Letter: Howard plays the 'serfdom' card

Sir: I find the news that some Tory MPs want the new plastic national identity card/driving licence to be made compulsory highly ironic.

I vividly remember the patriotic clamour raised by Churchill's Conservative Party of the late 1940s against the retention of wartime national identity cards as a bureaucratic badge of "socialist serfdom".

Doubtless their successors of today will claim that times have changed for the worse, thanks to the legacy of the "permissive Sixties". Nothing whatever to do with the past 17 years of Tory government, of course.

So we are to have CS gas-spraying policemen today, plastic identities tomorrow, and what next? The abolition of trial by jury?

A nation at ease with itself?

A E G WRIGHT

London NW2