Starmer ‘destroyed public confidence in ID cards’
Policy rushed and poorly thought through, says home affairs committee
Maybe ID cards are just a fuckwit idea?
Sir Keir Starmer’s botched announcement of compulsory digital ID cards “destroyed” the public’s confidence in the idea, a committee of MPs has said.
The Prime Minister’s initial announcement was “rushed, poorly thought through and failed to make a convincing case” for mandatory ID cards, said the home affairs committee.
Dame Karen Bradley, the committee chairman, said the Government’s approach was “nothing short of a fiasco”, undermining public faith in what had been a “generally well-received” policy direction.
Apparently not, it’s presentation that went wrong.
Tumbrils at dawn.
Like Communism whenever it fails, presumably this wasn’t real ID Cards?
It wasn’t real ID cards because it didn’t come from the ID region of Belgium. So it’s just sparkling f*ckwitery…
Were they wanted to make sure the native Brits didn’t access the welfare lavished on the illegal immigrants???
Labour (and the Tories) looked at the CCP’s social credit scheme and said “This is a good idea.”
“in what had been a “generally well-received” policy direction.”
Somehow I doubt that “generally” in that statement….
or that “well-received”….
Q: Would you like to cut crime and stop giving benefits to immigrants?
A: Ooh, yes please.
The “policy direction” was well-received
Q: So, I can sign you up for compulsory ID cards then?
A: You what?!
The actual policy was not.
Well-received by the Blair crime family. Half a billion quid has been mentioned.
The MPs said government communications on the “out of the blue” plan were “completely inadequate”, causing “alarm” and “uncertainty” for people given the impact that compulsory ID cards would have on them.
It would have no impact on me, because I never had any intention of obeying any such laws, and I’m not afraid of prison. (I am afraid of spiders)
But I do think MPs and so-called “Lords” should be humanely spayed and tagged with microchips, because they are more dangerous to the British public than devil dogs.
I don’t think that it would be prison that you would need to worry about. These people would just make it impossible to live without the ID card. You wouldn’t be able to buy food, you wouldn’t be able to use any form of transport, private or public. They would restrict you from doing quite literally anything.
That’s what Sajid Javid (remember him?) was threatening me with over the vaccines I didn’t take.
However, passing laws and enforcing them are two different things. This one would simply provoke instant mass rebellion that would make the Poll Tax look like a jolly holiday. Would that mean millions of Brits starving in the streets? No, it would mean politicians facing sharply increased insurance premiums.
I would like to think I’d be non compliant too, depending on how tough it made the situation for people around me that I cared about and/or had responsibilities for, but sad to say I’m honestly sceptical Brits would rise up against it. Hasn’t happened in other countries. And doubt there’s anything special about us Brits having some uniquely fierce love of liberty – we are all under constant surveillance anyway including by big tech and haven’t rebelled yet.
I’m honestly sceptical Brits would rise up against it.
Indeed.
…doubt there’s anything special about us Brits having some uniquely fierce love of liberty…
Yet Britons – well, at least the English – used to have a fierce love of liberty. What happened? Welfare dependence? The delusions of transnational progressivism? Socialist indoctrination in politics, education and media? Consumerist complacency?
All of the above, plus affluence. Too many people have too much to lose to risk it.
Mass rebellion? In the UK? After everything that has been tolerated?
And it wouldn’t be all at once. It would be a gradual tightening. More and more things would require an ID. And your neighbors will nod and say ‘that’s ok, its just a little thing’.
Until they’re calling the police on you because you’re a dissident.
If they go that far I can quite see it devolving to a situation where people will steal food, and kill the police who try to stop them.
Nobody would try to stop them tho.
Who’s going to risk personal injury to prevent a large, angry man from absconding with a tin of beans? Sainsbury’s don’t pay that well and the cops only show up long after a crime has been reported. A tin of beans costs, what, a pound or something? But getting stitches to the head after being battered with a tin of beans is much more expensive.
When laws are both unjust and unpopular, and the ability of the state to punish people is limited (we don’t have enough prisons, not nearly enough) you just get mass lawbreaking and contempt for the authorities.
The British public is an elephant held in place with a string. Elephants are generally quite docile, but they’re still dangerous.
With number plate cameras, plus facial recognition cameras, plus gait recognition cameras that are even harder to hide from, plus AI that tracks people moving between different cameras and can triangulate mobile phone signals and correlate between people, phones and cars … How much difference is it going to make if you don’t bring your ID card or make a payment trackable in the banking system? Not saying this to diss your refusal to comply, my point is that this all needs a better plan than “they can’t track me if I don’t show my face and don’t use a bank card”. Because they can, and though historically they’ve rarely been arsed to chase up shoplifters, the effort required will reduce with AI.
