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The Covid era was the beginning of the end. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Why won’t Keir Starmer support digital ID? When they caught wind of the electoral landslide, Blair and Blunkett lurched from their caskets to demand a return of this, New Labour’s most divisive and, eventually, most thoroughly defeated policy. But Labour Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, swiftly ruled the proposal out.
Is Our Keith unexpectedly passionate about English liberty? I doubt it. This is a man who locks people up for mean tweets, and can’t bear to have Shakespeare, Elizabeth I or Walter Raleigh looking at him from the walls of No. 10. No: the most likely reason for Labour ruling out an overt ID policy is simply that it’s already coming. It’s just arriving in a piecemeal, cack-handed way, to the profit neither of the Government nor the electorate but rather private corporations, and under the cover of our established church: the NHS.
I supported the campaign against Blair’s ID card bill in the 2000s. So it grieves me to admit this: but Blair was right then, and he’s right now. The UK’s administrative, political and economic order has long since left behind the kind of simplicity that can be managed without government ID. The historian AJP Taylor described that England, which in his words existed before August 1915: a country in which “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman”.
That’s not the world we live in any more. We don’t even live in the relatively high-trust one of the mid-twentieth century, all paper forms and cheques in the post. Unless we adapt to the Britain we have now, our capacity to function at all will go on disintegrating. And given the endemic inability of our leadership class to build meaningful state capacity, across either party, adapting is in practice going to mean selling us all to Big Tech.
Our government evidently already accepts this. On Monday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting made much of a deal agreed by the Tories to unify the country’s currently scattered and poorly-integrated NHS patient records. The contractor, to the consternation of privacy and Palestine advocates alike, is Peter Thiel’s Palantir, purveyor of military and surveillance tech to (among others) Israel.
It should come as no surprise that Thiel, a keen biotech investor, is salivating at the prospect of access to such granular population-scale medical data. And for the government, too, the deal surely makes sense. As the BMJ reported, a million prescribing errors a year could be corrected by implementing a single digital record across the country, potentially saving lives in the process — not to mention the countless administrative hours saved when records no longer need to be exchanged manually between providers. But if the conspiracists aren’t already going bananas about this, they should be. Never mind objections on privacy grounds; this will almost certainly end up becoming digital ID by the back door.
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SubscribeThe notion that introducing a national ID card will somehow reduce government corruption and inefficiency is so naive that one has to laugh. Don’t worry: modern Britain is more than capable of pairing an ever-more-intrusive surveillance state with utter incompetence and rampant graft.
It’ll cost a fortune, be years late and won’t work properly, but someone will be made a Lord on the back of it.
Try reading tne article. It says ID cards aren’t necessary as they are effectively being created by stealth.
The article literally finishes with statement “we might as well make it [ID cards] official”. The article is very much saying because we have stealth ID cards we should accept physical ones too. It’s an absurd argument.
Precisely!
Welcome back, Charles. I hope you are well.
I can’t think of one of your posts that I didn’t find insightful and intelligent, but with respect, I believe the author meant digital ID, rather than physical documents.
That is her point, we already have several, de facto governmental digital IDs. I have one for tax, another for NHS, and another for DVLA.
So let’s simply join them all up!
isn’t the result ID cards either way?
Not only that, but they’ll just give out ID cards to whoever they wish to, immediately legitimising those people and their every claim against their new “homeland”. So whatever checks and balances that they still carry out will cease.
It’s nothing to do with privacy, it’s about who lives here, what they contribute to the pot, what they take out, and whether or not they quietly wish us all dead.
Can even the normally sensible Mary not understand that?
Well, quite. ID law will be used to hammer Mrs Miggins of 29 Acacia Avenue because she forgot to update her details after she moved a few months ago, but foreign criminals will be ignored, because they are difficult, and she is an easy target. We see it with ‘human rights’ law – it only applies to the benefit of foreigners, not the average UK citizen.
And the Uk State will studiously ignore demanding ID from all the usual suspects when doling out money and services because that would be racist. They don’t enforce the law now, so why do we think NHS hospitals will suddenly be turning people away because they don’t have ID? You can bet your bottom dollar that the courts will decree that human rights law will prevent the NHS from using ID checks to stop illegals and tourists getting healthcare anyway, so it would even help there either. We would end up with the worst of both worlds – everyone and their wife would still be able to come to the UK illegally and avail themselves of everything the UK State provides, but UK citizens would have their every move scrutinised, and be subject to arbitrary bureaucratic harassment.
“…Arbitrary bureaucratic harassment.” Their favorite weapon.
At age 66, literally a gray-beard, I already have trouble buying beer for lack of a “valid” ID. The merchants don’t care, but they have Big Brother breathing down their necks, demanding a bar-code.
And the same applies to legal marijuana dispensaries. They’re using the age-verification excuse to demand a government ID (with bar-code); keeping track of buyers for some nefarious reason, I presume.
After the simply atrocious COVID Scamdemic how could one seriously ever believe HMG again?
