The case against digital ID cards: imagine how a Reform government could use them | Gaby Hinsliff

The civil liberties argument against giving the state more power over our lives becomes more urgent by the day – just look to Trump’s America

It was billed as Keir Starmer’s big chance. Finally, the prime minister would spell out the progressive, patriotic answer to a summer of far-right hate, culminating in Elon Musk’s bloodcurdling declaration that “violence is coming” to the streets of Britain. Yet for all its talk of renewal and confronting the politics of grievance, Friday’s speech – a warmup for what will be a longer argument at Labour’s forthcoming party conference – still sounded oddly like a surrender to Reform’s theory of where it all supposedly went wrong.

Both New Labour and their Tory successors were too relaxed about legal immigration, Starmer suggested, and the left in particular has shied away from the argument about controlling Britain’s borders. To stop those with no right to be in the country from supposedly undercutting wages by working in the black market, everyone must now carry digital ID on their smartphones and show it when starting a job. Think Theresa May’s hostile environment, only this time in your pocket.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist