Keir Starmer has announced the most un-British of proposals. Despite mandatory ID schemes having been rejected at every attempt to introduce them since 1950, Labour will require every adult in the UK to use a state-mandated digital ID to prove their identity.
It is central to the British liberal tradition that those who live in this country have the right to exist freely and without interference from the state, so long as they do not harm anyone else. A mandatory digital ID would fundamentally alter the relationship between the state and the population, turning us into a ‘Checkpoint Britain,’ where we can expect to have to prove our identity as we go about our daily lives. We are all familiar with the bureaucracy of identity checks as we travel across borders; a digital ID would replicate those checks within the borders of our Isle.
When Boris Johnson proclaimed in the Daily Telegraph in 2004, ‘if I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it,’ it spoke to something more than a mere rejection of the Blairite mandatory ID scheme of the early 2000s. Rather it was an expression of the liberal tradition that we should not have to identify ourselves to the authorities when we have not done anything to provoke it – in short, we should be free to be left alone.
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