Digital ID: Starmer’s gamble

Keir Starmer’s Labour government has chosen its hill: mandatory digital ID. Billed as a tool to curb illegal work and tighten immigration enforcement, the plan would give every resident of Britain a state-issued digital identity card. Ministers insist this is the modern equivalent of a passport in your pocket, no more intrusive than a driver’s licence. Yet the comparison collapses once you consider the reach of a system that ties every interaction with the state — from GP appointments to tax records — to a single searchable identity.

Mainstream commentary has split along predictable lines. The Guardian warns that a vast national database would be an “enormous hacking target”. Big Brother Watch brands it a “domestic mass surveillance infrastructure”. The Independent suggests it will merely push unauthorised migrants further underground. The government, for its part, prefers the technocratic pitch: efficiency, simplicity, fairness. Digital IDs, we are told, will end forged papers and cut red tape.

But the political risk runs deeper than data breaches or administrative headaches. Britain has a history with ID cards, and it is not a happy one. Blair’s Identity Cards Act of 2006 collapsed under its own contradictions and was repealed within five years. That was before smartphones made biometric tracking routine, before Big Tech normalised trading convenience for surveillance. The Labour proposal is not a return to the old card in your wallet; it is the creation of a single digital point of control.

Advocates argue that such a system is inevitable, that in a digital age only laggards cling to paper and patchwork identifiers. Yet inevitability is a poor substitute for consent. Europe’s democracies have muddled through without universal IDs; Britain, uniquely, has always seen freedom from state tracking as part of the social contract. To change that now is to alter the very grammar of citizenship.

There are, too, questions of capture. Whose software will underpin the new system? Who profits from storing, processing, and securing the data of 70 million people? Previous FOI requests have shown how lobbying by technology firms shapes Whitehall’s digital strategies. A national ID platform would be a prize beyond measure.

The Prime Minister has framed digital ID as patriotic renewal. In practice, it risks deepening public mistrust in government by making the state not only provider of services but also arbiter of identity itself. One can already sense the backlash: more than a million signatures against the plan, civil libertarian groups on alert, and unease within Labour’s own ranks.

Starmer may see the project as proof of seriousness, a modernising flourish for a managerial government. But Britain’s tradition of liberty has often been expressed in what the state cannot compel. The question is whether Labour truly understands the stakes — or whether it is sleepwalking into a fight over the soul of British citizenship.