‘The British public is running out of patience with a state that does not work, where interactions with public services are beset by inconveniences and delays even as outcomes slip and costs rise.’ The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not wrong there, but what is its solution? Not to sack the state’s clock-watchers who only want to work four days a week and only from home, or the beach. Not to break up underperforming state monopolies and introduce some more business-minded discipline into public services. No, as is so often the case with the former prime minister’s think tank, the solution lies in Digital ID. Give us a digital ID app on our phones and we will be able to report things like potholes and get them swiftly repaired.
Every crisis, every frustration of modern life has been used to try to sell us the case for digital ID
Sorry, but I am not buying it. The roads are not full of potholes for want of the means to report them. There is already an online portal to do just this. The problem lies more with a lower form of technology: a lack of men in donkey jackets doing the rounds with vats of steaming bitumen. Or better still with better scheduling of road resurfacing so the potholes don’t have a chance to develop in the first place. Funny how potholes are being weaponised in order to sell us all kinds of technological futures: the current prime minister recently tried the same trick, invoking potholes as a future application for Britain’s AI industry.
Every crisis, every frustration of modern life has been used to try to sell us the case for digital ID. Remember how it was going to save us from Covid, by showing our infection status and whether or not we had been vaccinated (never mind that there were questions over the reliability of lateral flow tests and that Covid was being spread via asymptomatic infections; problems for which ID cards were entirely irrelevant). Digital ID is apparently going to cure the problem of illegal migration, too (although we already have National Insurance numbers to show we have the right to work in the UK, and digital ID will do precisely nothing to address the problem of Blair’s Human Rights Act being used to prevent the deportation of criminals and terrorists).
It is all rather like the lobby trying to abolish cash; the digital ID lobby jumps on every opportunity without of course revealing the true motivation: it would present commercial interests with huge potential for collecting data from us. It isn’t just public services which would end up having access to the data. Like the electoral roll and the DVLA database of vehicle ownership, information held on digital ID would end up being sold to private interests. The idea that digital ID would somehow end up ‘making unauthorised access or significant privacy breaches like the Afghan data leak far less likely’ is laughable. On the contrary, it would simply increase the opportunities for our data to be stolen.
If you really want to understand IT – for good and bad – Tony Blair is the last person you would go to. This is a man who in 1999 – years after many people had started using the internet – had to be shown how to buy his wife a bunch of begonias online. ‘Like many people of my generation is positions of leadership, I rarely use a computer and when I do I usually need help,’ he said at the time. He was 46 – not exactly a grandad. He went on to blow £10 billion of taxpayers’ money on an NHS IT system which failed to work. Yet somehow he seems to have reinvented himself as a tech guru who can show us what the future could hold if only we are prepared to overcome our technological hesitancy. If you want guidance of how tech can and should be used, and how it shouldn’t be, I suggest looking elsewhere.
Comments