Digital ID is a disaster in the making

As the old saw goes, to the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To the Labour technocrat, there is no problem that can’t be solved with a national ID-card scheme.

So it is that UK prime minister Keir Starmer has landed on that most New Labourite of policies. The PM announced this week that digital ID cards – to be known in true Blair-era fashion as ‘BritCards’ – will help solve the problem of illegal immigration. ‘Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK’, he said. ‘It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure.’

Of course, there’s no evidence it will do any such thing. European Union member states (with the exception of Denmark) have been issuing identity cards for years. If the sheer volume of illegal immigration is any indication, ID cards have done nothing to make Europe’s borders more secure or clamp down on illegal working. So why should the introduction of digital ID be any more effective in the UK?

Advocates claim digital ID will force employers to check their workers’ immigration status, even though employers are already required to do this. The presence or absence of ID cards, digital or otherwise, will make no difference. Those wilfully taking advantage of cheap migrant labour are hardly going to start obeying the UK’s labour laws because of a new smartphone app.

Illegal migration is only the latest in a long line of justifications for a mandatory ID scheme. When Tony Blair and New Labour were first pushing ID cards back in the mid-2000s, they presented it mainly as a means to make people feel safe. Indeed, speaking in April 2004, Blair made the case for ID cards in the explicit context of the post-9/11 terror threat. Later that same year, then home secretary David Blunkett suggested ID cards could cultivate people’s sense of national belonging. They would strengthen ‘our identity’, apparently, ‘reinforcing people’s confidence and sense of citizenship and wellbeing’.

In New Labour’s hands, it seemed there was little a national ID-card scheme could not accomplish, from tackling terrorism to fostering a sense of British identity. But its managerialist dream of a citizenry fully known and categorised by the state kept on colliding with public resistance. People simply didn’t want to be exposed to the constant gaze of officialdom. As George Orwell understood, ‘the most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker’.

The Identity Cards Act may have passed through parliament in 2006, but a small roll-out in Manchester and London City airports was all but abandoned in 2008, thanks to opposition from the unions and cost overruns. In 2010, with prime minister David Cameron’s Tory-Lib Dem coalition freshly installed in power, the ID-card scheme was unceremoniously cancelled (and the Identity Cards Act repealed). Other equally intrusive schemes for collecting and collating private data, including the National Identity Register and the ill-fated child-protection database, ContactPoint, went the same way.

The coalition’s decision to scrap the ID-card scheme was a win for civil liberties. These New Labourite wheezes certainly intruded on and exposed people’s private lives to the prying eyes of the state. But there was another reason a coalition turned its back on them. This was the era of austerity – and these projects were costly failures. They are enduring testaments to the modern British state’s incapacity and incompetence.

This should make us doubly suspicious of Starmer’s BritCards plan. The state has an appalling track record when it comes to just about any large-scale project, but especially large-scale IT endeavours.

Take the now infamous National Programme for IT (NPfIT), which was meant to revolutionise the NHS, integrating all electronic patient records within a single IT system. Launched in 2002, the project was beset with technical difficulties, contractual wrangling and massive cost overruns. It was finally abandoned in 2011 at a cost of over £10 billion. The Public Accounts Committee described it as one of ‘worst and most expensive contracting fiascos’ in public-sector history.

Then there is the horrendous Horizon Post Office scandal. Thanks to a faulty accounting-software system, paid for by the state and developed by Fujitsu, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015. This calamity ruined countless lives.

There is no more reason to trust the state with an IT project today. As Andrew Orlowski noted on spiked earlier this year, the government is currently developing and expanding OneLogin, which provides a single digital login for accessing all government services, and holds the personal data of around three million citizens. As you’ve probably guessed by now, it has been disastrously mismanaged. Outside contractors have been given enormous, wide-ranging access to citizens’ private information. The risk of data breaches is all too obvious.

There is absolutely no reason to believe the state can collate private data currently scattered across disparate systems and governmental departments and not screw it up. But even if the state were capable of creating an effective digital-ID scheme, that wouldn’t make a good idea. Not only would it fail to address the problem of illegal immigration and put our data at risk – it would also corrode our freedom and privacy. And that is the real problem here.

Digital ID would turn us from free citizens into objects to be surveilled, monitored and managed. This is why the Labour technocrats cannot let it go.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.