It's not much of an HQ: a tiny, rather airless room five minutes from Lambeth Bridge, stacked high with box files, piles of leaflets and the detritus of office life. Balanced against one wall is a mock-up of an identity card featuring the image of Tony Blair, one of a run that has also featured the likenesses of David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid. "We're on to our fourth home secretary in three and a half years," says a man who has dropped by to stock up on campaign bumf. "And I shouldn't think this one will last very long."
This is the nerve-centre of No2ID, a campaign born in a London pub in 2004, and these days managing to make a good deal of the running in one of our most highly charged debates. According to its national organiser, 39-year-old Phil Booth, in addition to a hard core of around 2,000 members-cum-regular donors, No2ID has attracted more than 40,000 "registered supporters", as well as 100 or so affiliated organisations. The latter betray just what a mind-boggling coalition of people the campaign has attracted: as well as the Green party, the Lib Dems and the SNP, the list features UKIP and the ultra-libertarian Freedom Association, as well as the Association of British Drivers and Newhaven town council. No2ID's range of supportive "public figures" is no less diverse: this must surely be the only campaign to ally the ex-Stone Roses singer Ian Brown with John Redwood, as well as Joanna Lumley, Philip Pullman and Michael Portillo.
No2ID's mission is simple enough. Largely funded by individual donations and the support of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, it is a "UK-wide, non-partisan campaign opposing the government's planned ID card and national identity register". It works with MPs and peers from all the mainstream parties, and is currently encouraging members of the public to put their names to a pledge, whereby they promise that they will not register for an ID card, supply their personal details to the government's proposed identity register, or cooperate with any official inter- view about their identity. So far, 11,361 people have signed up.
Exactly what No2ID is up against is currently rather unclear. There are two aspects of what the government calls the National Identity Scheme: the roll-out of ID cards, and the creation of the database on which the state will store - among 49 items of information - people's photographs, passport numbers, driver numbers (given on driving licences), fingerprints, national insurance numbers, dates of birth and addresses. By way of softening the introduction of all this, there will initially be no specified date on which every British citizen has to be signed up; instead, to start things off, the government has proposed that people either applying for their first passport or renewing an existing one will have their details entered into the register and be issued with an ID card. Via passports and other "designated documents", the scheme will thus be rolled out bit by bit, leaving a final move on what campaigners call "universal compulsion" to follow in the future, after a vote in parliament.
Once you have got past those rough details, it all gets pretty hazy. Though the Identity Cards Act of 2006 specifies January 1 2010 as the date from which anyone applying for a passport will have to be entered on to the register and issued with a card, the Home Office now says that 2011 might be a more realistic date, and the minister responsible now claims that people "might not be issued with a card at that point - that's something we're still debating". To make things yet more confusing, this week brought news of official documents leaked to the Conservative party suggesting that 2012 was a more likely prospect, leading the shadow home secretary, David Davis, to claim that the identity scheme was now in "intensive care". It certainly seems remarkable that, despite the scale of the government's plans and supposedly looming deadlines, no procurement contracts have been signed.
And so the confusion goes on. Though 2013 was initially proposed as a possible dateline for universal compulsion, it is now suggested that it may not come until around 2018 at the earliest, depending on "full acceptance of the voluntary scheme" (which, truth be told, may only be "voluntary" if you want to give up your right to foreign travel). The scheme's opponents claim that by way of mopping up some of the 20% of us who do not have passports, the introduction of ID cards will be linked to driving licences, a concern the government answers with the not-exactly-reassuring claim that it has "no plans" to do so, though more definite noises have been made about cards soon being mandatory for people employed in "positions of trust".
To cap it all, with public opinion shaken up by a succession of huge stories involving the loss of personal information, the tone of the government's rhetoric has shifted. Messrs Blair, Blunkett and Clarke once ambitiously talked up the National Identity Scheme as a dependable means of fighting terrorism, organised crime, illegal immigration and benefit fraud. As late as June last year, the Home Office minister Liam Byrne claimed that the scheme would eventually be seen as a "modern-day public good" along the same lines as "railways in the 19th century and the national grid". These days, those in charge of the project are prone to make their case in more modest terms, emphasising how a single standard of identity would make millions of lives that bit more convenient.
