The UK government has no intention of changing course. But can the resistance grow?
For a prime minister who enjoys a massive majority in the House of Commons, Keir Starmer is developing a serious habit of flip-flopping. His latest big U-turn, announced three days ago, involved rolling back his recent proposal to impose mandatory digital ID for job checks.
For opponents of digital ID, the announcement represents merely a symbolic victory, at least for now, since the Starmer government has no intention of abandoning its plans for digital ID — it is just going to take a more gradualist approach to get there.
That said, it clearly represents another embarrassing setback for Starmer’s deeply unpopular government. Both Starmer and his mentor, Tony Blair, seemingly believed that the UK public’s innate fear of immigration, much of it stoked by politicians and the media, would be enough to get the digital ID legislation over the line. That hasn’t happened.
The BBC reported that “the government has dropped plans to make it compulsory to have digital ID in order to prove a right to work.”
The Guardian‘s headline: “The UK Rolls Back a Key Part of Digital ID Plans.”
And from the Times of London: “Keir Starmer Abandons Plans for Compulsory Digital ID.”
“As Simple As That”
It was at the Global Progress Action Summit in late September that Starmer first announced his plans for compulsory digital ID. Striking an authoritative pose (or at least trying to), he said:
Let me spell that out. You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have Digital ID. It’s as simple as that.
But it clearly hasn’t been simple at all. By insisting that digital ID would become mandatory for anyone wanting to work, Starmer instantly made the issue a lot more toxic. As we noted in late September, just days before Starmer made the announcement, opposition to the UK’s digital ID plans was already on the rise:
There are… major security concerns about all the additional data that would be harvested by and for the digital identity system. The UK has already suffered hugely costly data breaches in recent years, including the Afghan data leak whose total expected cost the government is currently unable to calculate but is likely to run into the billions.
[T]he government’s cavalier approach to security for its rapidly expanding digital governance and identity systems should be enough to give all UK citizens pause. According to a new poll, two-thirds of UK citizens do not trust the government to keep their data secure. What is perhaps most surprising is that one-third of the respondents said they do.
Even the New York Times recently asked whether Britain had gone too far with its digital controls under Starmer, describing the country’s embrace of digital surveillance and internet regulation as “one of the most sweeping” of any Western democracy. If your national government is drawing flak from the NYT for “surveillance overreach”, it means it probably crossed the line a long, long time ago.
In response to the government’s digital ID plans, a petition was launched on the UK parliament’s website. Calling for the government to commit to not launching a digital ID, the petition quickly garnered close to 3 million signatures, making it the fourth largest petition in British history.
Meanwhile, net support for digital identity had cratered from 35% in the early summer to -14% in early October, according to polling by More in Common. As we noted a few months ago, one potential silver lining of the government’s rush to launch a digital identity system and compel mass adoption as quickly as possible is Keir Starmer’s reverse Midas touch:
If anyone can turn the entire country off the idea of digital identity, tarnishing it forever, it is Starmer, who managed to establish himself as Britain’s most unpopular prime minister on record in just over 12 months.
And so it has proven. As the FT reports, “ministers will continue to press ahead with compulsory digital right-to-work checks for employers, but are planning to allow workers to offer other types of proof such as passports or commercial verification products.”
The U-turn comes as the government tries to argue for digital ID as a way to make life more convenient for Britons and drive reform of public services.
Senior Labour MPs had privately expressed concern about the proposed mandatory element and ministers have concluded it would get in the way of efforts to persuade voters to support it, according to people familiar with the matter.
However, the decision will add to a mounting tally of U-turns by Starmer’s government, which has been criticised by senior ministers.
While that may be true, it is clear the UK government’s attempts to foist digital ID on the British public had nothing to do with tackling illegal migration. It is equally obvious that restricting the right to work is not really the purpose of digital ID, as Iain M Davis pointed out in his September article, “The BritCard Digital ID Psyop“. In the government’s own words:
A new digital ID scheme will make it easier for people across the UK to use vital government services. The roll-out will in time make it easier to apply for government and private sector services, such as helping renters to quickly prove their identity to landlords, improving access to welfare and other benefits, and making it easier for parents to apply for free childcare.
Digital Identity for Everything
In other words, as Davis points out, “‘in time,’ we will supposedly need digital ID to access services like child care, to receive ‘welfare and other benefits,’ and to rent a home”:
But that’s not all. We will also need it to access ‘private sector services’ such as those offered by banks. You’ll need your government approved digital ID to buy a home too, in time.
