Public Sector Union Votes Against ID Cards

Members of Unison, the UK's largest union, voted for a motion to oppose ID Cards yesterday at its annual conference in Bournemouth.

Conference delegates were also fed the usual dubious stories about the foreign countries taking on work for Britain's public sector under offshore outsourcing deals. The union managed to say foreigners working for the NHS were threatening lives, without directly calling up the jingoistic stereotype of lazy, incompetent chancers.

Unison members were even more bilious on the subject of ID cards than they were foreign firms, at least according to a statement they put out.

Delegates where concerned that ID cards would be used by the state to discriminate against black and Asian Britons.

ID cards are a "form of state racism", said Medhi Hassan, "a British muslim...from Tower Hamlets".

They might also embody the inequality of the system it said because poor people, whose circumstances are typically less stable than the middle class masses, would be forced to pay repeatedly to have their ID database records updated.