Public Databases   The cumulation of personal data, from DNA data through to credit information and surveillance camera records, represents a massive threat to personal freedom.  Civil rights groups commonly oppose the maintenance of such databases, and seek to ensure the removal of personal data following its expiry. 

• SoCLA recognises that the cumulation of such data, coupled with sophisticated search and interrogation facilities, are likely to grow in extent, and which call for the most sensitive management.  SoCLA favours the use of dual-key controls, preventing single-agency access to public databases of all kinds, and vesting all such data in an independent and publicly accountable Data Access Commission. 

Asylum & Immigration   The UK laws regulating immigration are in a parlous state, as are many national legal systems within Europe, generating grave injustices to those caught up in their operation.  Those laws are of 19^th century origin, and do not acknowledge the rising incidence and complexity of global migration.  Labour should take the lead in modernising UK’s citizenship, immigration and naturalisation laws so as to remove the many indignities currently suffered by visitors and would-be immigrants at the hands of the UK authorities, acting within an outmoded and unsatisfactory statutory framework.  

Identity Cards   SoCLA is opposed to the introduction, by the UK Government, of official identification cards capable of being used as identity cards. Such cards carry with them the evident risk of abuse by public agencies of all kinds, including the Police, and no overriding public imperative has been established, for their introduction. Throughout Europe, there has been long experience of the operation of mandatory ID cards, without generating any overriding case for their future introduction. 

• Labour should retain a due sense of perspective and avoid the adoption of governmental techniques likely to involve the gratuitous erosion of civil liberties in the longer term.