“Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK,” Keir Starmer claimed today, announcing a new Government scheme. “It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure. And it will also offer ordinary citizens countless benefits, like being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly, rather than hunting around for an old utility bill.”

Since the premiership of Tony Blair, Labour has been keen to introduce a comprehensive national database which would bring together control and administration, allowing the state to track citizens’ identities. This isn’t entirely driven by authoritarian urges, though politicians’ enthusiasm for telling us what to say online, as well as what to eat, drink and smoke, betrays a certain “we know what’s best for you” disposition.

In an age when private companies can profile each of us every time we look at their website, it’s frustrating for bureaucrats to work with ancient, creaking data systems that don’t join up. How much easier it would be for those running the benefits, tax, education, and healthcare systems if we could be identified as the same person across all of them. Civil servants look with envy at the private sector, where people can be tracked from platform to platform, and even through the real world, thanks to their willing use of smartphones for almost everything.

For this reason, though recent Conservative governments mostly denied wanting a national ID card scheme, in practice they were creating a de facto digital ID system by joining up existing administrative data on citizens. Our National Insurance number was gradually being attached to our identity across different Government departments. Some of those, such as passports and driving licences, already have biometric data to link faces to numbers. In a few more years, though we might not have an ID card, we would have existed as a digitally identifiable individual in a state database.

In that sense, Starmer’s Labour is merely being upfront about rendering us all transparent to the state via technology. Where the last Conservative government planned to outsource biometric ID schemes — for example, to prove one’s age — to private companies, Labour will simply add that to its own scheme.

Initially, these ID cards will be compulsory only for adults starting a new job. It’s a politically astute move to link the new cards to making it harder for illegal immigrants to find work, presenting a conundrum to many on the political Right who would instinctively oppose a “papers, please” society. Isn’t it true that the ease of working in the grey economy is a big pull factor for small boats and other irregular arrivals? How else can a government identify those who shouldn’t be in the country, or shouldn’t be working? Inevitably, that also means identifying those who have every right to be living and working in Britain.

However, as campaign groups have been swift to point out, there are dangers. For a start, such a comprehensive database is an irresistible target for hackers. In the week that a chain of nurseries woke to the nightmare of hackers not only posting the details of children on the Dark Web, but directly contacting their parents, the potential consequences of hacking a national ID database should be salient.

Just as importantly, such a system can be used not only to track and observe individuals but also to intervene in their lives. The Post Office scandal revealed how fallible technology can devastate the lives of innocent people, even when introduced with good intentions — by Blair’s government, incidentally.

A government whose intentions are at odds with its citizens’ interests could not only deny benefits, housing or healthcare to the ”wrong” people, but also use their digital identity to otherwise make their lives difficult. Debanking, travel restrictions, and other exclusions from public life have already been used by other governments to deter citizens from stepping out of line. However much you trust Starmer’s ministry not to misuse the powers that accompany a universal digital ID system, it’s extremely difficult to take back such powers from other, future governments.

But given that comparable systems were already sliding in by stealth, perhaps Starmer has done us a favour. By overtly proposing digital ID cards, he has painted a target, a focus for popular pushback as well as campaign groups which have long opposed such schemes. Already, a petition against them has surpassed a million signatures. Could this be, as some rival politicians are already suggesting, Starmer’s Poll Tax moment?

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Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.

TimandraHarknes

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