Thirty years ago I would have fought against Keir Starmer's digital ID cards - now it is just a part of the world we live in
When I was younger, I bridled against the idea of ID cards.
It was talked about a lot in the 1980s and 1990s - Thatcher thought cards could eradicate football hooliganism, and later the plan was floated as a potential way to combat crime and the IRA.
(Incidentally, does anyone see a pattern here, as Keir Starmer pledges that digital ID will reduce illegal migration and tighten our borders? When you run out of ideas to counter the pressing problem of the age, reach for ID and promise it will provide the solutions.)
(Also incidentally, if the Tories pop up today and say that ID cards are “against Tory values”, rewind to 1994 when home secretary Michael Howard was heckled by the Tory conference when he said he preferred a voluntary, not compulsory card, and 1995 when John Major told Conservative central council the introduction of compulsory identity cards was his priority in fighting crime. There’s a tale about the dance between old definitions of right and left that our major political parties are engaged in, right there)
Anyway, civil liberties were very much at the forefront of our minds back then - but it really was a different era. For example, to see a friend you would call them on the phone, then agree to meet at a certain location (I have spent hours and hours in total under the clock at Waterloo station). The phone call would be made on a landline, and my ticket was a travelcard which I just had to flash at a train ticket inspector - if there was one. No mobile phone made my movements trackable and if I bought something to read or eat it would have been in cash. We weren’t tracked - and indeed the more gonzo end of the Thatcher and Major governments were administrations that you wouldn’t want tracking you.
But now my phone can be tracked, and I’ll use it in shops. Tickets are bought online and electronically scanned. And my driving licence is on a huge government database, as are my health records (I downloaded the NHS app for the first time the other day - the general one, not the Covid one - and was amazed to find you can see all prescriptions and test results from a decade ago and more). And yes, passports are also in the big vault of ID data.
And so, in this world, where even to start a shift at work I need at least four passwords to start a computer and then the software, and to use a phone to authenticate myself, can I honestly be that bothered about another card? Frankly, while nostalgia means that I look back fondly on the 1990s - and the time when Big Tech bros weren’t making ignorant interventions in our country’s governance - the march of the computer/digital age to me means that really this is nothing much to be bothered about.
Yes, there are concerns about those not online - the elderly, those who choose to pay in cash and eschew the digital world, those who may not be up to working a computer. There needs to be solid and sensible ways to ensure they are not penalised by not having digital ID. And yes, as with everything there are generalised concerns about the security of the data kept - but that is the case with everything.
But really, unless you live in a cave, walk everywhere and practise subsistence farming, can the introduction digital ID justify the more excitable end of Twitter declaring it will “not comply” and will go to prison if need be? We’ve walked into the digital age and have lost the ability not to be tracked. Pretending otherwise is foolish. You may not like this age, but it’s the one you live in.