The argument against ID cards/digital identity is the same as it’s always been. It’s not a means to prove who you are or show your entitlement to services, but a means of further control. The first thing that will happen is that the ECHR will rule that denying ID cards to illegals would infringe their human rights.
Control is neccessary in the digital age with virtual momey amd all transactions on line. It’s also necessary if there is to be a redistributive welfare state alongside a resulting need to control immigration. Your dinosaur views are relevantto tne pre 1914 world as Harrington cogentlt explains.
The UK legally allows more than 500000 people to stay every year, and doesn’t even attempt to deport 99.99% of those who arrive illegally. Mass immigration is state policy. ID cards won’t change that.
Control of transactions? Government has never had this control. Cash is the ultimate fungible means of transaction and criminals go to great expense and inconvenience to use cash. Wanting to control transactions is an entirely new power never held by governments before. Not that a physical ID card would have any bearing on controlling virtual activities…
There are plenty of countries in Europe with ID cards. They have exactly the same problems we have. ID cards solve none of the problems claimed.
This is surely the core point and well expressed too.
Even the saintly land of William Tell is having its problems, but fortunately most citizen s have at least one gun under the bed if not more.
Added to which the damned thing will always be disappearing down the back of the sofa.
I don’t want ‘radically dematerialised citizenship’ (what is that?) nor a generous welfare state – I’d prefer to keep more of the money I own and pay for the things I want. Welfare state should be a minimum floor, certainly not generous.
I tend to agree, but we’re very much in the minority.
Why are the people whom you credit as having “predicted imminent global digital ID and sinister moves to establish One World Government and digital tyranny all powered by the biosecurity state” described as “tinfoil hatters” a sentence earlier?
The fact that our technofedual overlords may know more about me than the government does indicates that surveillance capitalism created a monstrous problem that governments failed dismally to protect their countries against, and it is this that we should be directing all our energies at dismantling.
The degree of mess we are in is mainly due, most recently anyway, to Gordon Brown’s failure to regulate greedy bankers, George Osborne bailing out those bankers by transferring any wealth of the working classes to the very same people who caused the problem in the first place, and Rishi Sunak accelerating that wealth transfer under Covid to obscene levels. Now that the working class has been bled dry, Rachel Reeves will do the same to the middle class.
I am disappointed to see you caving into totalitarianism with the tired old right-wing tropes of benefit fraud and illegal migrants. I’m surprised you didn’t throw in ‘nothing to hide …’ too. The problem is not people on benefits or migrants; the problem is the behaviour of the people at the top, not the bottom, the very people whom you want to hand over our last scraps of freedom to now that they have taken everything else. They’re the people taking all the money, not those on Benefits Street.
I’ll look forward to reading your future article praising social credit systems.
“….and in any case, being a citizen doesn’t entitle you to much.”
Perhaps inadvertently, but I’ll choose to believe not, Mary put her finger on it right there.
What would ‘they’ have on us, what could ‘they’ do to us, if we didn’t want so much? There is no they, only us.
Nobody ever heard of Faust these days?
You can’t complain of a conspiracy if you’re in on it.
”You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal.” ( Chapeau to my namesake. )
Serves us right.
Don’t ask for so much.
Be a conservative ( No, no, not one of them. )
The fundamental problem is that we don’t actually have strong independent individuals and community; people are more than ever dependent on systems or systems of people than other groups or individuals local to them.
200 years ago you needed something, you wouldn’t believe a government sitting 200 miles away in London would be the guy to rely on to help you, or be anxious to pay your bills (benefits paid to you because taxes are too high… yeah, some really stupid shit ‘ey!). You’d call Richard from down the road who has the answer for your roof leaking, or Stanley who could advise you how to acquire/save more on some goods, or perhaps the Church for your woes. But now we are all strung on PAYE salaries, have complicated houses, apps and bank accounts, we need benefits to simultaneously repay/pay for your taxes and your food, and we invest too much time in social media and other non-sense again for gain in the system of systems.
Many of the ‘wants’ are not really our wants but necessary evils in a society which requires you to have these apparatus to work and survive. It’s definitely compulsion and conditioning more than we realize. I didn’t want to get vaccinated but I had to so I could travel for my job. I didn’t want benefits but I couldn’t pay my bills because my taxes were extortionate. So I’m still a conservative but if I have no where to move/wiggle, I take what I can to help my family survive.
And I really believe we got here because of two unimaginable world wars, the decline of spirituality and because quantitative science is heralded as the new religion. Besides that, there’s much more to say…
Quite right: we even expect someone else to give our children breakfast, now.
‘Blair was right about ID cards
Our privacy is long gone’
No he was not. I’m not sure our privacy is ‘long gone’, we don’t need to give more of it away subscribing to some nonsense government ID data base they could then use to enforce even more digital fascism than we are subjected to at the moment.
‘Why won’t Keir Starmer support digital ID?’
Because apparently the man has sense. I have a new found respect for him. Good for him.
‘I supported the campaign against Blair’s ID card bill in the 2000s. So it grieves me to admit this: but Blair was right then, and he’s right now. The UK’s administrative, political and economic order has long since left behind the kind of simplicity that can be managed without government ID.’
