Of course, the digital ID plan is a “dead cat” thrown on the table as a distraction. Any effective communication strategy for a government means setting the media agenda so that the opposition and opposition press do not set it instead.
Thus, Keir Starmer’s speech today will be reported mostly for the ID scheme – instead of for the questions being asked about Morgan McSweeney, Andy Burnham and the YouGov MRP poll suggesting Nigel Farage could soon be in No 10.
If the weekend before the Labour conference is dominated by a row over a policy that has broad public support – and which, crucially, is supported by most Labour members – then that is better for the prime minister than the alternatives.
Not that the ID announcement has been well handled. There is still enough of a backlash from the more liberal elements of the Labour Party, who overlap with but are not identical to the troublemakers who are pushing Burnham as a leadership candidate and a “soft left” turn as a rival policy platform.
The ID scheme was not in Labour’s manifesto, and it is a big policy to announce when parliament is not sitting, which are problems that could be overcome if the policy had been thought through and some work had been done on it.
Instead, it gives every impression of having been cobbled together at the last moment to meet the needs of media management. We first knew about it three weeks ago when it was leaked that Starmer was discussing the plan with Darren Jones, his new progress-chaser in No 10.
It feels as if an old options paper has been dredged out of the hard drive of a No 10 policy unit computer, run past the people at the Tony Blair Institute who have been advocating variants of the policy for years, and de-risked by the civil service.
There seems to be a lot of basic questions about the scheme that the government cannot yet answer, such as whether it will be used to check entitlement to state benefits, for example.
On the other hand, the scheme is not as bad as some of the recent leaks have suggested. It won’t, quite, be compulsory for all adults – only for those who have to prove their immigration status to get a new job. And it won’t be a card – except for people who don’t have a smartphone or who don’t want to use it. Nor will it happen for years – which is one of the reasons the timing of today’s announcement is suspect.
My main objection remains, however, that it won’t do anything to stop the boats, and won’t do much to stop illegal working. Employers and landlords are already under an obligation to check the ID and immigration status of workers and tenants. Almost all those arriving by small boat have their ID recorded, and they are not crossing the Channel because they want to work illegally, but because they hope to obtain the right to stay and to provide for themselves and their families lawfully.
The problem of illegal working is one of enforcement, not ID. And the problem of the boats is the difficulty of removing migrants once they get here, to which an ID scheme makes little difference.
Still, it is better for Starmer to have a row about the ID scheme than to have journalists ask more questions about his chief of staff. Morgan McSweeney’s failure to declare donations when he ran Labour Together, the campaign group that helped Starmer become leader of the party five years ago, is an old story, but these things have a tendency to come back to life when their subject is in one of the most powerful jobs in the land.
And better for Starmer than allowing yet more cubic metres of online space devoted to vacuous speculation about the leadership ambitions of the mayor of Greater Manchester, who is not eligible to replace him and not likely to be for some time.
And better for Starmer than allowing journalists to dwell too long on the latest seat-by-seat MRP poll from YouGov, which projects Nigel Farage as prime minister on current voting intentions – although he would need the support of Tory MPs in a hung parliament.
The only disappointment for the prime minister must be that, although Farage has taken the bait, “firmly” opposing the ID scheme which he says “will be used to control and penalise the rest of us”, Kemi Badenoch says “there are arguments for and against digital ID”.
That kind of sane and balanced response could throw out the whole of No 10’s media grid.
