Griffiths urged to oppose plan for national identity cards

EDINBURGH South MP Nigel Griffiths has been urged to withdraw his support for the Government's ID cards scheme by his Lib Dem rivals.

Former councillor Fred Mackintosh, the Liberal Democrat's Edinburgh South parliamentary spokesman, has written to the Labour MP asking him to stop supporting the National Identity Register in which the Government wants to store the personal information of everyone in the country.

He said: "The recent fiasco at HMRC has shown the dangers of the Government holding huge amounts of information about each one of us whilst being slipshod in the way that same information is kept.

"This is a clear illustration of the real dangers of a Big Brother centralised state," he said. "

The Government should now abandon its ID card scheme."