Digital ID cards are a sign of a Groundhog Day government that’s out of ideas
Digital ID cards – or ‘Brit cards’ as Starmer calls them – are a Blair-era policy being recycled at the worst possible time, says James Ford
It has been estimated that there are no fewer than 138 movie sequels currently in production. By any estimate, that is a lot of sequels. Even Homer Simpson is set to return to the silver screen, with a sequel to 2007’s The Simpson’s Movie recently greenlit. It will be joining titles like A Most Violent Year 2, A Quiet Place 3, Bill and Ted 4, and Avatars 3, 4 and 5 on a big screen near you. Hollywood seems fixated on ‘legacy IPs’ (Tinsel Town’s preferred term for its own collective lack of imagination, creativity and originality).
However, it is not just down at your local multiplex that you may find yourself experiencing a nauseating deja vu – because our beleaguered government is at it too. Tired, old, half-baked ideas from governments past are being taken off the shelf, dusted off and presented as the solution to the political challenges of 2025. Did you like it when the last government spaffed billions on new benches and hanging baskets for struggling shopping parades under its levelling up initiative? Well, now this government is going to spend billions on the same thing with levelling up 2.0 (as its new flagship ‘pride of place’ scheme might as well be called). Remember how great it worked out for everyone when Tony Blair decided to take over Afghanistan and Iraq 20 years ago? Well, now you can relive those happy memories as he gets his own threequel and takes over Gaza. What could possibly go wrong? Even new towns – a policy first conceived in 1946 – are making a comeback.
Probably the most egregious example of ‘groundhog government’ is Keir Starmer’s decision to introduce ID cards, an idea that even the Blair government abandoned. Starmer’s successor – the ‘Brit card’ – even fails in terms of nominative determinism: it’s a digital ID so there won’t be a physical card, and it is profoundly un-British.
But this policy’s shortcomings are more than linguistic. A rapid shift to online ID cannot come at a worse time for UK citizens. The government’s own Cyber Security Breaches Survey earlier this year found that UK businesses had experienced around 8.56m cyber crimes in the past 12 months. There have been no fewer than 26 major cyberattacks in the UK in the past five years. And it is not just corporations like Marks & Spencer or Jaguar Land Rover that have had their security breached but major public sector bodies like the NHS, TfL and even the MoD. Handing even more data over to the government will likely make it easier for hackers and hostile actors rather than harder.
More than just bad policy, mandatory ID cards are also dumb politics. Reform, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the Greens and Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Your Party’ rarely agree on much, but all have made their fervent opposition to this initiative very clear. Even opinion within Labour’s ranks is divided with Andy Burnham, the heir presumptive to the Labour leadership, now making clear that he opposes the ‘Brit card’. If Starmer thought this idea would strengthen his position and that of his government, he has instead united his opponents and given them a cause they can rally support around. Pitching digital ID cards as a necessary way to combat illegal migration will not resolve racial tensions on the streets but exacerbate them. Starmer’s already ill-fated ‘phase two’ is looking shakier than it did before Labour Conference.
Policies that failed, became discredited or were willingly abandoned in the past can only fail again now. It is painfully clear that this government is adopting these old ideas out of desperation rather than inspiration. Just as digital ID cards will not make any of us any safer, this odd compendium of recycled ideas will not save the current government from the opprobrium of a disappointed electorate.
James Ford was a policy adviser to Mayor of London Boris Johnson