What's the big deal with ID cards anyway? We have em in Singapore and nobody complains about them; apart from the ridiculous costs to replace em if they get lost 
1/ Infringes right to privacy (stores a vast quantity of private information, including a biographical record of changes made to that data)
2/ Infringes freedom of movement (firstly, by preventing internation travel by requiring registry with a passport, despite a supposedly voluntary system. Secondly, by compulsion which in theory means you could be stopped arbitrarily to check it)
3/ Open to abuse (studies in, for example, France, have shown that ethnic minorities are more likely to be stopped for Id cards; thus it provides an easy excuse for racist harassment)
4/ Infringes privacy#2 (equipped with RFID chips that allow the potential for tracking individuals)
5/ Open to fraud (see also below; simply, having an Id card just means theives have less places to look to clone your data. A Dutch test of RFID biometric passports found that criminals were able to break the encryption and download your data from about 50 feet away; it would simply act to boost the forgery market. Also, how do you validate an Id card for something like online shopping?)
6/ Ineffective as a security measure (Photocard IDs were introduced in N.Ireland during the Troubles, ostensably to provide greater security at checkpoints. This failed completely, as possesion of an ID card became more of a signature of identity than the card content. Whilst properly checking the card data against a DB would resolve this, it would not only have a big time delay on individuals and further impinge free movement, but also mean you could theoretically track movements by tracing 'check' accesses. Also, other countries with ID cards, like Madrid, aren't exactly immune from terrorism)
7/Justified by lies (not just the aformentioned poll, but for example by a figure made up for the cost of fraud 'preventable' by Id cards, which included the costs of police raiding the homes to recover goods or the cost of deporting asylum seekers, and for which the real value was much, much less than the likely running costs. An independent report indicating a vastly more expensive system was effectively rubbished by the government, who either flat out ignored it or accused the author of bias.)
8/Overpriced and underplanned (There are no clear goals, no clear aims or benefits given, and the only costs given are for the Home Office running costs, which omit the likely vast setup costs and the interagency costs that come from, for example, the Passport Office. Moreso, it looks likely a lot of the cost will be shifted to the Pass. Off. to 'hide' this initial cost, and the government has a long history of botching and running vastly overbudget on It projects because they are, frankly, clueless; the government has IIRc already looked to pre-emptively blame IT contractors for the likely implementation FUBARS. Luckily, government incompetence could be the thing to save us all from this scheme....)
9/Loss of privacy #3 (Likely unfettered access for police & security services, probably without protection for individuals to even know of accesses, and absolutely no guarentees either in law or even in statements, that this information will not be made available to private companies as the electoral roll is. specifically, it may be possible for companies to pay for the information to run credit / history checks)
10/Reduces public confidence and co-operation with the police (this was the specific reason given by the Law Lords when they abolished the Id cards that had been introduced during WW2)
That's all that immediately come to mind. One thing worth noting on the privacy issue - again - is that whilst we have our names on a lot of databases - passport, council tax/national insurance, NHS, DVLA (driving licenses), these are disparate and independent systems. That means they have very real technical (and legal access) boundaries that prevent people from just randomly trawling them - there is a cost of access to our details that acts as a protection from government harassment, and if we really are concerned about abuse we can still opt out. Even if you don't believe the current government is willing to go all the way to totalitarianism, a system such as this just makes it easier for a government that does - imagine Hitler with an Id database. Part of the responsibility of democracy is to prevent the government - any government - being able to abuse the people, after all.
Let's not, while we're at it, ignore the governments bill
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. This bill, seemingly mundane, massively reduces oversight for the 'reform of outdated or over-complicated legislation', essentially allowing a minister to make arbitrary changes to the law without parliamentary oversightl. The Lib Dems and Tories (opposition parties) tabled an amendment to protected certain rights/laws from abuse in this method, such as habeas corpus or democracy - Labour override it. See
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-2049791,00.html[q]Looking back at last week’s business in the Commons, the Bill makes a mockery of the decisions MPs took. Carrying ID cards could be made compulsory, smoking in one’s own home could be outlawed and the definition of terrorism altered to make ordinary political protest punishable by life imprisonment. Nor will the Human Rights Act save us since the Bill makes no exception for it.
The Bill, bizarrely, even applies to itself, so that ministers could propose orders to remove the limitations about two-year sentences and taxation. It also includes a few desultory questions (along the lines of “am I satisfied that I am doing the right thing?”) that ministers have to ask themselves before proceeding, all drafted subjectively so that court challenges will fail, no matter how preposterous the minister’s answer. Even these questions can be removed using the Bill’s own procedure. Indeed, at its most extreme, in a manoeuvre akin to a legislative Indian rope trick, ministers could use it to transfer all legislative power permanently to themselves. [/q]
Brave new world, indeed.