When I talk to Booth - a sometime sculptor, teacher and internet entrepreneur who devotes himself full-time to No2ID - it does not take long to get to the central fact that makes the organisation's campaigning job more difficult than most. Not only do the government's arguments keep shifting, but as against, say, the poll tax, there will be no flashpoint date when the scheme collides with the mass of the public. Moreover, refusal to cooperate will initially be less about a day in court than not having a passport. So, if people want to either register their opposition or avoid being roped in (or both), what should they do?
"Renew your passport now," he says. "Buy yourself 10 years." In 2006, No2ID set up an offshoot campaign called Renew For Freedom, encouraging people to be mindful of the date their current passport expired, and get their application in early.
Once the identity scheme is decisively linked to passports, he says, No2ID's tactics will not emphasise sit-ins and marches, but rather a series of legal actions against the government. "The very fact that this scheme could deny people the basic requirements of their jobs and their lives means that we are going to have a whole swathe of ways in which we can challenge them," he says. The identity scheme's appeals process will open up one set of opportunities; he also reckons that compelling only some of the population to cooperate is "discriminatory", and will thereby focus a good deal of his attention on litigation bound up with the Human Rights Act.
After an hour of conversation, he reaches his righteous crescendo. "The government haven't understood what it means to do this to people," he says. "The basic premise of the identity cards scheme is that 50 million people will meekly line up, like sheep, and submit to interrogation, be fingerprinted, and be issued with an official identity. It is not going to happen. It never was going to happen. Even in the first opinion polls, when 80% of people were saying, 'I think ID cards are quite a good idea', there were three million people saying no. This was never going to be a practicable policy."
Fifteen minutes' walk from the No2ID office is the Palace of Westminster, where the identity debate currently defines a good deal of the political weather, pointing up an issue on which the opposition parties are just about united, and which some Labour dissidents see as proof of the Brown government's failure to throw off the more toxic aspects of the Blair inheritance. When canvassing opinions among the latter group, it does not take long to hear a familiar refrain: that if the government still affects a gung-ho attitude on the identity scheme, the shifts in its rhetoric suggest that even if Labour wins the next election, the plans will eventually wither away. "I'm optimistic that even if it starts to roll out, at some point down the line this is all going to start to fall apart," says Neil Gerrard, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, and a sharp critic of the plans. "I think it'll be disputed by the courts. If you reach a point where somebody is being told, 'You cannot be issued with a passport because you have not put your name on the register', you're bound to get human rights challenges to that."
When Michael Howard was Tory leader, the Conservatives negotiated a fairly washed-out compromise on the initial ID cards legislation, supporting it on the basis that passport applicants could opt out before 2010, though now the scheme does not look set to arrive until 2011 at the earliest, that does not look set to amount to very much. In any case, the Tories are now pledged to repeal the Identity Cards Act, though they refuse to endorse any call for non-cooperation by the public. "Law makers can't be law breakers" is their mantra, an argument chiefly focused on the Liberal Democrats' new leader.
During the Lib Dems' recent leadership election, it was on this issue that Nick Clegg decisively found his voice. While he was the party's home affairs spokesman, he had established ongoing links with No2ID, and publicised his ministerial team's decision to renew their passports early. By the time he stood for the top job, his opposition was even more pointed. By way of underlining a keen sense of his party's history, he made repeated reference to Harry Willcock, a Liberal party activist who, circa 1950, played a key part in the belated abandonment of the ID scheme that had been introduced during the second world war and had famously refused to show police his ID card with the words, "I am a Liberal; I am against that sort of thing."
This, Clegg reckoned, was the example to follow. "If legislation is passed," he said, "I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience. I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register."
When we meet in his Westminster office, I read the quote out to him. Does he stand by it? "Well," he says, "the first thing I'll do, of course, is argue against the legislation."
OK. But if Labour win the next election and the watershed moment of universal compulsion arrives, what then? He pauses. "I'm going to effectively lead by example. I just cannot envisage the circumstances in which I would, by compulsion, give up my data."
When I ask him whether he would definitely advocate that as a course of action for other people to take, he noticeably hesitates. So I ask the question in a slightly different way: surely any leadership of a grassroots campaign would be on the basis of 'I've done this, and so should you'. Wouldn't it?
"Yes. Of course. It would amount to me saying, 'If you are as worried about this as I am, if you object to this as much as I do, if you find this objectionable, then join me in refusing to give details to the database."
Here's a crass but unavoidable question, then. Would you go to jail?
