No to Digital IDs: Starmer resuscitates dead Digital ID debate using immigration scapegoat
Image credit: Gov.uk
In late September, the Labour government announced their Digital ID proposal. This scheme revived 20 year long debates, from when Blair’s Labour government attempted, yet failed, at a similar scheme. The proposal, which drew opposition from over 2.7 million people who signed a petition, emerged amidst the context of a political crisis over immigration.
In the Gov.UK page on the ‘BritCard’ digital ID scheme, the government claims an ID system would disincentivise ‘illegal’ immigration. Instead of using their National Insurance number, an individual would have to show the card to the prospective employer. With this, the government aimed to respond to Macron’s call that European partners tackle the “pull factors” of migration. In this, the Labour government believes that further restricting access to work will deter potential migrants from entering the UK.
This proposal emerges amidst a wave of increasing political pressure around immigration. Rising public support of the Reform party, with the party leading You.Gov voter intention polls, has left the governing party in a crisis of public support. In response, the Starmer government shifted to the right, both in rhetoric and policy. The truth within the twisted knot of 21st-century British immigration is that numbers are rising. Since the onset of the European migration crisis in 2015, net migration to the UK has increased, by over 0.2 million more people per year, according to Commons Library statistics.
However, the causes are more complex. This crisis was caused by violence in which Western nations eagerly participated. The UK government, even without popular or parliamentary support, was more than happy to put British troops on the ground in Syria and Afghanistan. To the fall-out; to power vacuums, violence and civilian refugee families, a broadly blind-eye was turned. People from the Middle East were cast with a net of otherness, pervasive Islamophobia turned to by a populist political class and lies spread amongst the people, to shirk all responsibility for a growing humanitarian crisis.
Whilst numbers are rising, fear is stoked by politicians who make false claims about immigration to fuel xenophobic sentiments. In self-interested service of their ever-rising public profile, figures like Nigel Farage parrot demonstrably false stories of migrants. In an uncanny parody of Trump’s “They’re eating the cats and dogs” claim from the 2024 presidential debates, Farage similarly claimed on LBC that migrants were eating swans from London parks. As ridiculous as this particular claim sounds, the point is to spread hysteria. The truth doesn’t matter, nor does what he’s saying; the aim is to profligate, however gradually, the seeds of distrust. Amidst a right-wing media ecosystem, there is little to combat the wave of mistruths and distortions which add fuel to the dangerous fire of anti-immigration views. Far from harmless beliefs, these have been the source of violent attacks on communities, as so called ‘defenders’ of Britain commit violence unprovoked, riled by myths of ‘white replacement’ and conspiracies of gangs of sexual predators.
Until Starmer’s Conference speech last week, Labour has not proactively distanced itself from these types of claims. The timing of the Digital ID scheme, at a moment where Labour is grappling with ‘the Reform problem’, appeared to intentionally feed into this narrative. As a young, left-wing student who has fluctuated between voting Labour and Green in elections, both local and general, I am repudiated by Labour’s right-wing shift. Starmer’s claim that Britain has become “an island of strangers”, echoed unpleasantly familiar with the 1968 speech of Enoch Powell, a former Conservative MP from whom racially-fuelled hatred spewed forth in the Rivers of Blood speech.
In requiring Digital IDs, and expecting them to be a deterrent to possible migrants, Labour misunderstands the landscape of work in the UK. Starmer’s claims that Digital IDs will prevent the ‘shadow economy’, a web of informal work, is inaccurate. No provision in the proposal will change attitudes meaning that the same employers who didn’t care about the legal right to work before, would suddenly care about it now.
Currently, to work legally in the UK, you require a visa. Working without one means you are entitled to no benefits, no minimum wage, and cannot access public services like the NHS unless you have an open application. Those working in the ‘shadow economy’ are not privileged and pampered by the state as right-wing populists like Farage would falsely have you believe. These are the people most at risk of workplace exploitation, of which the Digital ID law would change nothing. The answer to these problems is not to leave people to fall in between the gaps, and pray on the success of your flawed deterrent. Facing war and persecution, the option of difficult, unprotected and underpaid work would likely still entice. In this lies the central problem: the digital ID scheme cannot fix the very problem the Labour government claims as its justification.
Another stated justification for digital IDs is the long-standing narrative of benefit fraud, the stereotype of people too lazy to work, ‘scroungers’ stealing from the state, and in doing so, stealing from the hard-working people of Britain. This playbook, that of the ‘undeserving poor’, is a time-old tale in British history, harking back to the Poor Laws and the prevailing, dehumanisingly unempathetic belief that some poor people simply don’t deserve any help.
As well as the striking flaws that, firstly, the digital ID simply will not work for its intended purpose, and secondly, that it perpetuates harmful classist and anti-migrant beliefs, there is a third reason to oppose the scheme.
Recent hacking events have exposed the weaknesses of the British digital security system. This year, the Legal Aid Agency, which is administered via the government, suffered a cyber-attack which exposed information about applicants. This attack was extensive, with personal details including National Insurance numbers, criminal records and financial information leaked. Despite Starmer’s pledge that the BritCard would use “state of the art encryption”, government systems have repeatedly failed at protecting data.
Raised online, the first social media generation, sometimes it’s hard to know quite why to care about online safety and data privacy. The sense that you have nothing to hide may overwhelm cares about safety and privacy, often rendered in opaquely technological language. Mass surveillance may appear less frightening in a social and political contract where we, as citizens, broadly trust our governments, even if we disagree with them. However, recent developments in the US, including extensive phone searches by border control, outline the fragility of citizen rights that we take for granted. Privacy is a cornerstone right to British democracy, and one which must be upheld, unless a dangerous precedent is set whereby future governments can freely enter and restrict our individual lives.
In this way, the digital ID proposal represents the most noxious of developments in 21st -century British politics: untruthful anti-immigration rhetoric which cynically exploits fear and anxiety, simultaneously extending the state without real necessity, and this with the potential of great costs to civilians.
Words by Em O’Riley