Britain’s left-wing government has performed yet another about-face, this time on scrapping a mandate for all people wanting to live and work in the UK to have a digital ID, but Nigel Farage made clear there is still more work to be done.
National digital identity ‘Brit Card’ documents being introduced by Westminster will no longer be mandatory, the British government has said. The news was met with celebration as an important victory by pro-liberty campaigners, with the U-turn having come after months of pressure and even a public petition garnering nearly three million signatures, an impressive achievement for British politics.
Reform UK leader and Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage noted “This is a victory for individual liberty against a ghastly, authoritarian government”, but importantly recognised the battle on the Blairite digital identity has far to go. Noting the digital ID cards weren’t going away yet, he added, “Reform UK would scrap it altogether.”
Indeed, Downing Street explained away their ditching the compulsory element as removing a distraction from the wider work of the identity card scheme, and said they were still pressing ahead with rolling them out. That the digital identity system is to be created, and in order to get a job or rent a property in future, a check against that system will still have to be made — even if it’s done with alternative forms of ID — Britain’s Labour government is still creating a papers-please system where refuseniks are to be burdened with inconvenience.
The Times says a government spokesman told them of the change: “Stepping back from mandatory-use cases will deflate one of the main points of contention. We do not want to risk there being cases of some 65-year-old in a rural area being barred from working because he hasn’t installed the ID.”
They continued: “We are committed to mandatory digital right-to-work checks. We have always been clear that details on the digital ID scheme will be set out following a full public consultation which will launch shortly. Digital ID will make everyday life easier for people, ensuring public services are more personal, joined-up, and effective, while also remaining inclusive.”
Independent Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe, who organised a cross-party parliamentary letter-writing campaign against the measure, hailed the development, thanked the members who backed his initiative, and said he’d be celebrating with a drink.
Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo wrote of the change: “We welcome Starmer’s reported U-turn on making intrusive, expensive and unnecessary digital IDs mandatory… The proposal to make right to work checks digital could raise similar cybersecurity, fraud and privacy risks that digital IDs carry. The devil will be in the detail but this whole digital ID debacle smacks of incompetence.”
While many European countries already have compulsory government identity cards, they have traditionally been seen as ‘un-British’ in the United Kingdom and a massive security risk given the government’s track record of leaking sensitive personal data. To varying degrees, they have so far been successfully resisted. As previously reported on the now decades-long push by the left to subvert the longstanding British norms against ID cards by finding an excuse to implement them:
Britons last had mandatory identity cards in the Second World War, when they were thought necessary to catch out German spies. But while most European countries have national mandatory identity documents, the United Kingdom abolished them after the war, figuring them to be fundamentally un-British and unnecessary. Even the left-wing Guardian stated in 1952 as identity cards were done away with: “In this country we do not like this sort of thing… The Labour party ought to know this characteristic of its countrymen by now, sad as it is for zealous planners to bear with”.
But bringing the document back in a modernised form has long been a pet project of the left. Indeed, it was Britain’s Labour Party that delayed abolishing the wartime identity cards after the conflict ended by years.
The last left-wing government (1997-2010) had just started rolling the cards out by the end of its time on office in 2010, when it was replaced at the ballot box by a Conservative-Liberal coalition government, which made repealing the card law one of its first acts in power.
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