The author is willing to surrender even more of her rights and her principals because fighting for them is hard and it’s an easy option to just get a nice ID card.
‘ Covid-era international travel restrictions and vaccine mandates already took us halfway there. It was impossible to travel internationally, for a while, without both biometric ID and individual health data: national passports and so-called “vaccine passports” respectively.’
I don’t travel out the country. I’m a little England gammon. I do not have a passport. Why should I have to get a digital ID and surrender my privacy and freedom because the London set go travelling and need a document to do so.
Covid fascism is exactly the reason these IDs should be resisted.
‘And if Thiel’s eye of Sauron is able to make all our NHS records interoperable,:
If thiel is working on the NHS data base going digital, that is completely different to an ID card scheme and not really an eye of sauron.
‘ But the reality is that it doesn’t matter what the memes say: digital tyranny is coming.’
Mary says surrender to the digital tyranny because Blair thinks it is a good idea. His ideas weren’t that good then, why we are still hearing about him and his ideas now, I dread to think.
I didn’t read past that point. Seems a really long way to say I believe in freedom, but actually I don’t, get yourself a digital ID kids. Give in to digital fascism cos Tony says it’s great.
Harrington doesn’t say give in to ID because Blair supports it, she says give into ID because it’s inevitable.
A self-fulfilling instruction if ever there was one and the worst possible reason to accept anything:
“I don’t like it but it’s inevitable so I’ll accept it therefore making it inevitable”.
Fair point, I’m very glad Mr Starmer has decided not make to make it inevitable, for now anyway.
He doesn’t want digital ID because it will discriminate against those he favours within his 2 tier system of government
Do you have a passport??
Nope. I had one that expired quite a few years ago. I haven’t left the country for at least ten years. And then I’ve only ever left it three times. Never for more than a week. Never further than Europe. Fundamentally I take a hobbits approach to life.
Please tell me it isn’t a legal requirement to have a passport now.
You need a passport to leave your country. So, without one, you are restricted! Job done.
Soon, you could need one to leave your county, or even your town/city.
Just look at Oxford’s filter system. It’s just for cars, for now:
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-will-divide-city-15-minute-neighbourhoods
Blimey, we are getting really quite bossy.
We have had various fines by accident from things like the London congestion charges, apparently there’s pedestrianised parts of Coventry you aren’t supposed to drive through, a fact my mum was oblivious to, until the fines came. These things are bad for hobbits that don’t do city travel very often, we tend not to pay much attention to rules that don’t make sense.
I love this quote from the article:
‘And he insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not.’
It’s nice to know the spirit of democracy is alive and well in our local councils. Seems he has the same disregard for democracy that we in our house have for traffic restrictions.
I don’t like IDs because they don’t solve the problems they claim. They create other problems – like the cost of creating and administering the ID system, excluding people who don’t have IDs from government services, plus linking the ID through all your transaction points – eg tying purchase habits to tax records to bank records.
They basically break the principle of anonymity. In an anonymous society, everyone you deal with is unknown, so you treat everyone equally.
This is different from a privacy-based society, where data is continually harvested, but there are, in principle, restrictions on what can be done with it. But those restrictions get bent, warped and abused so different people get differential treatment, and often government has opt-outs to pierce the privacy walls. And for certain areas, the collection of data is made compulsory – to catch a handful of money launderers everyone is forced through their bank’s know-your-customer process.
Now, in fact the UK does have systems for verifying identity. It also has ‘administrative data’ which is information about individuals collected through the state – tax and health data.
However, the lack of a co-ordinated system makes verifying identity arduous (which is why ID proponents want to make it easier). If it’s arduous to do then it becomes something that is done rarely, and only at points where it is really needed – not something collected with every transaction, message and feedback form, as it is in some European countries.
How often should we need to prove our identity? Isn’t that something that should be minimised – only for important moments and disconnected from all other transactions (so separated systems, like driving licence and NH/NI card for the NHS). We are pushed into the idea of ‘privacy’ over the principle of anonymity, when anonymity is less costly and delivers better equality, and minimises unnecessary data collection.
You have the attitude of an individualist who primarily values personal liberty and freedom. The systems you are criticizing are designed by and benefit socialist systems of value and interaction.
I prefer a state controlled by the people, rather than a people controlled by the state. That would still be a mutualist society, where individuals work together for mutual benefit.
But what it’s not, is a compulsive state, which compels behaviour, and demands unnecessary time, forms or work from the responsible, reasonable majority, just to benefit administrators (except with popular, mutual assent).
“… where individuals work together for mutual benefit …”
When ‘diversity is our strength’, the mutual benefit is for a select few, to the annoyance of others.
In a democracy, no matter the technology, it’s the quality of the elected politicians that matter, unfortunately.
You are quite right
There is no evidence or argument presented in this article that ID cards would be effective at stopping the activities Harrington doesn’t like; it is simply a belief that MH has arrived, at not a logical deduction.
– Bulgarian criminals may find it easier to copy one ID card than several.
