Somewhere in Westminster, there’s a round red plastic box mounted on a wall. Its single pane of glass is embossed with the words “CENTRISTS! BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY!” Inside is an potent idea. And yesterday – sooner than expected, it must be said – Sir Keir Rodney Starmer picked up the hammer.
So we learn today the detail of a digital ID scheme, as trailed in the British media. It is a policy with a long history that goes back to Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair and it runs from him to today’s Downing Street, like the willingness to actively participate in illegal wars.
The detail is this: mandatory digital ID if you want to work in the UK, living in your smartphone next to your credit cards and train tickets. The government is framing this attack on your civil liberties as a way to crack down on illegal immigration. Handily, it will open a point of policy difference with Reform. But Reform are on the right side of the argument and, if Labour want to open up a fault line with the extreme right on immigration, they could try arguing that the mass deportation of ethnic minorities is a moral atrocity. Just a thought.
Mandatory digital ID should be opposed on multiple grounds, the simplest of which is that it won’t work. Workers in the grey economy are already breaking employment law and their resulting precarity is exploited by predatory bosses. Adding another regulatory breach to their pile of offences won’t deter them from spending another day handwashing cars. Beat their masters, not them.
Enforcing the current legislation would be a better place to start and would avoid further encroachment on the slender remaining privacy rights held dear by British men and women. Slender and remaining being the operative words. Erosion is a long process, after all, and what starts with the right to work ends up denying you access to a supermarket because you ran a couple of red lights. It sounds alarmist but the Chinese Communist Party’s social credit system didn’t begin its life in its current form.
The government is also asking you to trust them. As a baseline, you shouldn’t. And definitely not when what they’re asking you to trust them with the adequate storage and protection of your personal data. That’s the same British administrative state that effectively sent a list of the Taliban’s enemies and their personal information to the Taliban.
The policy is also exclusionary. Those without smartphones or internet access will not be able to work.
It’s true that nearly every aspect of modern society seeks to surveil and commodify human behaviour: how well you slept, how angry that Facebook post is making you, what time you get home. But that’s not a good thing either. This country has a long liberal tradition. We should fight to reclaim what surveillance capitalism robs from us and, by god, what little we have left, we should hold.
[Further reading: Labour vs the left]
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