The Labour government’s plan to impose digital ID cards on all adults will do nothing to combat illegal immigration. But it will give the state more power to control the British people. Keir Starmer’s compulsory digital ID has been called a “Brit card”.
It might be more accurate to call it an anti-British card. Our country has never been a “Your papers, please” surveillance society.
What about our European neighbours, such as Germany and France, where there are ID cards and strict checks? It has made no difference at all to the immigration crisis there, and nor will it here.
The truth is we already have digital IDs to ensure migrants have the right to work here.
Any foreign employee needs to apply for a share code on their E-Visa account and pass that code over to their employer to check on a system.
If an employer doesn’t get a share code, they’re breaking the law. We simply already have the measures in place.
UK digital ID cards will instead become a means of controlling the population, of telling us what we can do or say, or even tracking where we go and what we spend.
During the Covid pandemic, we had to have vaccine ID to travel and to do various things. Did that stop the pandemic spreading? No it did not.
All it did was to impose costs and inconvenience on the general population.
Why would anybody trust the government to hold massive data banks of information about how we live?
People like Tony Blair already want to expand it into a “super-digital Id card” that could be needed to do everything from claiming benefits to reporting potholes! Remember, it was his Labour government who tried to impose ID cards last time.
There is a serious issue of democracy here. Who voted for Starmer’s digital ID card? Like many of Labour’s policies, there was no mention of it in their 2024 manifesto.
Labour’s plan to fast-track digital ID cards without any democratic mandate reveals their contempt for ordinary voters.
Reform UK, the party I lead, says no to a UK digital ID card and will vote against them in the House of Commons.
We will end the immigration crisis by quitting the European Convention on Human Rights, detaining and deporting illegal immigrants and stopping the boats, and scrapping Blair’s Human Rights Act.
Not by imposing more controls on the British people.
