CapX – Labour’s ‘Britcard’ will leave us less free – and less British

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.

Britain has a strong and proud tradition of rejecting mandatory ID schemes. After their introduction during World War II as a temporary measure in a time of national emergency, ID cards continued to be required in peacetime. However, when in 1950, a dry cleaner from London, Harry Willcock, refused the police’s demand to check his ID card, proclaiming ‘I am a liberal and I am against this sort of thing,’ his resistance sparked a movement. The British Housewives’ League protested the scheme by setting fire to their ID cards outside Parliament and Willcock established the Freedom Defence Committee. On February 21, 1952, the government led by Winston Churchill scrapped ID cards; this rejection of an overbearing state found its echo in 2010 when the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government scrapped identity cards, as soon as it came to power.

In centralising vast amounts of personal information into notoriously leaky government databases, a mandatory digital ID system also presents an unprecedented threat to our privacy and security. One need only look at the government’s track record on data breaches – which includes the Afghan data breach scandal and the loss of Legal Aid Agency data this year alone – to understand why the public might be sceptical to trust Whitehall with its sensitive information. Independent polling commissioned by Big Brother Watch and conducted by YouGov, found that 63% of the public said that they would not trust their digital security to be protected with a digital ID.

It is difficult to justify these erosions to our rights and freedoms when there is very little evidence that they will achieve their desired objectives. A digital ID app is unlikely to deter those willing to risk their lives to cross the Channel, nor will it make it easier for the Home Office to identify people living and working here without authorisation. Instead, it will lead to more burdensome requirements for compliant employers and landlords, while doing very little to tackle people-smuggling gangs and those who are operating ‘off-the-books’.

While these proposals are currently being couched in the context of tackling illegal migration, we should be very wary of building a mass surveillance infrastructure which would allow governments – present and future – to track, monitor and profile us on a population-wide scale. While it would be hyperbolic to suggest that mandatory digital ID will turn us into North Korea overnight, it would be a mark of the steady erosion of liberties in Britain to accept these proposals. Normalising suspicionless identity checks and surrendering masses of personal information to the state to help it administer itself have no place in a liberal democracy.

It may be trite to say that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but to forget this is to risk sleepwalking into a database nation in which our lives are laid bare to the state.

– Jasleen Chaggar, Legal and Policy Officer

CapX – Labour’s ‘Britcard’ will leave us less free – and less British

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