Sir Keir Starmer spent just 26 seconds announcing a mandatory, national ‘digital ID’ scheme one Thursday afternoon, in an almost throwaway remark. It is only now, some seven weeks later, that it is beginning to sink in at No10 what it has got itself into.
The UK scrapped war-time identity cards in 1952. It remains one of the few countries that eschews a ‘papers, please’ relationship with the state. In the 2000s, the 9/11 terror attacks gave Tony Blair’s government a justification to re-introduce state-issued identity cards, this time with biometric identifiers and a large centralised database. The ID cards would initially be required for new passport applicants and for registering with a GP, before becoming mandatory for all citizens in the near future. Introduced via legislation in 2004, ID cards became one of New Labour’s most contentious policies, dogging the final years of the government. They were scrapped in 2010 by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition. By then, they had already cost an estimated £5 billion, officially, or between £10 billion and £20 billion, unofficially.
Surely no one would want to do that all over again? Almost nobody did, until this year. The process that led to the revival of the ID card involved a series of self-deceptions.
The first self-deception involved Blair himself, and perhaps that was the easiest. Blair has never relinquished the idea that a smoothly functioning modern society requires a mandatory, unique digital identifier for every citizen. The proliferation of digital technology since he left office nearly two decades ago has only cemented his conviction. We now have smartphones with us all the time. We are always online wherever we go. We are used to apps and wallets containing virtual cards and credentials. What difference would one more make, particularly if we could be persuaded it would not be a tool of control, but of greater security and convenience?
With a turnover of $161million, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not short of resources. It has repeatedly used those to advocate for mandatory digital IDs. It took the lead in advocating for vaccine passports during the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, Blair’s chief government tech lobbyist, Kirsty Innes, teamed up with Morgan McSweeney’s Labour Together to make the case once again, producing a paper in June 2025.
Making this expensive and difficult thing sound cheap and easy to do was the second self-deception. Rather than spending years preparing the groundwork for reviving such a contentious proposal, Innes proposed a shortcut. Her idea was to adapt a system that’s already in use – namely, the One Login system, which gives us a single identity to sign in to UK government services, and Gov.Wallet, an app that runs on the One Login system. Gov.Wallet could simply be rebranded.
In its paper, Labour Together included some positive polling results, which are not hard to manufacture. Unlike producing plastic ID cards, rolling out digital ID would supposedly be smooth and painless. It called the new scheme ‘BritCard’, and insisted they were ‘progressive’ and ‘a new piece of civic infrastructure’ – a description that could equally be applied to the ‘national razors’ erected in Revolutionary France. Apparently, BritCard would be ‘an eye-catching, memorable brand’. Innes et al estimated the cost would be £140million to £400million.
‘Applying internet-era test-and-learn design practices to the development of the BritCard would help to avoid the pitfalls faced by some public-sector digital platforms’, the Labour Together team wrote. In fact ‘test and learn’ is a branding creation of Public First, the consultancy founded by former director of the Government Digital Service, Mike Bracken. It is little more than a clumsy rebranding of the Agile methodologies that have been in widespread use in software development for 15 years, which Bracken himself used to champion. Nevertheless, this appeared sufficiently novel and seductive enough to bamboozle Pat McFadden, until recently the Cabinet Office chief.
The third self-deception was more rapid than anyone expected. Used to pulling levers of government and seeing nothing happen, and desperate for any good news at all, No10 convinced itself that digital ID was a winner. It assumed that every claim made in the BritCard proposal must be accurate and achievable. Hence Starmer’s throwaway announcement, made without preparing parliament, Whitehall or the media for such a huge policy. Less than four months elapsed from Labour Together’s BritCard paper to its adoption verbatim by the UK government, with Starmer promising to implement digital ID in the two areas that Innes’s team had recommended: the right to work and right to rent.
Clearly, the government did not inspect Labour Together’s package adequately. For a start, it has awoken a sleeping giant. Mandatory state identity did not become more popular as it receded into history, much as an old sitcom might. A petition opposing digital ID rapidly acquired almost three million signatures. The No2ID campaign, originally launched in 2004, has been reactivated.
Most remarkably of all, neither Labour Together nor No10 took seriously the widespread concerns about the One Login project. In short, it has been chronically mismanaged. As a senior civil servant told me this year, outside contractors have been given enormous, wide-ranging access to citizens’ private information. Many have been given ‘do anything’ system-administrator privileges, which have been used thousands of times a month. The civil servant also discovered that part of the system was being developed in Romania, a nation named by Oxford University researchers as one of the world’s ‘key cyber-crime hotspots’.
In March, friendly security professionals conducted a security stress test on One Login. They confirmed that hostile hackers could take full control of the system without being detected. Questions about it have been asked throughout the summer. Conservative MP David Davis has called for the National Audit Office to investigate. Millions of us are now at a much greater risk of identity theft. One Login, which Baroness Neville-Jones describes as a piece of critical national infrastructure, does not appear to be secure.
It’s a remarkable indictment of this government that it did not interrogate the BritCard proposition independently. It never asked whether it would be as cheap, quick and ‘deliverable’ as Labour Together suggested. It never wondered whether those proposals might sound too good to be true.
Digital identity offers an insight into how many strange decisions, from the transfer of the Chagos Islands to mass prisoner release, get made. There’s no curiosity in government at all, just a whirl of announcements and retreats.
