Digital ID: we must resist this technocratic tyranny

So digital ID, the tyrannical policy that just won’t flush, has bobbed up into the Armitage Shanks bowl that is Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Out of ideas and with all the authority of an embattled supply teacher, the prime minister is falling back – yet again – on Continuity Blairism, on the great unfinished business of New Labour. Somewhere, in a lair under a dormant volcano, Tony Blair is stroking a cat and cackling incessantly.

For Blair, ID cards are the one that got away. Having tried and failed to implement them when in power, he has since developed something resembling a fetish for them. There is no problem to which they aren’t the solution. Covid? ID cards. Illegal immigration? ID cards. A knackered NHS? ID cards. Even the scourge of potholes might be tackled by a mandatory digital ID, Blair said recently. CCP control meets the cones hotline.

Now, Starmer has turned to them as the solution to a government that doesn’t know what it’s for – and is desperate to at least appear keen on cracking down on migration and black-market labour. That Germany, Spain and France already have ID cards, and have been rocked by the migration crisis regardless, apparently hasn’t dulled his enthusiasm. Nor does he seem to have noticed that employers are already required to check migrant workers’ legal status, or face hefty fines. Somehow I doubt those surprisingly numerous barber shops will relent to the new system.

Rather than summon the minerals to deport those who should not be here, regardless of their fondness for chicken nuggets, he hopes some tech whiz in jeans will sort it all out for him, keeping his manicured hands clean. Meanwhile, we are all expected to suffer an outrageous incursion into our privacy and civil liberties – unprecedented in Britain outside of the two world wars – to make up for successive governments’ failures to control the borders and offer decent public services.

It’s a hell of a sales pitch, isn’t it? We, the British state, have failed to do the most basic things you expect of us, and so now we must roll out a mandatory, national, centrally maintained ID system. It will be fine, honest! Forget about all those cyberattacks and data breaches you read about in the news. We’ll appoint a ‘digital privacy tsar’. Or something. Don’t worry about it.

But the problem with digital ID isn’t simply one of the practicalities and security measures. It will inevitably corrode our privacy – and freedom. It doesn’t make you a skunk-addled conspiracy theorist to notice that the state’s appetite for ever more power and data points is insatiable. We are a far more surveilled, snooped on and less free nation than we were 30 years ago, when talk of 30 speech arrests a day and rolling national house arrest, in a foolhardy attempt to quell a virus, would have been dismissed as the stuff of libertarian fever dreams.

Indeed, Starmer’s reassurances – that citizens won’t be asked to present their papers; that this is about streamlining services, not denying them to us if we happen to do or say things he disapproves of – would perhaps be more convincing were it not for the lockdown years, when the Tories were frantically flagging critical posts to social-media companies while threatening to send us back inside if we didn’t behave ourselves. All while Labour insisted none of it went far enough.

The ever-shifting justifications for ID cards make it abundantly clear that this was never about convenience, or the health service, or illegal migration, let alone the pissing potholes. It’s always been about control. At the core of the technocratic project is the conviction that a free, uncontrolled, unsurveilled population is the primary obstacle to good governance. That the technocrats have blundered us into one political, economic and social clusterfuck after another these past few decades doesn’t seem to have dented their supreme confidence in their own wisdom, or their deeply held suspicion of you or I.

You need not believe we are on the cusp of a Chinese social-credit system with British characteristics to object to all this. Indeed, we already live under our own distinct flavour of authoritarianism, in which dissent is punishable by law; in which the state – not to mention private firms – preside over vast amounts of our data; in which we are prodded and poked into supposedly better, more virtuous habits. All ‘for our own good’, of course. In many ways, ID cards would only be the culmination of decades of technocratic encroachment on a once free nation. The capstone to a profound shift in the relationship between citizens and the state. But it’s never too late to reach for that chain, and flush.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater