Welcome to Britain, where you already have to scan your face to access much of the internet, facial recognition is rolled out on our streets, and soon your digital ID will be essential to access literally any public service. This great nation, once the flag-bearer of liberal ideals and rights, is sleepwalking into a digital dictatorship.
One of the features of the Coalition Government that I am proudest of is that we repealed New Labour’s ID card legislation. Now, with fancy new branding and a cover that it is to help tackle problems with illegal migration, Labour appears to be back to its roots, and planning to roll out digital ID in this Parliament.
This appears to be inspired by a paper from the Starmer loyalist think tank Labour Together. I took the time to read this paper, and its contents are even more terrifying than the headlines suggest. In sum, the proposal is to introduce ‘BritCard’, dubbed as a ‘mandatory national digital identity’. The paper proposes to integrate essentially all of our interactions with the state into one digital location, including healthcare and driving licenses. Even more terrifying is that it explicitly endorses such a card being stored in a private sector system like Apple Wallets.
Even if I were to park the principled objection for a second, the Government will mess this up. I’ve worked in the NHS for years, and I can’t believe that our diabolical computer systems have not yet collapsed entirely. Look at Government’s myriad failures - from track and trace to the Afghan data leak - and I don’t think anyone could tell me with honest certainty that they don’t think this system will be hacked, will leak or will simply stop working at some point.
I look forward to the Russians (or indeed American tech companies) having literally all of my data, including my phone number, healthcare records, travel records, ethnic background, driving test scores and so on. To put all of this data in one place is beyond stupid, and simply inviting our enemies to throw everything they’ve got at it. Indeed, I look forward to seeing a list of every migrant, or brown person, in this country plastered all over the internet.
I have absolutely no faith that this is actually about illegal migration. Even if it was, it is a totally disproportionate response to a problem that can certainly be approached from a number of other means. This would be one of the largest infringements on our civil liberties in decades; and yet I fear the public will put up absolutely no resistance.
I was proud to be a member of the Young Liberals over a week ago, when they put up a principled response to the Online Safety Act, supported by student Lib Dem societies from across the country. It called out the restriction of certain content, such as protest footage, on the grounds of ‘online safety.’ When you couple this worrying crack down on freedom of expression with other authoritarian measures such as an expansion of facial recognition cameras, it seems that this Labour Party views freedom as an inconvenience to be trodden on, rather than a value.
We have to recognise that the internet is simply different to everything that has come before it. A quick ID check, with no permanent record, when you purchase alcohol for example, is substantially different to the mass data collection enabled by the Online Safety Act - or the ability of the Government to track my face wherever I go. I despair.
We are faced with an authoritarian Government, make no mistake. The question we must ask ourselves is simple - are we Liberals or not? Will we put up a fight that I hope future generations will thank us for, or will we simply acquiesce to Labour, and let them run our freedoms into the ground.
This article was originally written for Liberal Democrat Voice. You can find the link here