“In short, a state issued digital ID gives the state total control over your life and, to a great extent, the economy.”
Nonetheless, Starmer’s U-turn, while largely symbolic, is still important, for the simple fact that digital identity systems, and digital public infrastructure in general (more on them later), are among the most important questions today’s societies could possibly grapple with, since they promise to transform our worlds and lives beyond recognition. As such, they should be under discussion in every parliament of every land, and every dinner table in every country.
But they aren’t. In many countries, there is no public discussion of any kind. That’s largely because the rollout of DPI is being driven at a global level, primarily by the United Nations and its “strategic partner”, the World Economic Forum and its corporate members and sponsors. Digital identity was set as a global objective by the United Nations as SDG 16.9 in 2016.
The EU, for instance, adopted digital identity legislation in 2024 without even the slightest pretence of public debate, awareness or acceptance. I would wager that even today most EU citizens and residents still don’t know that an EU-wide digital ID is on its way, or what it could mean for them. And that, unfortunately, is the norm in most jurisdictions.
The UK is one of the few outliers in this sense, having had a relatively open debate on the issue. The reason for this is that the UK, like Ireland and the US, does not have a national ID card system, so adopting a digital identity system is a much more contentious move, requiring at least some semblance of public buy-in. And the public is not buying in.
However, while the government is trying to give the impression that it is abandoning its commitment to mandatory digital ID, nothing of real substance has actually changed. Digital identity is still being rolled out, just somewhat less forcefully, and that can change at any moment.
In short, the government has staged a tactical retreat from the most coercive use-case, presumably in the hope that it will defuse the immediate backlash. But the digital ID system itself is still going ahead.
Indeed, One Login, the government’s centralised digital identity platform, is already up and running, and has 12 million sign-ups, roughly equivalent to one out of four English citizens. Once fully operational, One Login will underpin the forthcoming Gov.uk Wallet, which will be used to deliver digital versions of key government documents, such as driving licences, birth certificates and passports as well as private sector credentials.
Security Issues
One Login already has well-documented security issues. Computer Weekly reported in April that the platform is still not compliant with cyber standards for critical services and has lost its certification against the government’s own digital identity system trust framework.
A recent simulated hack revealed that attackers could gain privileged access without detection, as The Telegraph’s Andrew Orlowski explains in the clip below.
The One Login system is also not exactly what you’d call user-friendly. Long-time NC reader Revenant recently shared his experience trying to register on it:
I just tried to use One Login today to file a confirmation statement. The app will not run on my mobile (eOS fork of Android, without Google spyware). Lol!
So I tried the web interface. It only allows you one attempt to be linked. I chose the wrong address (I have more than one) and it threw its hands up and said it would not be able to confirm my identity. I think this is because it uses credit bureau data (which I expected) and I now believe the electoral roll, which I have left in recent years (because I refuse to show ID to vote and all the choices are execreable). Using electoral roll data for validation is a very poor choice.
So I had to obtain a letter (really a QR code) via the website, take it to a post office, have them read my passport biometric data electronically AND photograph it AND then photograph me. This is overkill, it would have been enough for the postmistress to eyeball me and my passport and validate me as ID’d. This is all lawyers and accountants do for identifying you legally, including ironically for passport applications.
Stupid, broken, information greedy, anti-human system. Fortunately it will be badly written and die on live television in the near future, just watch!
Big Brother Watch, one of the digital rights organisations that led the push back against the UK’s digital ID plans, warns what while mandatory digital ID may have been defeated (for now), the fight is far from over, especially given how easily voluntary systems can become de facto mandatory.
This is precisely what happened in countries that already have full-fledged digital identity systems, such as India and Estonia. They started off by assuring citizens that digital identity was totally optional — until it became necessary for just about everything. In India, access issues to the Aadhaar system have locked millions out of their legitimate benefits, even resulting in deaths.
In the UK, it is already as good as mandatory for business owners to register with Companies House via One Login. That’s an additional six million people who will be corralled into the system — unless, of course, they refuse to or find work-arounds.
The stated reason for this new requirement is to attract investment to the UK by bolstering transparency as well as provide greater protection against fraud. While business registration processes could do with being beefed up, forcing business owners to register on One Login risks exposing millions of people to much greater fraud risk…
Nick Corbishley 