From 25 November 2008, identity cards will become a compulsory part of life for UK residents for the first time since the Second World War.

While this is only the first step in the incremental introduction of this biometric identity system, it is—as the Liberal Democrats argued this week—a particularly insidious one. The government, it appears, is to force minority group by minority group into carrying its expensive, untested and ultimately illiberal identity card until no more remain without one. We start, next month, with the UK’s perennial black sheep: the foreign national.

Nick Clegg, the otherwise ignorable leader of the Lib Dems, makes the point succinctly. We target the foreigners, whose disenfranchisement leaves them voiceless; then move on to the airline workers and then involve other sectors that can be deemed “sensitive” until the tipping point is reached when they can be rolled out across the populace with the argument effectively won before Joe Public has even noticed what’s happened. While not wishing to lazily compare New Labour to the Nazis, the famous German WWII poem, First They Came, offers a sinister reflection of its tactics:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Clegg, naively, hopes that Britain will not stand for this attack on the liberty of foreigners. However, if any group were to be targeted with impunity it would be this one. Public support for the legal registration of foreign nationals is high, consistently around the 60 per cent mark, and one needs but look at the experience of asylum seekers in recent years to see how intolerant attitudes towards immigrants have been reflected in their shoddy treatment.

Whatever the merits and failures of the ID card system, and they are—on both sides—numerous and complex, one cannot help but feel that the moral argument has not been won. Were that the case, ID cards would not be introduced through the back door, as it now appears to be the case, but across the board and in the full gaze of public scrutiny. Rather, the sinister and secretive methods of its introduction imply that there is serious cause for concern.

In the words of Mr Clegg: “It is shameful for ministers to exploit powerless groups to impose the new cards by stealth, and to stoke public fear by tainting foreigners with suspicion. The liberal commitment to freedom is universal, it shouldn't be determined by the colour of your skin.”

Furthermore, there remains no proof that an ID card system can be at all effective. In Madrid, such cards are compulsory but were not able to prevent the deaths of nearly 200 people in the 2005 train bombings.

While the proposed ID card system might have been devised with the goal of combatting illegal immigration and terrorism, it is an experiment that remains manifestly unjustified. Its architects would do well to heed the words of Benjamin Franklin: “He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither security nor liberty.”