Is Tony Blair pulling the strings of Keir Starmer’s government from beyond the political grave? Only two days ago the Tony Blair Institute released a report calling for digital ID cards. Now Starmer is expected to announce that the UK public will indeed have digital IDs forced upon them. The juxtaposition of these two things cannot have been an accident unless you believe firstly that Blair had no prior knowledge of what Starmer was going to announce, and secondly that Starmer decided to go ahead regardless of Blair’s intervention, knowing full well what it would look like.
Has Starmer really thought through the practical consequences of digital ID cards? He certainly doesn’t seem to have thought through the political consequences
Blair has, quite blatantly, finally achieved his cherished policy which, but for his departure from office, would have been enacted nearly two decades ago. The Identity Card Act became law in 2006, but Blair left office little over a year later and his successor, Gordon Brown, never showed the same enthusiasm for ID cards. There was a pilot scheme in Greater Manchester, but the policy then bit the dust when Labour lost the 2010 general election and the coalition abolished the Identity Cards Act.
But is it really wise for Starmer to allow himself to be sold a policy by a former Labour prime minister whom many in the party still see as toxic? It isn’t just Iraq which hangs over Blair; it is his post-Downing Street career as adviser to dodgy governments such as that of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s regime in Kazakhstan which, leaked documents revealed, was paying Tony Blair’s then outfit, Tony Blair Associates, £5 million a year for consultancy work. An obsession with digital ID cards does not sit well alongside a history of advising a dictator.
Whilst Blair has long campaigned for ID cards, there is a more recent source of funding for the Tony Blair Institute which is rather interesting. Among the listed donors for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is the Larry Ellison Foundation, Ellison being the founder, Chief Technology Officer and Chairman of technology group Oracle – exactly the sort of company that might be needed to assist with a compulsory ID card system that would require the development and maintenance of a comprehensive dataset of all UK citizens and residents. That may have immense commercial value – and no one can assume that our information will never at any point be sold to private interests. That is, after all, exactly what already happens with the electoral roll, at least the public-facing side of it.
ID cards will also create immense opportunities for fraudsters. Former software engineer Andrew Orlowski revealed this week that a senior civil servant had leaked him details of internal Whitehall documents which express fears of how vulnerable a national ID card system will be to identity theft. If hackers can get into systems run by Marks & Spencer and Jaguar Land Rover, they can get into a national ID card system as well. And once they are in, there will be a wealth of information required to steal anyone’s identity, all in one place.
Has Starmer really thought through the practical consequences of digital ID cards? He certainly doesn’t seem to have thought through the political consequences. At a time when the Labour left has started promoting a challenger to his position, in the shape of Andy Burnham, Starmer has made himself look like the dupe of Tony Blair and the lobbyists behind him.
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