– Is a major driver of small boats migrants to the UK really lack of ID? I’m fairly sure economics features higher on their list of concerns than the UK’s level of privacy compared to France. Do many of them even have this much information? Besides we have plenty of beaureacracy to make up for it.
– The claim that ID would unify and streamline all our public services is pie in the sky too. Everyone on these pages (left, right or centre) knows the UK government would **** it up. Already had pharmacies linked to the NHS’ “unified” system tell an elderly relative that she doesn’t exist.
– It’s a fair point that Thiel’s system would probably be be less useless. But to have confidence that an American corporation’s private system would consistently outwit international criminals trying to break it is equally naïve, even before taking into account the fact that US law effectively allows your data to be sold anyway and when you use a US company to store your data you have to consent to its rules.
Now that I think about it, it should be fairly straightforward to cease to exist in the eyes of the government if Thiel’s system goes ahead. Transfer your property to an offshore company and live tax free. Come to think of it whole towns could disappear from Westminster’s view, club together with the tax saved to pay for schools, roads and hospitals and parliament wouldn’t notice because the computer says the people never existed and the assets aren’t owned by UK citizens (which is how successive governments prefer assets to be held). Rinse and repeat until the only officially existing citizens of the UK reside in the Palace of Westminster. You could call it, I don’t know, democracy?
The major driver of small boats to the UK is the fact that the rate of approval of asylum applications in France is 25%, and here in the UK – 75%. It is the ones who already failed to get legal asylum status in France choose to try here and are approved at 75%.
I agree that we are all tracked and snooped on to a greater or lesser extent, If you are legally in this country, have a job, or pension, pay tax, have a driving licence and or passport the government know all they need to about you.
However, digital ID cards would change little. Our government and civil service would not manage it properly and would end up giving them out to every illegal immigrant coming to Britain. And for those in the black economy, they will continue to abuse our systems with impunity.
We don’t need to be tinfoil hatters to observe the implications of digital ID – the social credit system in China shows the way. This is about ccntrol and ideology – your carbon credit footprint, your food choices, your permitted income, all prescibed through digital ID linked to digital.money. The IMF is already well advanced in its plans for a global digital currency, nation states likewise with private actors to preserve our “privacy” (XRP in the case of IMF, Circle in the case of the UK). Blair has already done a deal with Oracle to sell your NHS records once digital ID is in place – national databases used for commercial.ends and rhe furthrance of AI, which has run out of viable datasets. Tom Mctague has reported on this, alongside many others. Be careful what you wish for. I’m happy to play Canute if that’s what it takes. .
Actually, it does make sense. The State has a force monopoly. All the other parasites have to entice us with something we (think we) want.
What possible purpose is served by having an electronic ID system at the same time as admitting unknown third world aliens by the million?
I once lived in a country where ID cards were obligatory, the police could demand you to produce them at any time and if you could not do so then you could be detained and and fined. We don’t want to go there. Full stop.
Those two things are not necessarily synonymous. The US requires ID cards for a million ordinary things, from driving to buying booze to boarding an airplane to applying for a job or public benefits. There is not, however, a cop on every corner demanding to see ID as you pass by.
Who is this “Keith” of whom Ms Harrington writes?
Keith “Keir” Starmer, Esq.
Yeah, but why “Keith”?
Indeed. I checked (briefly) online before posting, without finding anything to indicate either that Starmer had ever used the name “Keith,” or that “Keir” was a version of it.
He hasn’t but some people on the Corbyn Left have used it.
Keith is an unfashionable name. Like the old (pre-Farage) advert “Don’t be a Nige”, Mary is calling him Keith to infer he’s dull and personality free. And Keith, being brittle, prickly and humourless, absolutely loathes being called it.
Oh. Well that makes sense, I suppose.
Perhaps known as Keith in his second life? Or perhaps “so good they named him twice”?
It’s a fashion that started on the online Corbynite left, to mock Starmer
Ah, I see. It is a product of the incisive humour for which the Corbynite Left is famous.
Shocking that this has to be mentioned:
“efficiency” and fraud protection are not justifiable reasons to welcome in a digital biosecurity social credit system.
Defend the bigger principle.
Live with the “inefficiency”
Let’s not do fascists’ work for them.
Papers please!
I’m coming round to this myself, alas. Though as others have said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the State managed to make a pig’s ear of this too.
Whatever level of immigration one supports, it seems quite uncontroversial that we should know who is and is not in the country.
The eye of sauron has stolen my post.
The UK’s administrative & political order need to be torn to shreds & remade… and I know not the day nor the hour, but it will be. Just a few years ago I regarded such notions as pie in the sky, but I’m it is approaching inevitability with far greater speed that I expected.
The Great Realignment is coming & it will be both wonderous & ghastly. But the perfect trigger for this is being put into place swiftly & gleefully by the very people likely to one day discover how many sturdy lampposts there are in Britain. Net Zero will do the one thing that can unite a nation across every boundary in loathing for it’s ruling class: power cuts.
Didn’t we just spend enormous sums of money on a ‘track and trace” system which failed utterly?
