It was billed as Keir Starmer’s big chance. Finally, the prime minister would spell out the progressive, patriotic answer to a summer of far-right hate, culminating in Elon Musk’s bloodcurdling declaration that “violence is coming” to the streets of Britain. Yet for all its talk of renewal and confronting the politics of grievance, Friday’s speech – a warmup for what will be a longer argument at Labour’s forthcoming party conference – still sounded oddly like a surrender to Reform’s theory of where it all supposedly went wrong.
Both New Labour and their Tory successors were too relaxed about legal immigration, Starmer suggested, and the left in particular has shied away from the argument about controlling Britain’s borders. To stop those with no right to be in the country from supposedly undercutting wages by working in the black market, everyone must now carry digital ID on their smartphones and show it when starting a job. Think Theresa May’s hostile environment, only this time in your pocket.
Identity cards are not a new or even particularly radical idea. They’re widely accepted in Europe – French politicians have long argued that a British equivalent could help cut small boat crossings, if they made it harder for people smugglers to promise a job on arrival – and Tony Blair came close to introducing them as prime minister, though he billed them more as a means of easily accessing public services than a punitive measure. But it’s the meteoric rise of Reform UK that makes such measures both more attractive to a Labour government desperate for something to say on immigration, and arguably more risky. If this plan to beat the right by offering authoritarianism fails, then any new power this government acquires in the process would most likely fall into the hands of a Reform government at the next election, free to use it for very different ends. Suddenly, this is a gamble of very high stakes indeed.
Though Britons wouldn’t have to produce their IDs when stopped on the street under Starmer’s plans, a future administration could easily change that. Just imagine how useful ID cards would be in rounding people up for Trump-style mass deportations – especially if that effort was linked to facial recognition technology already in use by the British police, creating a system capable of automatically scanning crowds anywhere from a rush-hour Tube station to a football match and matching faces against an immigration database. (There are remarkably few legal constraints on how exactly facial recognition can be used, compared to other technologies like fingerprinting or DNA when they were introduced). Suddenly, there would be nowhere to hide. Now imagine how some future regime could potentially use such tools, perhaps not just against visa overstayers but anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
Too paranoid? Maybe. It’s still far from clear that Reform can win in 2029, let alone how an instinctively libertarian party (it’s officially opposed to compulsory ID cards) would react to the powers falling into its lap. What is clear, however, is just how fast the tide is running.
Less than a year ago, Nigel Farage was still insisting that Trump-style mass deportations couldn’t happen in Britain. Now, under pressure from rivals to his own right, he is threatening to round up migrants in their hundreds of thousands and make settled migrants with indefinite leave to remain – people whose right to be here was never previously in doubt – reapply for the right to stay. What’s frightening isn’t just how fast things are escalating but how little there is to stop them escalating further, with old norms visibly crumbling and mainstream parties in flapping disarray.
Civil libertarians have long warned against handing powers to benign-seeming regimes without considering how a malign one might later use them, only to be dismissed as paranoid. Even now, a part of me feels faintly ridiculous, discussing what Big Brother Watch’s Silkie Carlo calls the “architecture of authoritarianism” – a raft of policing, security and civil powers accumulated mostly in order to combat crime – might in future be used for more sinisterly repressive purposes. Britain isn’t America, even now. But watching Donald Trump bulldoze through a written constitution makes it impossible not to wonder how Britain, with its more higgledy-piggledy ad hoc constitution, would resist an outright populist attack on its democratic institutions.
Imagine a new government that moved immediately to scrap both the BBC licence fee – effectively kneecapping public service broadcasting – and the online harms bill that restrains social media’s worst excesses, while vowing to rewrite laws on hate speech it considers repressive. Mainstream politicians have floated each of those ideas in the past, so each could be presented as perfectly reasonable. But combined with Trumpian attacks on journalists considered hostile, they could swiftly add up to the chilling of the free press and an explosion of fake news online.
Suppose it then announced plans to get a grip on the criminal justice system, accusing “woke” police and judges of letting ethnic minority offenders off too lightly. Chief constables who fought to defend their operational independence could easily find, as the Met’s Cressida Dick did after Sarah Everard’s murder, that governments cheered on by friendly tabloids have ways of making their lives impossible.
Citizen protests against all this could easily be repressed, using measures originally intended for activist groups like Just Stop Oil. If the House of Lords pushed back, the new government could either threaten to shrink it as Reform did in its last manifesto, or resort (as the legal blogger David Allen Green has pointed out) to more devious means, like legislating via secondary instruments that don’t require a full parliamentary vote. In this scenario, what stops Britain’s slide into something genuinely dystopian?
It’s true that the famously freedom-loving Farage makes an unlikely candidate for full-fat authoritarianism, with Reform supporters if anything even more wary of big state power. But the same was once true of the Trump faithful, which hasn’t stopped him sending the National Guard into Democrat-controlled cities. It’s surprising how many libertarians harbour deeply authoritarian instincts, just so long as it’s the other side’s freedoms being curtailed.
Perhaps you think all this is hysterically overwrought, the kind of liberal handwringing that invariably cripples leftwing governments. But at the very least, the stronger and more centralised techno-state Keir Starmer seems to envisage as the answer to the nation’s problems is a new direction for Britain and one that demands safeguards. It’s one thing building a powerful machine to destroy your enemy. It’s quite another doing so knowing that very shortly you may be handing them the keys.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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