As an opinion columnist, it’s good to have a maximally apocalyptic attitude towards something you oppose. You want people to be interested, after all, and “This Thing WILL KILL US ALL” is just more eye-catching than “This Thing Is Pretty Bad”.
So, I’d love to argue that digital ID cards will usher in a nightmarish Orwellian tyranny, with Starmtroopers viciously detaining old women who forgot to bring their phones to Tesco. Unfortunately, I live in a country, Poland, with a mandatory ID system and it is not yet a vicious totalitarian Hell. Nor is nearby Estonia, which has a digital ID card system.
Digital ID cards, then, would not be the end of the world.
But there is something very, very depressing about Keir Starmer’s latest wheeze. The plain fact is that no one is stupid enough to imagine that a digital ID scheme will solve the problem that Starmer claims it will address — illegal migration.
A lot of migrants already work in a shadow economy of undocumented gigs (renting people’s Uber Eats accounts, for example). But beyond this, Britain does not have a problem with identifying migrants who should not be in the UK half as much as it has a problem with removing them. We saw that last week, with the Court of Appeal blocking a Home Office attempt to remove a single Eritrean man. As Luca Watson has written for The Critic, Britain’s asylum system needs a fundamental overhaul.
Starmer, then, is a failed PM realising the ambitions of another failed PM
Plans to introduce a digital ID system are just a desperate attempt for Tony Blair to claim a belated victory for one of his failed managerial schemes from the 2000s. Tony Blair has been obsessed with introducing mandatory ID, with the scheme becoming a poignant fixation for a man who had once seemed so ambitious. Terrorism? We need mandatory ID. Coronavirus? We need mandatory ID. It would not surprise me if Blair thinks that Ukraine would not have been invaded if it had had mandatory ID. He believes that digital ID will end populism, which is as odd as thinking that a dead fish will fix an electrical fault.
Starmer, then, is a failed PM realising the ambitions of another failed PM. This might sound conspiratorial but Starmer’s announcement literally followed a report from the Tony Blair Institute. This is how terminally short of ideas our ruling classes have become.
Court sycophants are queuing up to talk about how willing most of us are for private companies to collect data about ourselves — our internet providers, for example, or social media platforms. True enough. But most of us don’t actually think that this is uncontroversially good. Nor do we actually have to give them this data. Even if it can be inconvenient to avoid doing so, it is at least possible. When a government seeks to make something compulsory, it should have good reasoning for doing so. Britons have been made less free in terms of speech, lifestyle choices, employment et cetera and mandating ID is yet another freedom withdrawn. I’m not a libertarian and am not going to claim that this is indefensible — but it does at least need serious defending.
Again, I’m not going to write as if ID cards are the plastic nails in Britain’s coffin. This would be hypocritical, if nothing else. I have one and it hasn’t done me any harm. But there is something very sad about the desperate authoritarian flailing of a government without ideas — if it ever had ambition — for positive change. It is gravedigging in the cemetery of New Labour when a government which really cared about Great Britain, and which had ideas to better it, would be tearing down the grim old castle of the Blairite project.
