Keir Starmer is starting 2026 with a plot to tear up our freedoms with one atrocious move
Boris Johnson vowed to eat any ID card presented to him. Now Keir Starmer wants digital IDs on smartphones – so will he swallow his iPhone, asks Aaron Newbury.
Starmer pushes ahead with digital ID plan (Image: Getty)
Welcome to the New Year, I hope you have your identification ready? Sir Keir Starmer, fresh into 2026 and no doubt imbued with the focus for a fresh start the new year brings, has declared he’s pressing ahead with his plans to give us all the gifts we didn’t ask for: a digital ID card. Or rather, he wants to snaffle your smartphone and turn it into a state-sanctioned tracing device, one of the blessings of modern technology most don’t want.
Boris Johnson, back in the halcyon days when he was Mayor of London, once declared with his characteristic brio that he would “physically eat” any ID card with which he was presenting, boldly declared he would masticate it to the point of illegibility, before what “emanation of the state” demanded its production. One had to admire him for it, though eating your smartphone may prove somewhat tricker, and I doubt the warranty covers gastric digestion.
Now more than a decade after Boris inspired a generation of young ID-phobes to ready their stomachs, this Blairite infatuation is back. Resurrected like Lazarus from the political graveyard it was sensile buried in, ID cards were a wheeze touted in the wake of 9/11, sold as a balm to all ills, from terrorism, to benefits fraud, and probably tooth aches to boot. The British public, who by all accounts ever demonstrate a willingness to tell the Government to butt out of their business, told Blair where to stick it. Now Starmer, desperate for an idea, wants another go.
The whole sorry scheme reeks of that particular fascination only Labour appears truly equipped to embody: technological utopianism married to an authoritarian impulse, garnished with a dash of incompetence. Rather akin to asking your grandmother to programme the satnav, except Granny now finds herself entirely locked out of society.
Therein lies the inherent logical fallacy with the entire plot: it excludes people who don’t have smartphones. Statistically speaking that is overwhelming the elderly, people for whom, quite rightly, “the cloud” is something that brings rain. There are also, come to think of it, people who just don’t want to own an expensive smartphone, either through choice, or not.
To them the boss has warm words: “You will not be able to work in the UK if you do not have a digital ID.”
Do read that again, no phone, no job. Welcome to Starmer’s Britain, where the technologically adverse, or those who cannot afford an expensive phone, are locked out of work. Where you become unemployable because you have yet to master the dark arts of app updates.
That’s not even accounting for the security implications.
Now, I hesitate to point out the obvious, but Whitehall IT systems have rather the same security credentials as a paper bag in a storm. They seem to get hacked with ever-depressing regularity, and it takes months before anyone fesses up to it. Your medical records, your financial history, your late night online shopping, all sitting pretty on a government database that is about as secure as leaving your front door open with a sign saying “free stuff here”.
What could possibly go wrong?
Regrettably, we have the government enacting extensive overreach into our lives whilst cosplaying as Silicon Valley whizz kids. It will turn Britain into a “papers please” society, except instead of papers it’ll be your glowing rectangle of state surveillance, tracking your every movement like some ghastly digital ankle tag.
And here’s where it gets properly Orwellian, tin foil hats at the ready, please. A digital ID wouldn’t merely prove who you are, oh no, that would be far too simple. Digital ID systems have already been touted as solutions to everything from terrorism to immigration control to fixing potholes. Fixing potholes! One rather suspects that barcoding Britain will solve precisely none of these problems, whilst creating a spectacular array of new ones.
Instead, this system risks morphing into exactly what civil libertarians warned about during the vaccine passport debacle: a far-reaching instrument of state control. Link it to facial recognition technology (which the Government is frightfully keen on) and suddenly you’re being tracked from Tesco to the pub. Use it to segregate people by health status, and we’re back to vaccine passports under another name, like a particularly tedious game of bureaucratic whack-a-mole.
The marginalised suffer most. People with disabilities, low incomes, the elderly – all in effect could become second-class citizens, locked out by a system that demands digital compliance from everyone, regardless of circumstance. How terribly progressive.
Fortunately, Britain has rather a good track record of telling governments to sling their hook when they propose this sort of thing. Churchill abolished wartime ID cards on February 21, 1952, declaring his intention to “set the people free.” Those three words ought to be tattooed on Sir Keir’s forehead, backwards, so he can read them every morning in the mirror.
We rejected ID cards after World War II. We rejected Blair’s biometric fantasy after 9/11. The pattern is clear: the British people have repeatedly and successfully fought back against state intrusion dressed up as administrative convenience.
Now here comes Starmer, striding into this graveyard of failed schemes with all the confidence of a man who’s never met a civil liberty he didn’t want to curtail “for your own good.” The hubris is remarkable.
Digital ID represents everything this country has historically stood against: state intrusion, technological coercion, and the slow death of privacy. One doesn’t want to be reduced to a barcode on a government database, scanned like a tin of beans at Sainsbury’s.
Sir Keir should tear up this policy before it tears up what’s left of our freedoms. Though given his track record, one rather suspects he’ll press on regardless, convinced of his own righteousness whilst the rest of us scramble to remember our passwords.
Boris knew what to do with ID cards: eat them. Perhaps someone should mail Sir Keir an iPhone, for research purposes, naturally.