It needs to be argued that a digital I.d. System would indeed reduce fraud. In practice tight nets of control always inspire inventive ways to dodge them. So this argument leads us down a path of ever tighter and tighter control to the point of a brave new world. To throw hands up and say it is inevitable seems like a bad idea to me. The whole idea just screams abuse of power to me. That surely isn’t inevitable but a choice. Mostly centralisation reduces efficiency in the long run as systems become bloated, complex and removed from the actual people it ‘serves’. In any event, benefit fraud is not a sufficiently big enough problem to up end our remaining liberty. Far greater is basic tax fraud and that can be solved in relatively conventional ways. Not even fraud but just not enough tax.
Are people really super mobile? That’s also something I doubt. If people have lives worth calling lives then they have roots. The idea people just up and leave if the government changes policy is for the birds I would think. It is an argument for validating blackmail. Some might leave .. let them leave I say. What the long term needs is people who value paying taxes because of the infrastructure etc that it privileges us to. Those are moral arguments Id like to hear more of.
How about using a VPN?
The VPN server is under some jurisdiction. If it’s located in a State which can demand to know who the traffic is from, they’ll be given that information. Putin took over all DNS services within the Russian Federation more than a decade ago. There’s no end to what he can do with internet traffic within his jurisdictions. China always has had total control there. Snowden claimed the U.S. was doing something similar (and all you have to do is look at the size of the Govt server farms in Utah and elsewhere and look at the job reqs for these places to convince yourself he wasn’t making shit up).
I used to use a small ISP across the country from me, run by a sole proprietor. He had maybe fifty or a hundred blade servers and ran hosting and email services for a reasonable price. One day he sent out an email to all of his clients saying he would be shutting down in a month and we’d need to make arrangements elsewhere. I privately emailed him to find out why. He said it was because the (U.S.) Government was now requiring him to violate our privacy in ways he wasn’t comfortable with. He was going to get into another line of business instead. Some of his servers were running VPN outlets.
At this point, I doubt if even TOR is safe. There aren’t that many nodes. All it would take is for states to join in with a whole lot of nodes which they own and monitor.
What’s ironic is that this whole situation is unnecessary. PGP encryption methods have been around since the late eighties. But virtually nobody will use them. I had mine all set up and maintained my keys for years. I think I exchanged maybe only two or three encrypted emails with anyone the entire time. People are lazy. They don’t want to take even the simplest steps to procure their privacy. They want someone else to do it for them. But then they whine when they can’t trust these third parties.
Fascinating. Express VPN, I read, is owned by an Israeli billionaire, is based in the British Virgin Islands, but has its headquarters in Hong Kong!
On Google: they won’t let you use their cloud storage services if you encrypt the files you want to store there. Hmmm. Wonder why?
I can see this working for children and young people.
So the UK government could enforce membership to social media platforms only via digital ID showing the user was over 16 or even 18.
Otherwise, it’s not going to have a huge impact on illegal migration because the lawyers have got these tied up in European legislation. And we know what the solution to that is.
Absolute nonsense, The ‘Bulgarians’ would have got ID cards as easily as they got national insurance numbers.
Foreign NHS exploiters are first of all protected by NHS staff and if were served with bills would just ignore them and fly home.
Fraudsters if jailed would be out in weeks while if illegals (who are fingerprinted) were given deportation orders most would fail as their countries of origin, if even known, wouldn’t accept them back.
Better to pay Eritrea etc to give their citizens ID cards,
TBH it’s scary how easy it is to track a digital fingerprint. Private companies have cut down fraud dramatically (90%+) by sharing data on digital activity to flag individuals with a track record of credit card chargebacks etc. It tends to be the same people, cards, devices and IP addresses over and over again…… Whether the Government would or could rely on this kind of probability-driven software to drive enhanced KYC (Know Your Customer) checks and clamp down on fraud is moot.
So if Dark Lord Tony is cheering on Palantir’s project to create a unified patient database, and advocating the sale of NHS data to fuel a biotech boom,
In reading this line, there are two different issues: 1) creating the database and 2) selling the information. They do not necessarily have to go together. Organizations have paid for technology work without selling the data that is involved. Why can’t the British govt do likewise?
It’s not hard to come up with examples of where digitization makes sense; the prescription errors are a good one. But there is no corresponding requirement that the assembled data be treated as one more commodity in an increasingly commoditized world.
I tried to get my teenaged son out of the bathroom, where he was scrolling through YouTube for ages.
Eventually I said, “I’ve asked you, seriously, 3-4 times!”
The iPhone in my pocket lit up, and Siri said, “Three times four is twelve.”
Mary is confusing two things. I’m against ID cards, as I was when Blair proposed them, in the sense of a card that a policeman or other agent of the state can stop you on the street and demand to see.
I’m in favour of an entitlement card, that confirms one’s eligibility for one or more of free NHS care, benefits, legal aid etc.
Good point. People born here used to be given an NHS medical card with a unique number that proved entitlement to services. Mine used to be MQDD2882 but that changed about 3 decades ago when I was ‘renumbered’. Why wasn’t the old system used to prove entitlement and why not keep the original numbers?