The Chinese have a very efficient system for “ensuring crime-free town centres” (including warning flags for all ethnic Uighurs the cameras pick up, which buyers can switch over to their own “problematic” ethnic groups) which they’ve flogged with great success to other authoritarian dystopias, the Taliban are big fans apparently.
A lot of shoplifters lack the cash to repay anything and a revolving prison door doesn’t help them much so it’s understandable why they’re not priority numero uno. But shoplifters working for organised crime gangs do get targeted. Shoplifters doing so for anti-authoritarian reasons are also marking a target on their own backs.
How much difference is it going to make if you don’t bring your ID card or make a payment trackable in the banking system? Not saying this to diss your refusal to comply, my point is that this all needs a better plan than “they can’t track me if I don’t show my face and don’t use a bank card”.
Dunno. I don’t have a plan other than “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”. God loves fools, thankfully, so I get by.
No illusions that I can personally make a difference. I don’t even care about being tracked.
All I’m saying is, if the government tries to make ID cards mandatory, I won’t comply. I’ll be an awkward cunt instead. The worst thing they can threaten you with is prison, and prison isn’t that bad. A nice cot, 3 squares a day, plenty of time to read, strict limits on how often the wife can nag you, and no more mortgage? What’s the downside?
Same as during the egregious bullshit of lockdowns, when government ministers were threatening us to get jabs “or else”. I was never going to get the jabs, as soon as they tried making it compulsory.
Sometimes, as a man, you just have to set your jaw, dig your heels, and say “no”. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
…prison isn’t that bad…What’s the downside?
Being buggered every morning in the showers?
The stench of sweat, piss and fart?
The violence and intimidation?
The Islamists.
Bloody hell, Theo. I’m sure I’m nowhere near winsome enough for buggery.
Let’s be honest, if it didn’t happen when I was an altar boy, I’m probably safe now.
Steve:
In prison, buggery is about asserting power – not about the victim’s winsomeness. Your small brown starfish would be roughly penetrated just to show who is boss. Enjoy your incarceration…
The one thing I have wondered for quite a while is: why would the government be deliberately importing hundreds of thousands of fighting aged males and placing them in what look a lot like barracks around the country?
Could be it’s because they’re stupid fuckwits, could be because they think they might need some assistance (the stupid fuckwittery might still come into play there if they get let down, of course).
Dunno, but “fighting age” does a lot of heavy lifting there. They’re brave enough to rape women, occasionally chimp out and stab innocent bystanders, but they’re not brave and they’re not a fighting force.
In the former Canada, they’re finding that army units full of freshly arrived brown replacements are useless at fighting the enemy, very good at fighting each other.
Most of them will quietly fuck off as soon as we stop giving them free housing and money.
I agree, though there’s no inherent reason why they should be shite and they can fuck you up in a group if they’re armed.
There will be a CCTV trace from you leaving home to the store and back.
And the Pakistani store clerk will stab you because he has no fear of killing a white man. And the police will handcuff you and watch as you bleed out.
De-evolution of Western civilization. Broken window effect. Rampant petty crime will bleed the culture of its dignity. It is one of the commonly cited reasons for the exodus of corporations from Big Blue cities and states like California, Seattle, Illinois, and NYC.
“On the contrary, Mr Bond, I think you’ll find those wounds quite fatal.”
“These people would just make it impossible to live without the ID card. You wouldn’t be able to buy food, you wouldn’t be able to use any form of transport, private or public. They would restrict you from doing quite literally anything.”
The powers that be can’t (or won’t) stop people openly stealing stuff or fare dodging right now. So even if we got to a position whereby the police descend on you in Tesco for the heinous crime of trying to buy food, everyone would just steal it instead. I would certainly. And there’s very little the authorities could do about it.
The fact is the ability of the authorities to control us is paper thin. Almost entirely it’s voluntary compliance. There’s a few hundred thousands of ‘Them’ and tens of millions of ‘Us’. It won’t take many to say ‘Fuck this’ for ‘Them’ to be overrun.
As I’ve mentioned before, we have this problem in Oz.
The huge taxes on tobacco have led to a huge rise in illegal tobacco sales. Govt action doesn’t seem to have any effect.
Most of Europe has ID cards. And yes, for many things you have to show them. But what it means in practice is you get a very large grey & black economy, where people avoid them. As far as here’s concerned, there’s far less honesty than the UK.
They don’t much want to do anything about it as things stand. But they could, and I think will if they situation worsens to the point where they themselves feel physically in danger.
I fear that all they would really need to do is ensure that a critical mass of the population is on their side, and they can pretty much do anything they want to the others – that’s what years of immigration and multi-culturalism, uneducation, propaganda, demoralisation, and divide-and-rule does for you.
Who is this “they”?
