REGARDING the meeting concerning the ID card scheme at Liden Community Centre on Thursday, MP Anne Snelgrove is holding what she describes as a listening panel' on ID cards to "share information and reaction to the scheme with a Government Minister".

Are the hand-picked audience of 40 there as extras to a publicity stunt. One wonders what purpose is to be served by this palliative staged-event when the decision to proceed with the menacing National Identity Register was taken not only without reference to the public, but on such a covert basis as to raise an atavistic howl across the land.

There is a predictable but truly alarming ignorance of the actualities of this scheme, to say nothing of its potentials and had I personally the vestige of a doubt about the stealthily underhand introduction of this constitutional monstrosity, it was shredded when Mrs Snelgrove literally stonewalled a voluminous challenge I made to her conduct in the matter (correspondence too extensive for submission here but open to any who might like to read it).

I would encourage any who can, to join an exploratory meeting outside the event (lifts are available). Your right to privacy at any level will disappear with the introduction of ID cards as proposed by New Labour.

You are being sold a hideous deception in the form of The National Identity Register (NIR) pretended to be one and the same as an ID card - it is not.

Every public interest purpose honestly declared and argued as served by this scheme of mass registration, is fulfilled by possession of a simple ID card to keep in your wallet. The NIR is a linked database whose only purpose is to identify how and when you use your ID card, a requirement that will become ever more widespread. Security applies as equally to your local pub as it does a football stadium or airport and the details of your routine banking will become an audit trail when you have to use your ID card for every transaction.

It is the ultimate surveillance system, which you are about to agree to using throughout your every day. It will ultimately track your activity in such minute detail as to give a power to the present proliferation of increasingly intrusive cameras that only George Orwell dreamed of.

There is no state initiative more threatening to your wellbeing than this monstrous scheme of control, being slipped in by the back door.

Only a mass backlash against this initiative will prevent its application.

D Payne.

Swindon