Sad though it is, Mary is on the money. The horse bolted a long time ago, taking the stable door with it.
Horses do not bolt from the stable where they are fed. They are bolted by horse thieves. Pro nobis fabula narratur.
A high trust society doesn’t need ID. We do.
That is your belief (fair enough) but it doesn’t follow logically. It just shows that you naturally support ID (again, fair enough if that’s your bag).
You could just as easily claim, “a low trust society doesn’t need ID” because
1. criminals will quickly find a way to make fake IDs,
2. the (untrustworthy) government will implement the system poorly and repeatedly loose everyone’s data and
3. (untrustworthy) corporations will misuse the power ID confers on them to create targeted ads to push unhealthy products, manipulate credit ratings, try to sway elections, expand the definitions of diseases to sell pharmaceuticals…
Oh wait.
We aren’t just tracked online. Brits are amongst the most surveilled populations in the world. CCTV everywhere, NPR tracking your journeys, contactless payments recording your bus rides and shopping. In the face of all that objecting to ID cards (which many countries have had for decades) has a simple, rustic charm.
Papers! Show me your papers!
Congratulations, Mary, on a very necessary article, though, as many of the comments here show, a lot of people just don’t get it. As you and others have said, you can’t have a wide-ranging welfare state, including a free-at-the-point-of-delivery NHS, without proper means of knowing who is entitled to benefit from it. A strong pull factor drawing in illegal immigrants and allowing visa overstayers, is our lack of a centralised ID system, as the French have noted when they see people piling up in Calais. We have no real way of knowing who is in the country, so the provision of education, health care, and housing is based on guesswork. So our access to many of the state – and private – services on which we depend would be made much, much simpler if we had a recognised state ID system rather than our patchwork of documents, as I have seen in Singapore. As you have indicated, we have handed over masses of personal data to various corporations for their benefit; it’s time to allow the state the means to run the welfare state efficiently for our benefit, unless we are willing to abandon it.
Generous welfare state or no digital ID ?
Easy. No digital ID(*).
The welfare state’s already far too large.
* : Definition: no government organised and centralised digital ID. No way they’re remotely competent enough to create and run a reliable and secure system. They couldn’t even do something like Tesco Clubcard.
I fear that MH is right. I love the AJP Taylor idea of freedom but fear it has gone; partly due to life and reality but mainly due to the lunacies of our Elites who, I fear, are doing what they are doing partly for their direct benefit, partly for ideological madness but also partly because the chaos they are creating will create the ‘necessity’ for them to enact all sorts of laws to ‘protect’ us and empower them.
Having said that if I got into power then I would be looking to create ID cards, hand them out to all valid citizens and residents and then boot all the others out. Then get rid of ID cards and protect our borders and freedoms effectively.
What could possibly go wrong?
Australia was/is following UK government setup & functioning except we never had functional law-enforcement. People find this out like I did, when trying to report crimes punishable by many years in jail as a public servant witness to these crimes (Business Analyst, Victorian Electoral Commission, 2009-2012). Crime hiding, crime witness/victim silencing works so well, I lived 1988-2008 within a 10km radius from where a stalker ex-coworker’s ongoing, unpunished, devastating crimes against me started in 2009 & knew nothing about crime.
Australia’s 21st century Al CAPONE equivalent Mick GATTO openly brags about his risk-free extortion abilities (1). The reason is simple: military and surveillance tech have been in organised crime arsenals together with expertise of using such tech likely for decades. As a crime witness whose conscience cannot bear the burden of complicity with my silence, I have been subjected to remotely delivered physical harm via e.g. DARPA (2) tech since in 2019 I declared self-representation as Victoria Police – our sole, highly corrupt & dysfunctional law-enforcement entity – forced me to fight at court as an accused criminal in an admitted silencing attempt, tried to entrap me 2x. I won. Prosecutors bluff. Crimes never stopped, only paused inexplicably at times.
My 1st forced war-crime experience today was before 4am on my own in the home I have owned in a leafy Melbourne suburb since 2001, while trying to sleep behind locked doors. My last forced war-crime experience today minutes ago. I am writing this comment at 8:24am on 24 October 2024. I found typical sick psycho signs of 2 break-ins 13 days apart over the last 4 weeks. There would have been at least 6 break-ins in 2024 so far, there were at least a dozen break-ins in 2023 that I could not miss. None of thousands of crimes against me via physical & cyber-space using technology my taxes are paying for shows up anywhere beyond my desperate public interest disclosures like this one.
Australia has no authority to which it would be safe, let alone effective to try to report what I have been forced to learn about government level surveillance & military-grade technology in crime arsenals. Our sole law-enforcement entity, Victoria Police openly participate in organised crime, they gleefully flash their uniforms in the process as they gang up on crime witnesses/victims who cannot be terrorised into silence.