The police often don’t enforce the law on theft because the police want an easy life (aka ‘operational independence’) -without the bureaucracy of arrests, the risk of being accused of racism, the risk of injury, etc. And, up to a point, I can see why…
The liberal elite despise the police – apart from the few senior ones that they directly appoint – and seek to constrain them at every legislative opportunity. But the liberal elite are not in league with the police in some grand conspiracy to control the population.
While there’s no conspiracy among the liberal elite, there is a consensus which can rapidly turn authoritarian – as we saw with covid.
The powers that be, obviously, you colossal fuckwit.
And who are the TPTB in your opinion? Could you be more specific?
I know you’re a churchgoer Steve – that image and the attached quote reminds me of Proverbs 6:
‘There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.’
The man in that image fulfills the description above in every aspect. Always shocking to be confronted by a literally diabolical visage this time of the morning.
That Tory devil eyes ad campaign from 1997 was not wrong, after all.
Having a staggeringly unpopular policy fronted by the most unpopular man in the galaxy was never going to go well.
I seem to remember back in the 1980s that Labour kept losing general elections because they weren’t communicating their policies effectively. It wasn’t that the electorate understood them perfectly well and didn’t like said policies, that was obviously impossible, how could anyone reject their brilliant plans for a perfect Britain?
The only thing I can think of that Sturmer’s got right was his comment about an island of strangers. Naturally he reneged on it.
Yes the presentation was terrible. They pitched it as something new and obtrusive you had to have rather than something on top of what you already have that will help you.
The passport system already holds details of 53 million people. What they should have done is taken the passport system database and add a strongly authenticated access to your own details so that you could logon and obtain a time limited access key to view your stored details. They don’t need to expose the whole database to do this. It just pushes your details into a temporary system where it could be accessed externally. You could then pass this key onto a bank or whatever as “proof” of id for institutions that require a government id. We already have something similar to this for driver license record details when hiring a car and sharing Legal Power of attorney details with a financial institution. By using the passports biometric authentication it would be much more secure than either of these.
The next step a year or two later would be to allow non passport holders to share in the benefits they were complaining they were excluded from. It would need an enrolment system to collect the necessary details and a passport type photograph. Lots of other validation paperwork would be needed to ensure that this new enrolment links up to other government data and reduce possible dual identity fraud. A combination of online access and/or Post Office counter process could achieve this. The cost to the person applying should be nominal or even zero. You don’t want cost to be a deterrent, but I suspect the Government would not be able to resist the temptation.
While this is going on that digital id should become usable for more and more. You could use it as your photo id to vote and use it when opening accounts. All Government services should use it. If you want to claim your state pension at retirement you need your digital id to log on the the website to claim it.
Eventually you mandate it as being required for more and more things and it becomes the primary method of establishing a persons identity for both the public and private sectors.
But the obtrusiveness was the point. It was the “we will exercise our power over you to prove that we can” so beloved of the permanent bureaucracy, fronted by TTK who is very much one of their own.
They just didn’t realise how much they’d over-reached.
By using the passports biometric authentication it would be much more secure than either of these.
No it wouldn’t. It would be Post Office Horizon 3000. It would also make it considerably easier for foreign gangs to defraud the British government through fake or stolen credentials. Not harder. They wouldn’t necessarily have to even visit the country.
Digital ID is a single point of failure, and as any fule kno, putting a vast, centralised database like that online is an open invitation to theft. It’s not a case of “if”, the chances of this getting breached are 100%.
Anyway, the purpose of this thing isn’t to reduce illegal immigration or other crimes. It’s to take away your ability to be anonymous on the internet, so you can be better controlled.
You don’t put that vast central database online. It already exists as the offline passport database holding that data for 38 million people. When you get an authenticated request from a person to make some of their details visible you generate a random key and push just that lump of data into the system that is visible online. It’s encrypted by that key. Once it’s used and/or the time limit is reached it’s deleted. Thanks to it being encrypted it’s only visible to someone with the random one time key anyway.
We have a digital ID that works like that. Someone asks for it, one sends ones ID link & the system produces a short expiry one time ID confirmation.
The passport system is as secure as it is because the reward for breaking it is limited.
Putting more reward into breaking it makes it more of a target.
And what makes you think someone can’t fake an ID from anyone whose phone they have stolen?
There may well be ways to do it. If it’s limited to when you would need a passport or driving license, fine. Nut the issue is what it could enable a wicked government to do, and that is why it must not happen. It is a truism that once a technological advance enables a tyrannical policy, that policy always follows.
You’re expecting my mother to log onto a website? Oh, you poor deluded child.
My guvnor, 82 and struggling, struggles to tap a debit card on a payment machine.
I gather this is not uncommon.
My mother (89) didn’t even have a debit card; it was cash or nothing. If she hadn’t passed a few weeks before the Great Covid debacle she would be very bewildered today.
How’s that EES system coming along?
