Labour’s identity crisis

The proposals for ID cards are not about immigration control – and ministers lack the mandate or public trust to introduce them

All we know about the Government’s proposed digital identity system is the 955 words published in a press release on gov.uk on Friday.

The story was briefed out in a hurry to distract from troublesome news that was not going away. The Prime Minister and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, had broken the rules and kept £750,000 of political donations secret. New emails between McSweeney and his lawyers appeared to show the Electoral Commission had been deliberately misled.

With the Labour party conference approaching, McSweeney judged that they needed the news to move on, and so the Government announced the digital identity scheme. For such a controversial and divisive announcement, there had been no attempt to prepare public opinion, and no debate led by ministers about what problems such a scheme would solve. There had been reports by the IPPR and Tony Blair Institute, but the Government announcement was abrupt.

This is an unwise way to launch policy at the best of times, but when you are trying to win public support for the acquisition of such sensitive and intrusive powers, such haste was reckless. What is the Government trying to achieve? What specific problems does an identity system fix? How will it work alongside wider policy? How much would it cost? What data would it store? What safeguards for civil liberties will be introduced?

We do not know the Government’s response to any of these questions. But we do know some of the answers provided by Tony Blair, and his ideas are incredibly far reaching. “Imagine that all your health information was in one place: easy, with your permission, for anyone anywhere in the health service to see,” Blair has written. “That your passport, driving licence, anything you need to prove your identity, were in one simple digital wallet, unique to you. That you could purchase and pay for any goods or services using your digital ID.”

According to this proposition – and Blair, remember, is the force driving the Government’s adoption of digital identity systems – it would include not only data relating to your right to reside here, but data regarding your engagement with the state and your personal financial transactions, including even the means to conduct those transactions. This would put enormous power in the hands of the state – giving officials the power, at the push of a button, to remove the ability of citizens to buy goods and services.

If this seems far-fetched – or even paranoid – consider the well-rehearsed arguments regarding central bank digital currencies as an alternative to cash. CBDCs might allow central banks to allocate credit, putting extraordinary powers in the hands of officials and politicians, and risk the politicisation of lending. They would allow governments and central banks to become prescriptive about the use of money: restricting expenditure to particular items, or placing time limits in which the money can be spent before it reduced in value. Fines could be levied immediately in response to bad behaviour with funds withdrawn from the perpetrator’s account instantaneously. The potential for abuse and inappropriate state intervention would be enormous.

And consider the decisions made by different branches of the state in recent years. The overreach of Covid vaccine passports. The nannying of public health officials. The concerns about two-tier justice, with individuals and groups treated differently, apparently on the basis of their political beliefs or racial or religious identity. The legalised discrimination permitted by the Equality Act and practised by branches of the state even including the intelligence agencies.

There are in fact some strong arguments in favour of an identity system, and I have made them in the past. Together with other important reforms to the immigration system, ID cards could help public services to determine access rights, and help employers and landlords to comply with their legal responsibilities. To some extent, this already happens: Britain already has a biometric residence permit system for foreign nationals with a visa. But unless everybody living legally in the country – including those who were born here or who have settled here as well as migrants – has such documentation, the utility of identity cards and their equivalents will be limited.

Since the Windrush scandal it has become controversial to argue that the authorities should make it difficult for illegal immigrants to live in Britain. But the root cause of the scandal was not the policy goal to remove more illegal immigrants, nor to make it harder for illegal immigrants to access housing or work or obtain official documents like National Insurance numbers and driving licences. The scandal was caused by a lack of official documentation for a specific cohort of people who are British but were born overseas. It could have been avoided, and illegal immigration better policed, with better record keeping by central government.

So an identity system could help the response to illegal immigration. But Labour are proposing a scheme – sprawling, ill-defined, with policy intent far beyond immigration control – just as they are refusing to do what is necessary to restore border security. They tore up the Rwanda agreement and scrapped the Duty to Remove, which required ministers to deport anybody who had entered the country illegally. They refuse to touch the European Convention on Human Rights and the many avenues of legal appeal that allow illegal immigrants and foreign criminals to evade deportation. Their ludicrous “one in, one out” deal with France means three people we should have deported to their countries of origin have been sent to France, three illegal immigrants in France have come here, and in the meantime thousands more have continued to cross the Channel.

Just as there are arguments in favour of digital ID cards, so there are risks that must be weighed up. As Tony Blair acknowledges, there are obvious concerns about data security. But there is also the risk of systemic misuse in this age of rising “anarcho-tyranny” – in which there is a complete lack of enforcement against those who break the law and cause harm, for example illegal immigrants, but unduly tough punishments for ordinary people when it comes to parking fines and even expressing their opinions online.

The Government is seeking to impose digital ID cards when it is failing to do the basics to control immigration and stop the Channel crossings. It is doing so without a mandate and – at a time when it has done so much to damage trust in the state – it does not have the public support to implement such a sensitive and intrusive policy. There may be a time when an identity system – tightly defined, properly constituted – can be introduced. But the irresponsible way in which Labour have started this debate shows that now is not that time.