Tech capabilities in Australian crime arsenals can affect anyone on planet Earth, because the Internet is everywhere. Our opportunistic government/military insider criminals are free to trade with their Russian, Iranian, Chinese, North Korean etc. counterparts. It is crime witnesses/victims in Australia like me, who are prosecuted. Committing crimes using government/military grade technology is such risk-free triviality, the MARCUCCI commit crimes for their own sake: without function or value.
I never even dated the stalker ex-coworker, I never mixed with any MARCUCCI. I am so outraged & horrified by what I am forced to learn, I lost all fear, all shame about my inadequacies of fighting Australia’s organised crime.
— Remove spaces from the URLs —
(1) 60 Minutes episode:
https :// youtu .be/EuoWv-VKvy0
(2) Transcranial direct current stimulus = electric shocks to the brain delivered remotely:
https :// http://www.darpa .mil/program/next-generation-nonsurgical-neurotechnology
Privacy is long gone when people publish on their social accounts all that they do every day. And that’s just because other individuals are aware of such activities, never mind corporations or the state. The Edwardians would have regarded publication of even such things as family nicknames as an intrusion into privacy.
In Ms Harrington’s analogy, the Shire should have lost the war of the ring. Sauron’s power wasn’t in his eye itself but in the ring of power, the master ring. That could be used by anyone. It could also be destroyed, albeit by what Tolkien called a ‘eucatastrophe’.
Hospital Trusts in the NHS use many different systems. Some Trusts have already experienced outages in their services due to corruption of the software, including that from third parties. Exceptional Summer temperatures damaged the servers in a London Trust several years ago.
When medical record systems are offline due to such causes the staff have to revert to making paper records and digitise them later. A warning of what would happen to human society if there’s ever a cosmic phenomenon that fries all the computer chips.
“This lacuna creates what Tories like to call a “dynamic labour market” and which everyone else calls sweatshops, money laundering, and an “undocumented” (and sometimes trafficked) underclass working cash-in-hand for poverty wages.”
and what the eff do the Lib Dims and Liebour call it?? they dont exactly rush to prevent them coming in, far from it. I was against ID cards but the state is now so incompetent and repressive it no longer matters.
Aaaand now we know who signs Mary’s paychecks! What a fraud. No, digital ID is NOT inevitable… we must continue to fight it at every turn. It is, of course, possible to live a life without handing over your data and privacy to multinational corporations. But you must give up convenience and fight for your rights. Never use e-gates, never use self checkout, refuse to give your address unless it’s essential for a delivery, never give your real DoB unless it’s for an official legal reason, block your phone number so it comes up “unknown”, never use QR codes, use an alias on social media and stay off it whenever you can. Starve big tech of big data as much as possible. Shop local. Leave home without your phone sometimes. Don’t join “reward schemes” (they are a trap – just data harvesting!) Find genuinely independent businesses (check thoroughly they are not actually owned by Blackrock)… research, do your due diligence, and teach your children to do the same. Stay human!
The choice is between digital ID implemented by a democratically elected government with oversight by the free press.
Or the equivalent implemented by other actors
Seems many here are choosing the second option, you will miss government when it is gone.
We already have a digital ID. Check out the Post Office EasyID.
Et tu, Mary? Et tu?
This is no time for common sense!
How many citizens in the UK believe in privacy? How many want it? Like free speech, do they say they want it but in practice show that that don’t believe in it?
During the 2015 EU referendum I lost count of the number of people who asked me how I was going to vote or how I had voted. When I told them it was a secret ballot they impudently assumed that I was going to vote or had voted for the side they didn’t like.
If they believed in privacy they wouldn’t have asked in the first place. If they were against some sinister iteration of Big Brother they wouldn’t have assumed that voting one way or another was a political crime, as evidently they did.
How many citizens in the UK worship the state? Not only is this a form of idolatry, but it is also essentially what fascism is. Never mind Trump being a ‘fascist’ because he ran the White House like the boardroom of one of his private companies, or because he’s a sore looser (wasn’t he easily thwarted by the professionalism and integrity of the officials of the states?).
The fascists are the ordinary citizens of the UK who petition the state to do everything for them and provide everything for them. There are more such requests made in the secular age than were ever addressed in a religious age to God.
Like the Italian Fascists, they want everything to be within the state, nothing to be against the state, and everything for the state, even if they cannot articulate such a desire. Their veneration of the NHS is a visible example of it. And their belief in the ‘settled science’ their holy writ.
If these citizens want the state to be the Almighty God-state, it will. It will have its recording angel. And in a digital age, also a coding angel. Such a god will have its chosen people.
Harsh as their lives were and however limited, the Edwardians deserved their privacy and their small state. Those undeserving will have something else.
By revealing how you vote to ‘tellers’ (as those who hang about outside polling stations to ask how people voted are called) political parties and psephologists are able to assess voting trends and inform interested parties. No-one is interested in the individual’s vote – unless they know them! – as it is all anonymous anyway.
