While Starmer’s government is trying to expand the powers of the British State, it is using powers it already has — namely anti-terrorism laws — to arrest and intimidate pro-Palestinian journalists, activists and protesters.
After his election victory in July, which by the UK’s first-past-the-post system gave his party a disproportionate majority in parliament (h/t Vesa), Keir Starmer promised that his new Labour government would “tread more lightly” on the lives of voters. It is one of a multitude of pledges Starmer has broken in just his first four months in office, during which time his approval rating has suffered the biggest post-election fall of any British prime minister in the modern era. It’s worth recalling that his government’s massive parliamentary majority represents just about 20 per cent of the eligible electorate.
As the veteran journalist Peter Oborne warned in 2023, “you would be very unwise to believe a word Starmer ever says.”
Just in the last week, he and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, broke their pledge not to raise taxes on working people — by raising national insurance contributions for even the lowest-earning workers. The impact will be felt most keenly by small businesses, many of which are already struggling. As Richard Murphy notes on his blog, “Big businesses can afford to pay, but small businesses rarely pay their owners a great deal (contrary to common perceptions), and they will suffer, as will employment prospects for many people who are on lower pay.”
The latest broken promise came yesterday with the announcement of a hike in student tuition fees in England, from £9,250 to £9,535 a year. It is the first hike in seven years, and it comes after a period of persistent high inflation. Starmer had pledged to abolish tuition fees altogether when he ran for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2020, saying the Labour Party “must stand by its commitment to end the national scandal of spiralling student debt and abolish tuition fees.” Once in power, he did the exact opposite.
And there will be no “treading lightly” on voters, either. On the contrary, as Starmer told delegates at the Labour Party conference in September, under his government, the State would take more “control” in people’s lives. None of this should come as a surprise, of course. The Labour leader’s ruthless purge of the left and pro-Palestine voices in his party as well as his role in the British State’s persecution of Julian Assange were all clear warning signs, wrote Oborne and Richard Sanders, two of the journalists behind Al Jazeera‘s “The Labour Files”, in 2023:
In the Labour party, not only is the right in control, it is brutally pummelling the left into the dirt, determined that it will never again wield so much as a shred of meaningful influence within the Labour movement.
At the start of the first programme in The Labour Files, a Merseyside activist, Paul Davies, posed a question:
“If a small group of secretive people manipulate and control one of the two great parties in Great Britain, what will they do when they have control of MI5? When they have control of all the levers of the state? Are they suddenly going to believe in justice and proper investigations and fairness? Or are they going to be the same as they are now? Or even worse?”
A New, Orwellian Government Office
One of the main ways the British State plans to exert greater control over people’s lives is through the rollout of digital surveillance technologies. As we predicted would happen four months ago, the Starmer government is pushing hard to make digital identity a reality. Last week, as the country’s attention was focused on the government’s first budget announcement, Downing Street quietly launched a new government office to oversee the UK’s blossoming “digital identity market”: the so-called “Office for Digital Identities and Attributes”, or ODIA (which, I suppose, could be pronounced, fittingly, as “oh dear”).
First launched in 2022 by the Rishi Sunak government as an interim governing body for digital IDs, ODIA is now officially part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Its responsibilities will include developing and maintaining the UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF), which outlines standards that digital ID providers must follow, maintaining a register of certified organisations, and issuing a trust mark to identify registered services.
As the industry news site Biometric Update reports, another key task for the new government body will be liaising with international partners to promote interoperability of digital ID platforms among jurisdictions: “Industry experts have noted that the UK is behind other nations in digital ID” — including, first and foremost, the EU and Australia.
But both the UK government and its private-sectors partners are determined to catch up, notes the website Think.Digital Partners, an industry association whose “content partners” include seven UK government departments and tech companies like AWS, Microsoft and Solar Winds:
In a panel discussion on the future of digital wallets and identity strategies, industry leaders outlined both the opportunities and challenges facing the UK as it looks to become a global leader in the rapidly evolving space.
They were speaking at the recent Think Digital Identity and Cybersecurity for Government event in London…
“We’re conflating payments with wallets, but what a wallet will be in the future is likely to be much more than just payments,” explained Jim Small, head of identity at Hippo. “It’ll be a secure repository where we can own our own data, our own information, things like verifiable credentials and decentralised identifiers.”
Small pointed to initiatives around the world, from the US tech giants’ digital wallets to the EU’s eIDAS-based ID schemes, as examples of the diverse approaches being taken. However, he emphasised the need for a more centralised, ecosystem-focused framework to drive widespread adoption…
With regulatory clarity, user-centric design, and a focus on high-value use cases, the experts agreed that the UK can emerge as a global leader in digital identity, transforming how citizens interact with both government and businesses.
This would be a dream come true, not only for the tech companies involved but also for Starmer’s mentor, Tony Blair, who has repeatedly called for the development of a digital identity system in the UK, after trying but failing as prime minister to introduce an identity card system in the country. In his speeches, Blair routinely emphasises how a digital identity will be connected to one’s vaccine status.
“More Dangerous Than You Think”
Digital identity systems may help streamline bureaucracy and reduce fraud, but they are also fraught with risks. As Brett Solomon, the then-executive director of Access Now, warned in a 2018 Wired op-ed titled “Digital IDs Are More Dangerous Than You Think”, digital ID, writ large, “poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.”
Those risks include massive breaches of personal data, including biometric identifiers; hacks and system outages; function creep as more and more basic services require digital identification; unparalleled government and corporate surveillance; the near-total exclusion of people who don’t have access to mobile devices or the internet as well as those who do but choose not to comply with governments’ increasing demands…
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Nick Corbishley 