"Well, I mean ... I'd be prepared to go to court. I guess it would start with fines. We don't know what the sanctions are going to be, but I can't take my position - that I'm not going to accept compulsion even if it's written into primary legislation - unless I'm prepared to face the sanctions."
He agrees that all this represents a big step, happily acknowledging that some of his colleagues advised him against it. His young staff make a point of reminding me that imprisonment would mean that their boss would have to give up his parliamentary seat. But is he really prepared to go to such lengths?
"Look," he says. "I think there are issues which define the relationship between the state and the citizen. [Pause] Well, everything defines the relationship between the state and the citizen, but there are very few issues that I can think of in contemporary politics that define it in as stark a way as compulsion on data and ID cards. And, you know, there's a very good reason why the ID cards system that was established in 1939 collapsed in 1953. It was the result of civic resistance.
"This unites everybody," he says. "One can get dangerously romantic about it, but there is something about it that I think people feel just isn't consistent with our understanding of what is best about Britain. It is slightly romanticised, this image of ourselves as a land of the free, because we arguably live with a more centralised and illiberal system of government than almost anywhere else in the developed world. But notwithstanding all that, self- image is crucial to the identity of a nation. And what would really destroy that self-image is a feeling that we are being arbitrarily and compulsorily asked to do things by the state that we don't understand."
Meg Hillier is the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch. In the wake of the handover from Blair to Brown, she became what official-speak terms the parliamentary under-secretary of state (Identity). In the wake of my meeting with Nick Clegg, her aides send me a succession of emails about what the National Identity Register will hold, and who will have access to it. "There will be controls to segregate the data, with biographic information being held separately from biometric information," they tell me. "Very few authorised staff will be able to see full records and these will be treated as highly protectively marked."
Though Clegg bases at least some of his opposition on the idea that the data on the register will be subject to "mission creep", the Home Office line is to stress the supposedly minimal nature of what they are after. There will, they say, be no information held "on a person's political or religious opinion, health records, criminal record, tax or other financial records. It will hold the same sort of identity information that the government already holds for the issue of passports, plus biometrics such as facial image and fingerprints." Hiller says that anyone accessing the register without authorisation will face a two-year prison sentence, and that identity data going missing is all but inconceivable. "There wouldn't be information on discs and stuff, because you would access it remotely," she says. "There certainly wouldn't be a laptop with all this information on it."
For each of those claims, of course, No2ID and its allies have a corresponding argument - and besides, their opposition is surely as much a matter of philosophical principle as simple logistics. And I wonder: given the fact that recent events seem to have put the identity scheme's advocates on the back foot, are their calls for public non-cooperation a concern?
"I think we should be clear on a couple of things," Hiller says. "There are certain people who say, 'I will never carry one, and I will go to prison.' Well, for one, you don't have to carry an identity card - it's not a requirement. You're not going to be asked to present it randomly by someone in the street."
That's not quite the argument, though. The big issue for the people I have spoken to is being added to the national register.
"Well, most of these people are on the passport database. And they haven't got a big problem with that. So what is the big difference?"
What, I wonder, about the fog surrounding the issue of universal compulsion? "The proviso on any compulsion," she says, "is that the voluntary scheme is working, and accepted, and bedding in. I would hope that the voluntary scheme works. If it doesn't ... well, you know, it's part of my job to make sure I get it to the next stage. But that's a long way off. I can't foresee exactly what'll be happening in 10 years time.
"There are many benefits this can deliver, short of it being universal," she goes on. "For example: convenience for people travelling on a document that's not as valuable as their passport and is cheaper to produce. When I last went to a bank and had to prove something, it was a pain in the neck ... If you've got a proven document and you're on the national identity register, these things are benefits."
One thing keeps nagging away at me, though. Once I have talked to Hiller, I go back to a sheaf of newspaper cuttings from the distant days of 2004-5, when the government was much less hesitant about the need for compulsion, and way more gung-ho about the benefits it would bring. In among them, I find a slightly more recent quote about the government's plan from a senior Labour figure: "In my opinion, without it being mandatory, there is little point in doing it."
David Blunkett said that. You may remember that when the National Identity Scheme was first formally proposed, he was the home secretary.
· This article was amended on Friday January 25 2008. Meg Hillier, not Hiller as we said in the article above, is the MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch. This has been corrected.