Well, you asked for it. Opposing the sensible and/or inevitable on some half-baked ‘principle’ rather than looking constructively at how it could be introduced to our benefit, always results in the measure being cack-handed and poorly thought out. If you’d looked at Blair’s measure and thought this is an opportunity to take ownership of our individual identities, and all their bio and genetic markers, give access only to those companies and organisations we want or need to, and to the government only for essential security and other services, we’d be far better off. Instead, thanks to people like you, we thoughtlessly give away our facial recognition features, fingerprints, gait and posture, age, size etc for unaccountable corporations to profit from as they wish. Great job, Mary.
That must be Utopia where you live
🙁 ugh, it’s happening globally. I say dump the welfare state. But, without a nuclear event, it won’t happen.
Good discussion which somehow slides around the point that there’s no effective civil liberties argument against ID cards in principle as well as in practice. It’s simply citizenship.
When I moved back to Britain after living for many years abroad in various countries I was stunned to discover how difficult and perverse it proved to be to establish my identity. It was the first time as an adult that I’d lived without an ID card. I had them from all over, Russia, Tanzania, Hong Kong, Cyprus… in fact, Britain I soon discovered was the only country in the world who didn’t have them. I used my (Greek) Cypriot ID card here as it was still in date: various institutions were very grateful to see photo ID card even from another country, including banks.
I considered it then and still do, a personal insult to force me not to have a way of proving my identity. I felt my right to proof of myself and my identity, had been stolen from me in favour of 3 utility bills and a bank statement. It is absurd not to have ID cards. I want one back asap. I am not an unknown entity; I have an identity!
I’m with Mary Harrington on this. I resisted Blair’s ID cards because I saw the dangers of drift from a sometimes useful card to a world of ‘Papers, please!’. But the world has moved on and principled resistance is no longer practical unless you care to live a hermit’s life in the back country.
I would sound a warning though. If digital ID makes some crime (such as illegal immigration or fraud) more difficult then the criminals and gangs will switch their attention to opportunist crimes beyond the reach of digital control.
I prefer a hermits life in the back country. Please don’t ID card us.
For once I 100% agree with you: both your analysis and recommendation
Most British expats who have been required to carry a National ID card overseas will tell you they are convenient and facilitate daily life. People don’t give them a second thought. Most countries have had some form of national ID for decades. Over here we have driving licences, passports, NHS apps, nectar and clubcards and yet froth at the mouth at any suggestion to unify the government part as dystopian and “Big Brother”. I despair…
I agree with Paul, I am an expat working in Paris and my ID card is very useful, and I dont feel controlled by it. It is also a simple way of telling who is an illegal immigrant and who isnt….
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought that in France they have ID cards + driving licences + passports + a whole load of online activity books to colour in during Covid? Has this changed?
Which other countries with ID do not issue driving licenses or passports or online Covid Candy Crush?
The idea is just going to become less and less contentious because they already know so much and the mechanism of accessing vital stuff on-line we all need will require it.
For a moment I was surprised that the usual crowd who are very anti illegal migration or Visa overstays (with some good reason) then seem the most anti this too. Bizarre. Then I remembered Author’s reference to pre-1914 desires and it made more sense. Loving a specific objective but hating the reality of what it’ll take to sort it and thus doing nothing much other than transmitting rage fairly standard in some quarters.
Now the only valid criticism is the, ‘but we’ll just f*ck it up in the implementation’ school of thought. But whilst we focus on the stuff that goes wrong, everyday we use such systems without pain or even much reflection. It’ll work even if a bump or two on the way.
Let’s just hope a few satellites don’t prang into each other, because then the take-down of so many systems we all now use will be much greater shock than the loss of one’s smart phone ID.
The other argument is scope creep.
Existing ID systems in other countries are (slightly) more limited because the conventions about what ID can and can’t be used for are solidly embedded in the habits of the population.
At present the UK government is comfortably taking money directly from the bank accounts of benefits recipients – one doesn’t hand such people a digital carte blanche… unless they ring you up and offer you half their lottery winnings of course.
Yes a danger. Could be covered in the legislation with some safeguards. As you note it’s a danger now already
‘For a moment I was surprised that the usual crowd who are very anti illegal migration or Visa overstays (with some good reason) then seem the most anti this too. Bizarre. Then I remembered Author’s reference to pre-1914 desires and it made more sense. Loving a specific objective but hating the reality of what it’ll take to sort it and thus doing nothing much other than transmitting rage fairly standard in some quarters.’
Why would people that don’t like illegal immigration want to surrender their freedoms because the government can’t do its job?
Do you have any evidence that’ the usual crowd’ are both anti immigrantion and do not want ID cards. Who are the ‘usual crowd’ you refer to?
Civil society has always meant we trade some freedoms for order and stability.
On your 2nd critique – you are exhibit A for the case m’lord.
What are you an exhibit for?
It’s quite funny really, you make out like you are an embattled left wing poster. Yet you were completely pro the Ukraine war. You are rude about people concerned with immigration and rude about people that are concerned their freedoms are being eroded.
You are rude about the working class that voted for Brexit. Including insulting me with your sweeping judgements. If you think all I do is ‘transmit rage’ you haven’t been reading closely enough.
You come across as incredibly arrogant and intolerant.
Do you work for the labour party?