Campaigners have criticised the government’s claim that digital identification cards will stop small boat migrants crossing the channel.
Sir Keir Starmer is ploughing ahead with plans to introduce the scheme in line with efforts to overhaul the country’s asylum and immigration system and reduce crossings in the Channel.
The PM has been ‘exploring’ the idea in recent weeks, although finer details of the scheme are supposedly still being ironed out, according to the Financial Times.
Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Pat McFadden has suggested digital ID cards could help tackle the record numbers of small boat crossings and could serve as a deterrent for migrants.
But critics have rubbished the claim as ‘utter nonsense’, and accused Starmer of ‘gaslighting’ the public in order to gain support for the plans, which could be announced as early as the Labour conference next week.
Alan Miller, co founder of the campaign group The Together Association, said: ‘Pat McFadden said It’s going to stop the boats. How is that going to work?’
‘What are they going to do give everyone smart phones?’ he added in a video on social media. ‘They are gas lighting us, it’s nonsense.’
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has voiced similar doubts, saying: ‘I think as a way of helping to control immigration, it is not really going to solve the problem.’
Campaigners have criticised the government’s claim that digital identification cards will stop small boat migrants crossing the channel. Pictured: Sir Keir Starmer
A mock up of a virtual ID, which could be given all people legally entitled to reside in Britain, whether citizens or those with legal immigration status
Rebecca Vincent, of Big Brother Watch, said earlier this month: ‘While Downing Street is scrambling to be seen as doing something about illegal immigration, we are sleepwalking into a dystopian nightmare where the entire population will be forced through myriad digital checkpoints to go about our everyday lives.
‘Mandatory digital ID… will not stop small boat crossings, but it will create a burden on the already law-abiding population to prove our right to be here.
‘It will turn Britain into a “Papers, please” society.’
Meanwhile, Gracie Bradley of Liberty said a new scheme was ‘likely to be even more intrusive, insecure and discriminatory’ than the Labour government’s failed 2006 plan to bring in ID cards.
Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s nascent card scheme was scrapped by the incoming Coalition government in 2010.
Ms Bradley added that an ‘expensive and unjustified ID scheme… threatens our rights’.
Conservative justice spokesman Robert Jenrick also criticised the proposal earlier this month. He said: ‘Most employers who are employing individuals illegally are doing so knowingly.
‘Asking them to check ID cards rather than the current checks that they are already obliged to do is not going to make a blind bit of difference to illegal migration.’
A small boat carrying people thought to be migrants arrives to collect more people in Gravelines, France, on Friday
Sources told the FT that the government is considering giving digital IDs to all people legally entitled to reside in Britain, whether citizens or those with legal immigration status.
The digital ID could then be used for employment verification and rental agreements, though the government may still narrow the scope or revisit the plan, they added.
A government spokesperson said Britain was committed to expanding the use of technology to make it easier for people to access services, pointing to existing systems such as e-visas and the NHS app.
‘We will look at any serious proposals that would help people access public services, including digital ID,’ the spokesperson said in a statement.
