It is an irony that the politician so keen on introducing digital identity cards has no identity of his own. It is this absence of identity that is impelling him to introduce digitally conceived identities.
It is as if Starmer is under the impression that in order to exist, identity has to be bureaucratically constructed and preferably printed on a card or stored in a virtual card on your iPhone.
Do you remember Starmer’s pre-election pledge cards? That stunt that could have come from a floppy elementary school teacher? Labour’s pledges printed on cards and distributed to the punters as if committing something to stiff paper made it, you know, authentic and compelling.
Did he have a corresponding card for all the policies on which he u-turned? The card of abandoned pledges? The environmental agenda, for example the promise not to sell the NHS, the promise to abandon university fees, the pledge to replace universal credit, to be a broad church to Labour’s diverse membership, the pledge to provide an alternative to the fucking Tories. Starmer’s pledges last as long as an ice cream in the Seventh Circle of Hell.
Those pledges made in his leadership campaign and then the election campaign show that he will be any identity he thinks will get him a vote at any given time. Before leadership, he was the progressive — patching together an identity out of off-the-shelf progressive statements; during the election campaign the incessant dogwhistles, he clothed himself in off-another-shelf statements designed to appease Britain’s knuckle draggers and anus-breathers.
Starmer’s identity as a politician and human seems to be glued together out of scraps he has found lying about that he thought might appeal to the punters, as if the punters were excited by scraps and rags.
It is a golem identity, a formless, claylike thing composed of found objects. The word golem is appropriate since it comes from Hebrew, and Starmer has also been an obedient little golem composed out of Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal will.
Back at home, he has picked up bits of trash discarded by Reform and plastered them all over himself to look like Reform with the result that the UK population is likely to elect Reform in the next election.
The enthusiasm for digital ID is part of that dogwhistle approach to policy.
If Mr and Mrs Hobbit in the Shire install a digital ID wallet on their phone, then undocumented workers everywhere will suddenly be unable to work. Magic! Golem magic!
Starmer’s little drum beats about digital ID are also like saying that every person who arrives in the UK without a document should be given a document, as if that weren’t already what happens. The banging is obviously meant to stir hearts not brains.
Employers are already required to confirm a hire’s right to work and there are means to do that — and if those employers don’t care whether their employees have the right to work and don’t check, it won’t make any difference whether anyone has digital ID. Either Starmer and his crew know this or they don’t. If they know this then they are bullshitting the population for cynical gain or undeclared purposes, or they are irretrievably stupid. You pick.
Talking of cynical gain, Tony Blair, the Assistant Butcher of Baghdad, the spirit guide to Starmer, is very much behind the ID cards. If that doesn’t send shivers down your spine you may already be dead. See your GP immediately.
But, but, but, but the ID is only for checking right to work. Isn’t it?
Even putting aside right-to-work checks — which, we’ve already decided, the black economy will ignore — the government’s digital ID promises to be a bicycle with square wheels. It’s supposed to protect us from fraud, but centralising everyone’s identity makes a perfect hacker’s jackpot. It will make accessing services ‘simpler,’ except for anyone without a smartphone, and it will boost online security, provided the rollout doesn’t become the next Universal Credit IT disaster. Efficiency gains for employers and administrators are trumpeted, while citizens mainly get privacy risks. And optional?
In Japan the government has introduced digital ID without calling it digital ID and everyone has sucked it up. Starmer should look at Japan. The Japanese system is called My Number. Cute name. Evokes Hello Kitty. My cute little Number! The My Number system ties you to the tax and social insurance systems, the national health insurance scheme, which records your health data and visits to doctors, and tracks how much these services are costing you, your insurer, and the state. The Japanese government got around possible public reluctance or opposition or inertia firstly by not calling it a n ID card, and then by — quite literally — bribing everyone. On activating your My Number card, you received ¥20,000 in shopping points — redeemable with participating stores and authoritarian regimes. My Number is less an administrative tool or de facto ID and more a digital umbilical to the state.
Perhaps Starmer should have followed the Japanese example. After all, he follows everyone else’s example. Perhaps he should have called his ID My Completely Innocuous And Not Terribly Relevant card.
Having said that, Starmer’s longer version of snaring the population in a digital web goes like this: first the ID is optional and has limited use, for example, establishing right to work. Then more functions are added, starting probably with national insurance, but spiralling out from over time and the system will still be optional until you find you can’t do without it and have to ‘opt in’ anyway.
As it happens, those alert to history will know that Britain previously tried ID cards. Ahem, during the second world war, as a temporary wartime measure, which is a conspicuous case of function creep, didn’t end with the war and was discontinued only in 1952. And it didn’t end well. Citizens publicly tore up their ID cards. Yes, calm and reserved British people in the nation’s Golden Age, people who wouldn’t normally do anything more radical than eat crumpets at tea time, tore up their government issued documents — a whole howevermany years before burning draft papers, passports and bras became internationally en vogue.
Biometric ID was again rolled out in the UK in 2006 and then rolled in again in 2010 because the whole plan was bollocks.
Data abuse — think it couldn’t happen here? History and modern surveillance show otherwise. There hasn’t been a technology or piece of legislation designed to protect the population that hasn’t been used against the population. Britain’s own GCHQ has been quietly scooping up emails, calls, and online activity for decades, not under a fascist regime, but under ostensibly democratic governments. Across the Atlantic, the NSA has built a sprawling apparatus of mass data collection, and every new technological opportunity has been exploited.
In both the UK and US, legislation designed to deal with the threat of terrorism has been used to ban legitimate protest. The are countries in which you can be arrested or deported for being opposed to genocide or fascism.
Any centralised digital ID is a treasure trove, and governments, even well-meaning ones, have a long track record of mining such troves for power, control, or expediency. It is naive to believe that any government, especially a bad player, would resist the temptation to dip its scaly claw into the data cache just because that wasn’t what the cache was set up for.
So re-introducing digital ID now, just 15 years after the idea was binned as unpopular and unsafe, is an obvious flyer of an idea.
And we haven’t got to the broligarchs yet. You saw them lined up behind Trump at his inauguration. Once upon a time, money was the grist of power. Now it’s data. So let’s give the data lords more means of accumulating it!
The computer systems that will make the digital ID work will be made by private companies who shouldn’t have access to our private data but ha ha ha sucker, and who will pocket billions of taxpayer pounds. We live in the actual digital surveillance age. If you use Google or Meta or Amazon, everything you do is recorded and stored and aggregated and sold, not just to marketers, but to political players like Cambridge Analytica and fed back at you to nudge your behaviour in ways convenient to the very people who own the apparatus of data.
Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative was a massive data raid that gave the oligarchs access to the tax and health insurance data of almost everyone in the US.
But of course, these companies will put security over profit and go as far as needed to make sure the systems are abuse-proof ha ha ha, sucker, and the partition between government and private data caches will forever remain secure and inviolable woo hoo!.
So, an ID system, a digital ID system — shaky, full of holes, popular with flag shaggers and would-be demagogues, begging for abuse, previously tried and discarded — is just the kind of rubbish that Starmer would pick up off the street and stuff into his identity hole.
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This story was originally published on Substack on October 18, 2025. I have republished it now here postdated to October 19, 2025, because it belongs here too. If you’re a bit puzzled about receiving a notification for this article two months after its publication date, that’s why.
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