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.
The tinfoil hatters were already warning of this prospect during Covid, when eye-bleeding Facebook boomer memes predicted imminent global digital ID and sinister moves to establish One World Government and digital tyranny all powered by the biosecurity state. And well they might: while such voices were probably over-imaginative about the details, they were also directionally correct. In the UK, with its religiously nationalised health system, the most robust vector for digital ID really is the NHS.
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. And if Thiel’s eye of Sauron is able to make all our NHS records interoperable, he can surely plug these into National Security numbers and passport data too. So why would Starmer even need to fight for such an unpopular measure as digital ID directly, when the needs of our sainted NHS make it all but an inevitability?
But the reality is that it doesn’t matter what the memes say: digital tyranny is coming. We first saw it in Canada, when Justin Trudeau led the way in weaponising the banking system to end a protest against his vaccine mandates. Now, Starmer’s government is about to hand itself powers to demand information from any private company, or take money from your bank account or payslip, if it thinks you’re committing benefit fraud. Digging our heels in about ID achieves little save perpetuating an information asymmetry that favours corporations and criminals over the Government, forcing them to find other, more clumsy and intrusive means of achieving the same ends.
As for the privacy ship, that is also already a dot on the horizon. Every time we buy something online, use social media, accept a browser cookie, or download an app, we’re handing over personal information. Apple, Google, and Meta almost certainly have a more complete picture of you than the UK government. Which is more trustworthy? Difficult to say. But once the information is out there, it’s sold on to data brokers who will share all your internet habits with whoever has the money to pay for it. Only the Government is flying blind. This does not make sense.
If the prospect seems alarming and un-British to you, well: it does to me as well. But rejecting ID cards would only make sense if we could somehow return to Taylor’s pre-1914 world, in which most people aren’t very mobile and in any case being a citizen doesn’t entitle you to much. And that’s not the Britain of today, in which information, money, and people are all hypermobile, to the extent that it’s widely considered rude to make assumptions about someone’s nationality based on their appearance, culture, or first language.
There is a range of views on the merits of this modern approach. But one thing is certain: combining generous welfare with only the most rudimentary efforts to track who is actually entitled to it also means rich potential for bad actors to exploit gaps between databases. Earlier this year, for example, three Bulgarian nationals were sentenced for stealing hundreds of millions of pounds from the UK taxpayer, funding the renovation of an entire town in their home country. They sent “customers” on short visits to the UK using cheap flights, supplied forged proof of address, job offers and other evidence of entitlement to benefits, then trousered the payments that flowed in thereafter.
As I’m sure Blair would be swift to point out, this would have been far easier to stop with greater interoperability between all the existing government databases, such as tax, driving licence, healthcare, and travel behaviour. The same also goes for the health tourism that costs the already-groaning UK taxpayer £500m a year. In a word: the Government probably already collates enough information to identify and stop scammers; it’s just held in a host of disparate databases. As things stand, we don’t even bother to check the passports of those exiting the UK, meaning we actually have no idea how many people there are in Britain today. If only there were some kind of sinister, CIA-funded surveillance tech Eye of Sauron out there, who could put the pieces together for us.
Should we obtain such an Eye, one upside might be greater power to tackle the small boats crisis. For here, as the French are fond of pointing out, our lack of centralised ID is a significant pull factor for Channel migrants. 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 this in turn drives over-regulation and over-taxation of those foolish enough to hang on in what’s left of Britain’s formal economy, instead of — as growing numbers are now doing — fleeing the UK like rats leaving a sinking ship.
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, perhaps he’s hoping that this time our hapless Westminster wonks will seize the opportunity to take a stake in every such venture. Perhaps, downstream of this, we might even actually start making stuff again — even if it’s mainly IP — rather than just juicing house prices and wiping bottoms. A girl can dream. But chances are he’s also identified NHS data as the most politically palatable way of sweetening the digital ID pill: after all, our national religion of NHS worship serves as an effective trump card in so many other debates, there’s a robust likelihood it will neutralise the WEF conspiracists too.
And, as un-British as it is, and much as I dislike turning 180 on so creepy a prospect as government ID, the bottom line is that we can’t have it both ways. We can’t have radically dematerialised citizenship, highly mobile populations, global social media communications, and a taboo on linking citizenship to ethnicity, culture, or language, then also insist on a generous welfare state without robust central monitoring of who is entitled to what. The pre-1914 English relationship to citizenship and the state persists, as a ghostly collective memory, and junking it goes deeply against the grain – including for me. But those who cling to our tax-funded entitlements cannot then reject the logic of state managerialism, or draw arbitrary lines to halt its totalitarian trajectory.
It may have seemed possible, for a few post-war decades at least, to balance liberty against welfare. But Britain’s dour, down-at-heel arrival in the digital age has left us with these three ugly options. We can abolish the welfare state (politically impossible). We can pay a crippling surcharge in fraud (already unaffordable). Or we can accept the eye of Sauron (Do it for Our NHS!!!). In practice, the argument is already over; every browser cookie we accept, or Google search we perform, declares that we’re already staring into the Eye. We might as well make it official.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/