Quelle Surprise: UK’s Keir Starmer Government Goes All In On Digital Identity

The government is finally admitting the truth: it wants to launch a universal digital ID dubbed “Britcard” — despite the fact it’s a smartphone app.

Regular UK-based readers of this site can’t say they weren’t warned. On July 5, 2024, the day Keir Starmer became UK prime minister with a massive majority despite winning just 33.8% of the entire vote share, we ran a piece titled “Will a Keir Starmer Government Make Digital Identity a Reality in the UK?” Our conclusion was that it would try its damnedest (and probably make a giant pig’s ear of it, given UK.gov’s long history of IT disasters).

The reason we knew this was two-fold:

1. Just about every country on the planet, from the poorest to the richest, from BRICS partners to NATO members, including even the US itself, is hurriedly trying to erect a nationwide digital identity system. The United Nations, its strategic corporate partner, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank have been pushing for digital ID for years.
2. The government of the UK, like Ireland and the US, was always going to face a more uphill struggle since it does not have a national ID card system. However, Starmer was always going to follow the lead of his tech-infatuated mentor, Tony Blair who tried (but failed) to bulldoze through a national ID system when he was PM. As we predicted in May 2024, Blair would end up wielding an inordinate amount of influence over the Starmer government:

Many of the key positions in a Starmer government will be filled by members of the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, which has spent the past four years purging the party of its genuine left-wing politicians and members, including former party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach. As the veteran US journalist Robert Kuttner writes, Starmer “has virtually outsourced his entire program to Tony Blair” and his modestly named non-profit foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (often shortened to TBI)….

As we noted at the time, the beauty of this arrangement for Blair is that he would be able to continue expanding the influence of his global political consulting empire, which is currently helping to define the future of post-genocide Gaza without apparently consulting the Gazans on the matter, while also pulling the Starmer government’s strings — presumably to benefit primarily his consultancy’s VIP donors, the most important of whom is the US tech mogul (and world’s second richest person) Larry Ellison.

Reality has, if anything, exceeded our worst fears. In early September, The New Statesman asked: “Is This Keir Starmer’s Government or Tony Blair’s”. The article notes that “[t]here is no comparable example of a past prime ministerial court dominating a successor’s.”

Indeed, the only real political set back Blair has suffered in the past 15 months was the recent firing of his close friend and former colleague Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the United States due to Mandelson’s former close ties to Jeffrey Epstein, which were already common knowledge even on his appointment as ambassador.

As noted in our previous post, one of the reasons why Blair’s quiet return to political power could be so key to the UK’s future is his near-total obsession with digital and AI technologies:

Blair’s Digital Nirvana

There is an almost evangelical zeal to Blair’s faith in digital technologies, including biometrics. …Blair’s prescriptions are, unsurprisingly, technocratic. They include promoting the full gamut of “digital public infrastructure”, or DPI, currently being rolled out in countries across the Global South, often with World Bank loans and financing from billionaire philanthro-capitalists like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar.

Blair 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 a speech at the World Economic Forum’s 2020 cyber attack simulation event, “Cyber Polygon”, he told the event’s participants that Digital Identity would form an “inevitable” part of the digital ecosystem being constructed around us, so government should work with technology companies to regulate their use.

Fourteen months on, the Starmer Government is finally admitting the truth: it wants to launch a universal (and probably soon to be mandatory) digital identity system. That system already has a name: “Britcard”, despite the fact it’s essentially a smartphone app. The political pretext for launching “Britcard” will sound eerily familiar to US readers: iIlegal immigration. From the FT:

Sir Keir Starmer is pressing ahead with the introduction of digital IDs, with an announcement expected as early as his party conference this month, as the British prime minister tries to show he has a credible plan to reduce illegal migration.

Officials said Starmer was determined to plough ahead with launching a digital ID scheme, despite Sir Tony Blair’s costly and failed attempt to roll out compulsory ID cards in the 2000s.
The announcement may come at Labour party conference later this month, according to two people briefed on the matter. They cautioned that the finer details of the scheme were still being ironed out and that the timeline could change.

