The British government will scrap plans to introduce a digital ID system after steep public backlash, the office of incoming prime minister Andy Burnham has confirmed.
In a string of immediate concessions laid out ahead of him officially being sworn in on Monday as Britain’s seventh prime minister in the past decade, former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s team told the BBC that the government will drop the push from outgoing PM Sir Kier Starmer to impose a digital ID system in favour of focusing on the “the daily priorities facing people across the country”.
A spokesman for the incoming leader added that the “time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it’s most needed, such as helping with the cost of living”.
“This reprioritisation of public resource shows a change in direction towards improving everyday life and strengthening local economies over expensive national government schemes.”
The proposed digital ID system was one of the more contentious legislative items put forward by the Starmer adminstration, which had argued that such a scheme would allow the government to crack down on firms hiring illegal immigrants and to allow citizens to better access social services.
However, opponents have raised concerns over right to privacy, particularly online, with the British state already arresting thousands for comments they make on social media. Some have warned that a digital ID system would potentially undermine the ability of people to post their political beliefs anonymously to avoid possible prosecution.
Others have raised the issue of the government’s seeming inability to safeguard private details of its own soldiers and spies, such as in the infamous Afghanistan leaks, raising the question as to whether it would be able to protect the much less sensitive data of average Britons.
Perhaps more fundamentally, the public has long pushed back against a national ID system, with it being seen as anti-British since the wake of the Second World War, during which many Europeans, including Britons, were forced to carry identity papers.
Even so, a digital ID has remained a pet project of former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his acolytes after having failed to push through such a system during his government or during his successor Gordon Brown’s administration.
Commenting on the decision by the incoming Burnham government to drop plans for a digital ID, head of advocacy at the Big Brother Watch civil liberties campaign group, Jack Coulson said: “The British people were clear that they do not want mandatory ID. The government backing down shows what campaigns like Big Brother Watch’s can achieve”
“But the dangers of a ‘papers please’ society have not gone away. Big Brother Watch is concerned that the government’s approach to social media restrictions will lead to a de facto mandatory ID regime for the internet. If this is a signal, it is a positive one, but we must all keep a wary eye on Tony Blair’s former ID card minister.”
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