The beaches of Dover are awash with abandoned plastic left by the dinghy migrants, but Stephen Kinnock has proposed adding some more – the Shadow Minister for Immigration has floated the idea of introducing ID cards.
Surely, Kinnock mused, we could introduce a basic national card, while protecting civil liberties? He was quickly slapped down by Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary.
Cooper evidently remembers how Labour’s National Identity Card scheme dogged five successive Home Secretaries, before it was finally extinguished by the Cameron coalition. Labour wants us to believe that it now takes border control very seriously, and creating a new card looks like a diversionary tactic, which of course it is. But don’t let the card part of the ID card proposition distract you.
What such schemes really reflect is a utopian bureaucratic desire to impose order onto chaos, from the top-down. Wonks fantasise that a digital ID and its accompanying profile would transform dysfunctional administration into a smooth running, futuristic digital state.
“There’s always been a transnational push to see if we can uniquely identify people – and that’s also what sections of Government, for their own reasons, want to do,” explains Phil Booth, who founded the No2ID campaign which galvanised opposition to Labour’s ID system.
The digital ID dream today is kept alive by bright young things at supranational agencies, where the justifications vary widely. For example, the World Bank’s ID4D Initiative is now marketed as a prerequisite for development. “At least a billion people in developing countries lack any form of officially recognised ID,” the Bank laments.
With over 14,000 easily preventable deaths of children under five taking place every day, you may think these countries have rather more pressing concerns than a digital ID. And in reality, introducing high-tech digital tools can be disastrous, as Kenya’s 2013 election demonstrated. Biometric kits didn’t recognise voters, laptop batteries ran out, and servers crashed and couldn’t count the votes.
Another relentless booster is the World Economic Forum, where Kinnock once led the technology policy group. The WEF advances digital IDs as both an online prophylactic and a safety net. “Fewer people than ever believe they can safely and securely navigate online,” it claims, in one blurb. “This can lead to… withholding personal information, giving false biographical details or removing information from mailing lists altogether.” How awful.
The WEF believes that throwing sand into the machinery of Big Tech is a bad thing – I see it as more of a public duty. The Tony Blair Institute has also been relentless in promoting digital identities, and naturally the EU, with its European Digital Identity Wallet, doesn’t want to be left behind.
With coronavirus restrictions, these organisations spied a huge opportunity – perhaps now, their moment had come. But something very interesting happened instead. We learned that a top-down identity system wasn’t actually needed at all. We saw how well ad hoc measures, such as the NHS app, served their purpose.
Booth, now at MedConfidential, agrees. We don’t need a one system to rule them all, he points out, merely a very limited and carefully supervised exchange of what techies call “attributes” between existing systems.
For example, by analogy, the doorman at a nightclub merely needs to know how old you are, but not your name. Modern cryptography of the kind used in Apple’s AirTags, and indeed our contact tracing apps, enables this. Two parties can exchange a token without knowing anything about each other – or anything about what’s on the token, either. As each day passes, the central digital ID becomes even more of a white elephant.
Much of Whitehall privately recognises this too, and is heroically ignoring digital ID systems imposed on them from above. There are really three working IDs or logins that matter in the UK: those used by HM Revenue & Customs, the NHS, and the Department of Work and Pensions, and each works well.
After the Government Digital Service’s Verify system flopped, they’re even more wary of using its anointed successor, the £400m One Login for Government scheme. That wariness is reflected in the timescales.
“Services will have begun onboarding by 2025,” the Government predicts. No rush, then. Throw in the recent leaps in smartphones, which biometrically authenticate you, and cryptography, and it’s hard not to conclude that the time for digital identities has come and gone.
Of course, digital IDs remain a fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. Fears of a global citizen ID go back a long way – possibly back to the Book of Revelations 13. They see WEF and the EU and conclude a social credit system is coming. But the reality is far more pathetic than it is sinister.
A better explanation for the wonks’ digital ID mania lies in my favourite fictional civil servant, Mr Dundridge, a star of Tom Sharpe’s Blott on the Landscape. A prodigious creator of hair-brained schemes, Dundridge, lived by “science, logic and numeration”.
Sharpe tells us: “His schemes sounded good, and year by year Dundridge had been promoted, carried upwards by an ineluctable wave of inefficiency… until he had reached the rarefied zone of administration where, thanks to the inertia of his subordinates, his projects could never be implemented.”
What a perfect description of digital IDs. The technocrats have been wasting their time.
This column first appeared in The Daily Telegraph.
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