BY SEAN WALSH
To steal and misapply a line from Woody Allen in Annie Hall it’s looking like Keir Starmer’s notion of compulsory digital ID won’t even make it to the concept stage, let alone become a workable idea.
Colour us unsurprised. Starmer’s saving grace, his accidental virtue, is a preternatural incompetence attached to an unmatchable personal detestability. He delivers policy in the same way Laurel and Hardy delivered pianos, and if you can look on with some detachment, with about the same number of laughs. This is no bad thing when the policy is evil or the piano untunable.
It’ll be back though, if the malevolent actors of permanent (inter)government get their way. If you listen to the influencers sent on mission by the shadowy people behind the Tony Blair Foundation, digital ID solves everything. Not just immigration, the proximate justification this week. Everything.
Worried about stubbing your toe or the possibility you might tread on a Lego brick? Windscreen wipers susceptible to malfunction? Does your neighbour play his Coldplay too loud, or even at all? That person in front of you in a checkout who only seems to realise right at the end that the stuff needs to be paid for?
These are just a few of the potential and familiar crises which can be avoided if you agree to the State’s plan to disapply your human essence and merge what remains – your data cloud -with the 21st Century Ouija Board aka your smartphone.
I’m not that interested in Whitehall/Fleet Street anthropology on this because it’s just the shadows on the cave walls. The real story is the “powers and principalities” behind the whole thing. Digital ID is transhumanism flogged on the promise of (meretricious) convenience. I say so here.
But I’m due a break from warning that we are in a spiritual war and that the politics is the distraction, so what the heck?
It should not need saying that the point of digital ID is not to prevent illegal immigrants getting jobs. In fact, if its implementation had the effect of driving more people into the alternative economy, I might be in favour of it, since the impossibility of regulating and taxing that part of the economy makes it quite attractive to me. I happen to like going to a Turkish barber shop, shooting the breeze, and paying for a buzzcut in cash, so that the tragically bobbed Rachel Reeves doesn’t get her cut, so to speak. If this makes me a bad citizen, then at least I am a citizen.
The underground economy will survive just fine, partly because Starmer’s not in charge of it. Who would be affected? As usual, the people who don’t need to be. If you were to force me to come up with a Mafia analogy, I might say the following. The implementation of compulsory ID for the general population would be like vigorously applying the anti-racketeer RICO statutes everywhere apart from New York City and Chicago.
The commentariat, the mutual aid society which jointly writes the narrative du jour and then congratulates itself for agreeing with itself, suggests that the initiative is cynical and a distraction (as I would say a distraction within the distraction – see above).
The argument is that bad things are yet to come out about the money behind Starmer’s Manchurian election as Labour leader. So better to give the plebs something else to gab about.
This sounds to me like the strategy of the bad husband who murders his wife to cover up the smothering of his mistress. Not fantastically optimal. Rubbish in fact. So much so that the commentators might be right on the money.
Anyway, let’s not kid ourselves by pretending that any of this originates or ends in the Starmer government since it’s now clear that there is no “Starmer government”. What there is, in its place, is a shell company with Starmer its Chairman and McSweeney its CEO. Government by “long firm” bankruptcy con, if you like.
Or perhaps we have what George Smiley calls a “network” of sleeper agents. One which has proved so rubbish at the finer practices of “tradecraft” that Karla’s thinking he might have to “roll it up”, minimise the damage, and start again.
It’s possible I’m getting ahead of myself here, but the “network” thing might have some flex. Digital ID systems (again, not “cards”) are a gift to the spooks and those other deep state lifers untroubled by what’s in your best interest. That’s strike one.
And, like out-of-control judicial activism, the scattering of political accountability across Whitehall, the (oxy)moronic Human Rights Act, casual war, and possibly even the existence of Coldplay itself it goes back to Tony Blair.
That’s strikes two, three, four etc.