One of the models being looked at would involve giving a digital ID to every person with a legal right to be in Britain — either through citizenship or legalised immigration status, according to one of the people.

The digital ID programme’s “efficacy depends on everyone having them”, they said, otherwise the government would have to contend with a combination of paper and digital systems.

Civil rights groups argue that a mandatory digital identity is unlikely to have much impact on illegal immigration — most other European countries already have national identity systems in place, some even have government-controlled digital identity systems in place, but many of them are struggling with similar problems with illegal immigration as the UK. At the same time, digital identity systems pose serious threats to broader human rights.

“Any digital ID system designed to reduce irregular migration will not solve the problem its proponents suggest, but would pose a host of wider human rights questions,” says Sam Grant, Director of External Relations at Liberty. “There are many countries that have mandatory ID systems, and it’s been shown there is no clear correlation between irregular migrant population, underground economies and ID policies.”

In 2022, the NYU School of Law warned in its report, “Paving the Digital Road to Hell: A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID“, that the emerging infrastructure for digital identity in Global South countries, financed by the World Bank, has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations in a range of countries around the world, affecting social, civil, and political rights.”

The Role of Labour Together

Interestingly, the Starmer government’s proposed plans for a “progressive” (I kid you not) Britcard appear to be borrowed directly from a paper put together by Labour Together, a neoliberal think tank closely aligned with the government. Here’s the abstract to that paper:

For a progressive society to work, it needs to be able to collectively agree who is allowed to join it. Because it will exclude those who cannot join it, it needs to give its members proof that they belong. The UK doesn’t do this. Our conflicted historic approach to issuing identity credentials has led to a situation that represents the worst of both worlds. We currently can’t effectively stop people from living and working in our country illegally. Nor can we efficiently support legal citizens and residents to exercise their rights.

This paper makes the case for the introduction of BritCard: a mandatory national digital identity that would be issued free of charge to all those with the right to live or work in the UK, whether they are British-born nationals or legal migrants. The BritCard would be a verifiable digital credential downloaded onto a user’s smartphone, which could be instantly checked by employers or landlords using a free verifier app.

Labour Together was founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street. As with the TBI, its supporters hold top jobs in Starmer’s cabinet. Labour Together also played a key role in toppling Jeremy Corbyn from the party’s leadership, helped along by money provided by City of London financiers like Lord Myners, the former Rothschild director, and Trevor Chinn, the high-profile Jewish businessman.

Much of that money was undisclosed and Labour Together is now facing serious questions about its financing, as set out by the upcoming book The Fraud. From The Times:

The Fraud is expected to raise questions about Morgan McSweeney’s leadership of the think tank Labour Together and its failure to declare donations worth hundreds of thousands of pounds…

While McSweeney was in charge of the group, Labour Together failed to report donations of more than £700,000 made by venture capitalists and businessmen.

It included £147,500 when McSweeney was running Starmer’s campaign to become Labour leader in 2020, while remaining company secretary of Labour Together.

These revelations have prompted accusations from Labour’s opponents that the prime minister of the United Kingdom may have been brought into office by an illegal slush fund.

Now Blair and McSweeney are apparently working together to build the political case for digital identity. According to a recent editorial in The Observer, “a new internal paper by the Tony Blair Institute on the role of technology in government, commissioned by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, is understood to be ‘forceful’ in pressing the case for digital ID as a way of meeting voters’ demands and heading off the threat from Reform UK.”

But while the government believes that the UK public’s innate fear of immigration, much of it stoked by politicians and the media, will finally get the government’s digital ID legislation over the line, the ultimate ambitions for digital identity are far bolder. From the FT piece:

Earlier this year, former technology secretary Peter Kyle announced the creation of a new gov.uk app that will allow Britons to access thousands of public services on their smartphones.

He also announced that by the end of the year, the government would launch a new digital wallet that will allow people to hold driving licences and veteran ID cards on their smartphones.

A government spokesperson said: “We are committed to using tech to make it easier for people to interact with the state, learning from other countries on how best to deliver this for citizens.”

