Andrew Gilligan: The Conservatives needed to come out swinging against compulsory digital ID – they still can

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.

Have you noticed how large numbers of politicians and commentators suddenly start parroting the same phrase or idea, without any sign that they’ve actually thought about it?

From the left, wealth taxes are the obvious recent example. But from a much broader range of voices, the new fashionable magic answer is compulsory digital ID cards for anyone, British citizen or not, who wants to have a job. The thinktank run by Tony Blair, no stranger to wild exaggeration, claims that digital ID cards will restore faith in “a state that does not work.” The government says, more modestly, that making them mandatory for right-to-work checks will reduce illegal immigration.

But how, exactly?

That’s the bit that’s never been explained.

Because employers are, of course, already required by law to check that the people they hire are eligible to work here. If you’re British, you have to show your passport or birth certificate. If you’re foreign, you must show your passport with a permission-to-work stamp in it, or an immigration status document or registration card issued by the Home Office, or a share code, a form of digital ID for immigrants derived from the UK Visas and Immigration online ID checking service.

In other words, the necessary documents already exist, are already issued to all of us, and are already used to carry out the supposed job of a digital ID card. At least in the medium term, digital ID cards could not replace passports or immigration documents. Those would still need to be issued.

Digital ID would, therefore, complicate rather than simplify: it would be an extra, wholly unnecessary, document that you’d have to get in addition to the other ones.

Sure, black economy employers don’t check your paperwork – but they wouldn’t check a digital ID either.

You could perhaps try to turn every GP’s receptionist or council librarian into an ID cop, though I imagine they’d object strenuously – but illegal immigrants often don’t use those services anyway. The only sure way digital ID could tackle illegal immigration is if everyone was obliged to carry it with them at all times, checkpoints were set up in the streets and anyone found not in possession of their papers was detained for questioning.

Perhaps that is the likely, perhaps the intended, final destination on this slippery slope. It is hard to imagine going to the trouble and expense of setting up a digital ID system and not, over time, expanding the purposes for which it is used. But even then, of course, many illegal immigrants would have perfectly decent fake digital IDs. As with every other bureaucratic miracle cure, those affected and inconvenienced would mainly be the law-abiding majority.

So much for restoring faith in government.

And all this is before we’ve even got to the other issues: privacy, cost, the risks of hacking, the digitally excluded, the British government’s unrivalled record of failure in big IT projects. I am strongly against the expansion of state power on principle – but you don’t even have to be against this on principle to realise that it just cannot work in practice. We increasingly understand, too, that smartphones may be the new tobacco – heavily promoted by monied interests, genuinely harmful to our health, things we should probably all use less. Digital ID, however, will make it effectively compulsory to own and use a smartphone.

The politics?

Well, imagine the excitement among those maestros at Number Ten. Here’s an issue where we can out-tough Reform yet take the public with us. Look at those polls: voters love it! But polling hypotheticals is never reliable. True, as we saw during the pandemic, lots of people do want to be regimented by the state. But the polling numbers will change when people realise the practical downsides. And I can see it being really harmful for public confidence in politics. With millions already willing to entertain conspiracist fantasies about vaccines and 5G masts, what will happen when there is something which offers conspiracist views a genuine basis?

The Tories have been flat-footed on all this. Their opposition to the government’s announcement was lukewarm. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said last month that the party will need to consider “very carefully” the case for mandatory ID cards. Have that consideration very quickly please, Chris, and come out swinging against them.

It isn’t just the awfulness of the idea. It isn’t just that Labour seems absolutely addicted to bad ideas.

It’s that the most underrated ability in public life is the ability to think. Politicians have got to stop proposing things without thinking about them.