The initial manufacture of the MTK android was botched so anything emanating from it will be similarly tainted. It is seriously, deeply flawed and is becoming an embarrassment. It’s makers might be moved to deactivate it shortly…
The only purpose of ID cards is to enable the government to keep ever tighter control over basically law-abiding people. We live in an anarcho tyranny.
It’s repeatedly “we haven’t explained clearly enough to the stupid plebs that it’s good for them”. again and again and again
This is the problem though – obviously loaded questions which are designed to elicit a certain outcome. It’s why ‘citizens assemblies’ would be so disastrous, precisely because the kind of people they’d bring in are career politicos or the kind of people that think Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart are anything other than God awful, and who are obsessed with power and control.
It’s a consequence of discussions with their counterparts in Belgium and France who cite absence of ID cards as the reason its hard to get a handle on illegal immigration. As Steve points out Digital ID has Fuck all to do with controlling anything other than your ability to freely criticize a government that to be blunt is far,far worse than North Korea. A government that seems to want to dismantle our legal heritage in an effort to try and commit the same kind of crimes as are reported there, but without the excuse that they have been at war for 7 decades.
I wouldn’t trust this government to run a whelk stall. The notion that a project of this size could be anything other than a fiasco is strictly for the birds. I know there are some commentators here that oppose the death penalty on principled grounds but I do not think there will peace on this Earth until everyone associated with this administration, both within Parliament and the Civil Service, is six feet underground.
I hate every policy that Labour stands for, and most of the policies of the other parties. I have to say, though, that I carry around a whole lot of IDs and have a drawer-full of others. In the wallet are my bank debit and credit cards, AA, supermarket (Tesco, Coop, Waitrose, Morrisons, Aldi), the IKEA family card, National Trust and English Heritage, membership of one political party and two professional bodies, driving licence – and yes, it’s a fat wallet, but it has no money in it! In the drawer is a passport, various insurance and medical things, pension info, etc etc.People more tech savvy than me have many of these things on a mobile phone. I can see where a singlereplacement appeals even to people who don’t want to use it to control the plebs – and I can also see the other point of view..
As for the Horizon system, why can’t people see that it wasn’t faulty at all? It did what it was intended to do, and that is to syphon off large chunks of money rom people who couldn’t argue. Why do you think that the PO appointed a moron like Vennels? Follow the money. The ‘defect’ appears to have been present in the precursor DOS-based system. It was a design feature, pure and simple.
“Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence” – it’s the easier and far more common reason. ‘Occam’s Razor’ and all that. Can’t remember who said it, but it’s a damned-good approach to take..
Sometimes it’s both, Baron. They’re not mutually exclusive.
There is not much in 2026 more important than that you should be able to read about and comment anonymously on government policy on the internet, given that they have tried to shut down critical voices and have thrown people in jail for things that aren’t even real offences.
Unless your name actually is ‘Excavator man’ you’re soon going to have to share your real identity.
For starters, servicemen and women, cops, probably anyone employed by the state, is going to stop chatting freely almost immediately.
A veil of ignorance and apparent approval of the government is going to fall across much of the online land, and it will be extremely hard to lift.
It’s the “single system” that is the flaw. It creates a, well, single point of failure, a single point of attack. I don’t want to use a single government ID to access my bank account, I’ll use the bank’s provided ID thank you very much.
Speaking as a member of the public I *never* had confidence in Digital ID cards.
My first job after leaving school (until I went to Oxford and in the next two long vacs) was as a computer programmer so I immediately realised that fake digital IDs can be manufactured en masse.
Fucking liars.
The government has NO WILL to stop the invasion of illegals. They encourage it. They are trying to exploit the public’s disdain for THEIR FAILURE to implement a totalitarian requirement on the CITIZENRY. Non-citizens are expressly exempt.
It is a human right for citizens of a sovereign nation to expect everyone there to be there legally. It is the nation’s duty to insure it. It is not an employer’s duty. THERE IS NO REASON WHY CITIZENS SHOULD HAVE TO HAVE NATIONAL ID! Everyone should be presumed legal. You should not have to wonder if the person in front of you in the grocery checkout line is there legally. Illegal immigration is a serious problem. So they attack the law abiding.
A central database of all citizens is a tool for tyrants. It’s not for the people. You are sucker if you believe it’s for ‘immigration crackdown.’
Sure, illegals working here is a problem, one that needs sorting out eventually.
But the bigger problem is the ones being paid by the government – put up in hotels, fed, given pocket money and freebies.
“by forcing anyone looking for a job to have an ID card”
So they borrow a friend’s card.
I knew two men who employed 75 Hispanic workers. I asked them, “Are they legal?” Both barked, “How would I know? They all had the right papers. Were they their papers?”
Its never that its a fuckwit idea.
Its always ‘we didn’t explain it well enough to the proles’.