KEIR Starmer is under attack from every angle.
Opponents of all stripes will line up to oppose his “Brit Card” plans for compulsory digital ID.
His left-wing critics in the Labour Party have said the scheme, which will make it mandatory to have a “Brit Card” in order to get a job, must be scrapped.
Nigel Farage claimed the policy would be used to “control and penalise” people, while Jeremy Corbyn said the plans were “an affront to our civil liberties”.
John Swinney (below) has said that “ people should be able to go about their daily lives without such infringements ” and hit out at the branding – now disowned by the Government – saying the Prime Minister was “attempting to force every Scot to declare ourselves British”.
Michelle O'Neil, First Minister of Northern Ireland, says it undermines the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of civil war in Ireland.
But his most powerful opponent will be ordinary people. Polling shows that voters are split on the question of ID.
Earlier this month, Ipsos asked whether people were in favour of a “national identity card scheme”, with 57% saying yes, 19% against. Some 24% of people said they had no opinion.
But when asked specifically about a digital ID scheme – after a series of other questions about the pros and cons of ID cards – those numbers evened out a bit, with 38% in favour and 32% opposed.
Polling from YouGov from June tells a similar story, with more than half backing some form of national identity card.
If around a third of people – and those numbers can likely be mustered – simply refuse to get a digital ID card, what is the Government’s plan?
When Margaret Thatcher introduced her hated community charge – or the poll tax as it was known, much to her government’s chagrin – it was met with mass non-compliance.
Police forces announced they would not make arrests for non-payment. Scotland eventually wrote off people’s outstanding poll tax debts in 2015.
It created a lightning rod for public opposition to her regime and eventually saw her off. Don’t be surprised if the feeble Starmer is done in by something so small as a smartphone app.
Public trust in the UK Government is at an all-time low. According to a poll from September last year, just a few months after Labour’s loveless election landslide, 31% of people said they did not trust Starmer to tell the truth “at all”, with a further 27% saying they had “not much” faith the PM would be honest with them.
He fared only a little better than the UK Government as a whole, which had an overall “distrust” rate of 69%. (For balance, one of the few categories to be considered even less trustworthy was journalists.)
Now Starmer is introducing a “papers, please” policy to a country which despises him and fundamentally distrusts his Government.
But the policy must be pushed through. There is much riding on it.
Someone has, after all, been kind enough to fund Labour Together and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s research into why this policy is absolutely essential. Perhaps those same generous souls will benefit when the time comes to flog the contracts to run the scheme.
It will, it is claimed, prevent people from working illegally in the UK. “Let me spell that out,” Starmer said on Friday. “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID.”
Greece is one of the European countries that ministers will not mention when they point out that our neighbours have similar schemes. All citizens of the Hellenic Republic aged 12 years and up must have one.
In July this year, the far-right Greek migration minister Thanos Plevris told the BBC his country faced a “state of emergency” and warned of an “invasion” of migrants.
Starmer should ask him whether he reckoned having “Greek Cards” had made any difference.
The policy, clearly, will neither stop illegal immigration nor neutralise it as a political issue for the Prime Minister.
Instead, as Farage prepares to enter Downing Street in just a few years' time, Starmer risks handing over a ready-made state monitoring system to Reform UK. Worth it to relive the New Labour vibes, though, however briefly.
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