Keir Starmer’s BritCard - The Tyranny Of Digital ID

The Brits are at it again. This time it’s New Labour leader Keir Starmer proposing to introduce a Digital ID that all employees must have to work. The British government’s website says: “The new digital ID scheme will make it easier for people across the UK to use vital government services.”

Germany, France, Greece, Spain and Italy already require citizens to hold them, and last weekend, Switzerland approved a plan to introduce electronic ID cards. The Swiss system is starting on a voluntary basis.

But the truth is that without this Digital ID users won’t be able to access tax records, childcare and social welfare benefits. All your information will be in one place including bills paid, your passport, driving licence, everything.

The information on the card could be used to track everything you do from purchases to union subscriptions. This would represent a huge attack on the right to organise and protest freely. There would be consequences for workers if employers could access such information. Your new employer scans your card, a message flashes on the screen “right to work denied!”

Militant workers would be blacklisted as would opponents of the state’s policies. They could just shut you out of everything you need to live under modern capitalism. There’s no doubt that MI5 would be snooping around in all that personal information.

And considering Margaret Thatcher once called New Labour her greatest victory, because they were wed to her policies of outsourcing and privatisation, all that information could be outsourced to private companies. You can’t trust those companies not to sell it on for a profit.

Starmer is claiming the whole thing is directed against immigrants but denying migrants the right to work or the right to rent a home will just lead to people starving on the streets and once these measures are introduced they can be turned on everyone else.

Migrant workers would just work off the books in dangerous situations with no legal protections, Starmer will just create a black market in human labour where parasite bosses pay people little or nothing and hold the threat of ratting them out over the workers’ heads.

The same goes for landlords who, when they know they can stuff a load of poor people into a room and make a killing, will just do that anyway off the books.

The British government is talking about extending it to even cover children in school who would be identified by a digital marker and tracked to provide them with a tailor made education, but this will lead to children being stratified and directed to certain career paths. It will enforce social class segregation.

Imagine a child’s academic history being reviewed by an A.I. system which then maps out their future path. One destined to be a worker drone, another destined for middle management. And the system would be weighted against kids from deprived schools, where the average grades are lower.

They’re also talking about integrating health data with the Digital ID system. Information that greedy big pharma companies will be drooling over.

There’s also a thing called “function creep” where a government starts by saying they’ll only do certain things but then adds more and more as time goes on. Imagine where all that info could end up?

In Egypt anti-government activists have had their ID removed. In India the government used ID’s to illegally profile 78 million people. Two states in India removed over 5.5 million people from the electoral register, manufacturing election outcomes.

The whole thing is a goldmine for hackers too who could, with a few keystrokes, steal every aspect of your life and identity. Just look at the post masters scandal where computer errors destroyed hundreds of lives and imagine if similar systems had every piece of information about you all in one place.

Tony Blair tried to introduce a similar scheme in the 2000s when Labour was busy helping George W. Bush to blow up Iraq. ID cards are usually pushed in times of war. That’s the secret to understanding the current push for Digital ID. In the First World War ID cards were issued to support conscription.

In 1952, with the two World Wars out of the way, the British state scrapped ID cards. Until Thatcher’s bastard child, Tony Blair. There was too much opposition at the time so Blair backed down. But the British establishment has wanted to get this through.

We live in a world controlled by giant multinational corporations, they suck our labour, they buy up all the homes, they steal resources from impoverished countries and call for their home state to militarily intervene to protect their economic interests. It’s called imperialism.

The drive to war is ramping up everywhere, the Germans are spending hundreds of billions on arms and are proposing to re-introduce conscription. The EU and NATO want the Irish government to scrap our neutrality and sell us off as cannon fodder for French and German bankers.

The drive to regulate and control populations is part and parcel of the drive to war. We have to oppose both. Any talk of introducing a Digital ID scheme to Ireland should be met by massive militant working class protests. We in the Red Network will be first on the streets.

But the threat won’t go away until we overthrow a system based on corporate greed, imperialism and control and put the working class in the driving seat. That’s going to take a working class revolution.