As we have previously reported, a full-fledged, government-backed digital identity system could end up touching just about every aspect of our lives, from our health (including the vaccines we are supposed to receive) to our money, to our business activities, our private and public communications, the information we are able to access, our dealings with government, the food we eat and the goods we buy.

As the now-infamous WEF infographic makes clear, life without digital identity could become very cumbersome indeed.

If governments like the UK’s, Australia’s and the EU are successful in imposing all-encompassing online age verification systems on their respective populaces, biometric-empowered digital identity could soon become our gateway card for using the Internet.

Digital identity systems are also a necessary prerequisite for the roll out of central bank digital currencies, as we have documented many times before. CBDCs are not only traceable forms of digital money, meaning they could be used to track who spends what, where, and when, but also programmable, allowing money to be restricted for specific uses. Expiry dates could also be imposed as well as accounts blocked based on user behaviour or location.

Inherently Exclusionary and a Potential Bonanza for Hackers

While often touted as a tool for social and financial inclusion, the reality is that digital identity systems are inherently exclusionary. As the World Economic Forum admits, while verifiable identities “create new markets and business lines” for companies, especially those in the tech industry that will help to operate the systems while hoovering up all the data, they also (emphasis my own) “open up (or close off) the digital world for individuals.”

As one FT reader wrote in the comments thread, “the basic idea is to make compulsory owning a smartphone and carrying it at all times.”

There are also 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.

As we warned in May, the 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:

🆔"On top of a digital ID scheme being a civil liberties disaster, it would also represent a significant cybersecurity risk." – @M_feeney

63% of Brits do NOT trust the government to keep their digital ID data secure, a @YouGov poll we commissioned reveals.

Read⤵️… pic.twitter.com/8SOg9EPuUw

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) September 22, 2025

Another FT reader, mirroring these fears, warned that digital identity in the UK government’s hands would be a colossally expensive IT failure:

It will be intrusive, with you being demanded to prove your identity in far more situations than now.

It will be a nightmare for the many many people who will experience errors in the system.

It will experience mission creep, with more and more data stored on it, allowing all kinds of unwelcome social engineering in the future.

Forget about lurid authoritarian fantasies. Imagine what your least favourite actually existing government could do with it.

In the case of Starmer’s still somewhat fledgling government, since coming to power just 14 months ago it has (and this is a constantly growing list):

• Unveiled plans to further expand the use of live facial recognition technology, on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force. Authorities are apparently testing affixing permanent facial recognition cameras in certain part of London, which is already one of the world’s most surveilled cities.
• Called for the creation of digital health passports for NHS patients, prompting a backlash over concerns about digital privacy and the possible sale of patient data to third-party companies — a policy that Tony Blair and former Conservative Party leader William Hague lobbied for just before the elections.
• Introduced new powers to automate spying on bank accounts. The Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill will force banks to spy on people’s financial movements all the time, on the premise of looking for potential indicators of welfare fraud or errors, including the government’s own mistakes. As Big Brother Watch’s Director Silkie Carlo notes, the government already far-reaching powers to go after genuine fraudsters: “This will simply turn Britain’s once-compassionate welfare system into a digital surveillance system.” 
• Announced plans to pilot a Central Bank Digital Currency by 2025, carrying on Rishi Sunak’s controversial Digital Pound plans, with a “blueprint” expected by Christmas.
• Launched an ever-escalating crackdown on lawful speech. Journalists and hundreds of  campaigners have been arrested for opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza — a genocide that Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, denies is even occurring. A pro-Palestine NGO has been designated as a terrorist organisation. The Online Safety Act has been passed, threatening to obliterate online privacy and restrict online content. British authorities have also tried to weaken encryption and have even experimented with artificial intelligence to review asylum claims.

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.

As we’ve noted before, this accelerating shift towards digital authoritarianism is a generalised trend among ostensibly “liberal democracies” — as broad economic conditions deteriorate, public disaffection grows, and AI-enabled technologies advance, the temptation among governments to exploit these new surveillance and control systems is irresistible while the potential benefits for Big Tech are also huge. That said, the UK is most certainly at the sharp edge of this trend.