Keir Starmer has been brutally mocked for his dystopian plans to force everyone to carry a digital ID card after a pub changed its name to George Orwell and beamed the PM’s face onto its walls. Orwell’s iconic 1984 novel envisaged a totalitarian Britain where people’s behaviours were controlled by the iron fist of the state. The author took real-life elements from the Stalinist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany to create a fictional UK overseen by a leader known as Big Brother, who ran the country using Thought Police and surveillance from the sinister Ministry of Truth.
Sir Keir said the introduction of ID cards could help tackle the small boat migration crisis in the Channel, but a petition against them being introduced has received more than 2.4 million signatures, with many people believing the scheme is a threat to civil liberties. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called the proposed measure “an anti-British card”, and the Conservatives described it as a “gimmick” that would not help cut illegal immigration.
Entrepreneur Daniel Davies, from New Brighton, in the Wirral, Merseyside, has now stated his own protest transforming his pub, The James Atherton into the George Orwell.
Mr Davies said he was taking a stand against the proposed introduction of mandatory ID cards. He told Express.co.uk: “This is about waking people up. We don’t want a future where every part of our lives is monitored and controlled. That’s not freedom, that’s Orwell.
“We decided to change the pub to the George Orwell, the restaurant across the road from the pub to the Ministry of Truth and another corner location we’ve got to the Ministry of Love.
“We projected a number of Orwell-style things onto the walls, it’s a trigger of conversation, it’s to get people talking, and open a bit of debate up rather than just partisan both parties screaming at each other.”
Mr Davies said he had always tried to offer a bit of satire around politics and he previously renamed The James Atherton as The Three B*llends, as a response to the Boris Johnson Government’s covid lock down policies. The rebranded pub’s sign featured Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings.
He added: “You can have a bit of a laugh, but also you can get people looking at things a bit more and actually having a conversation.
“We have people who come in with opinions from all different sides, we’ll host different debates and we always welcome it. Often people say don’t talk about religion or politics in pubs, but actually public houses go back hundreds and hundreds of years and often that was a place for discussion for debate and long may it continue.”
Mr Davies has transformed the area around the pub into a creative hotspot, with street art an integral part of its charm.
The New Brighton activity and the Liverpool protests are backed by the Together Association, the grass roots campaign group that famously delivered 360,000 signatures to Downing Street in 2021, successfully stopping the rollout of vaccine passports.
Alan Miller, co-founder of Together, said: “We shall not let the Prime Minister weaponize his political problems to impose a Biometric State Surveillance System on us all. That is not the British way. We call on all the public to make their voices heard. We say No to Digital ID.”
