Starmer won’t stop illegal migration. But he could leave us with a China-style social credit system
27 September 2025 5:12pm BST
Daily Telegraph
After barely a year, Sir Keir Starmer has reached the stage that signifies the final stuttering demise of every drained, divided and directionless government. Rocked by scandal, unable to constrain the rise in debt and desperate to change the subject, he has hit on that perennial answer-in-search-of-a-problem, mandatory identity cards.
ID cards are always sold as the answer to whatever is bothering voters at that moment. It might be benefits fraud, or it might be online theft. Now it happens to be illegal immigration. In reality, of course, the solution to illegal immigration is to stop people entering the country improperly rather than to tighten controls on the entire population. ID cards have done nothing to solve the problem on the Continent.
The arguments in favour of the plan have swithered around a bit over the past 30 years, but they can’t be said to have advanced. Tony Blair is making essentially the same case that he was making when he left office in 2007.
The arguments against, however, have become vastly more potent as technology has put previously unimaginable powers in the hands of state officials. This is no longer an abstract danger. We can see how those powers are abused overseas.
Back in the 1990s, when ID cards were mooted by Michael Howard and then David Blunkett, I opposed them on largely theoretical grounds. We were a free country, I argued. If, as a freeborn Brit, I was peacefully going about my business, breaking no laws and making no claim on the largesse of the government, then no agent of the state had the right to demand my identity.
Reversing that presumption, I averred, would fundamentally alter the relationship between government and citizen. It would chip away at the presumption that anything not expressly prohibited is legal, and move us towards a Bonapartist model, where the authorities license certain activities.
It was, as I say, a largely abstract argument; and, as I recall, it was not popular. “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear,” readers of this newspaper would respond whenever I advanced it.
Since then, though, things have moved on at a vertiginous rate. We have seen both extraordinary abuses of police power, with people being harassed and detained for posting opinions online, and a dizzying advance in technology that has transformed what ID cards can do.
Ponder what has happened in China, which has steadily made its cards more powerful, beginning with laminated cards in the 1980s and becoming fully digital this year.
At every stage, the changes were presented as measures against identity theft and money-laundering. China Daily, the English-language newspaper published by the Central Propaganda Department, reassured its readers in 2013 that the biometric data embedded in the cards would “reduce potential crimes involving identification fraud”.
In fact, the cards were becoming essential for an increasing number of everyday activities. You now need them to catch a train, apply for a job, buy a SIM card, open a bank account or rent a flat.
This puts vast powers of surveillance and control into the hands of state officials. ID cards, combined with advanced geolocation and face recognition technology, have come to underpin what the Chinese call the Social Credit System (shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì).
If citizens behave in ways of which the Communist Party disapproves, officials can now restrict their access to housing or healthcare, prevent them from travelling, ban their children from popular schools, even lift money directly from their bank accounts.
At first, behaving badly simply meant being in arrears with money owed: social credit was nothing more than a credit check. Then it began to expand so that minor offences, such as speeding, were taken into account. Now, the definition has been widened to include any behaviour that the regime dislikes, including voicing the wrong opinions.
Ah, say supporters of Labour’s plan, but that’s China. Such things couldn’t happen in an open democracy. We’re not that kind of country.
Until very recently, I’d have believed them. But the lockdowns knocked any such complacency out of me.
Have we forgotten the way we were subjected to house arrest on the basis of speculative and, as it later turned out, inaccurate models? Have we forgotten how the Chinese virus led to Chinese-style repression? The way in which, without legal process, we were prevented from travelling abroad or enjoying our own property? The way vaccine passports made a notionally voluntary vaccination programme a practical necessity for most of us – including, by then, the many people who had recovered from the virus, and for whom the vaccine made no difference, either as protection or as a way of reducing transmission?
Yes, obviously the pandemic was an abnormal situation. The point is that the British state has shown itself quite capable of seizing authoritarian powers on the flimsiest legal basis. The idea that it will confine itself to using those powers against fraudsters, criminals or illegal immigrants requires us to avert our eyes from what happened in 2020 – and, indeed, from what has happened since.
For the chilling truth is that the lockdown gave state agencies, above all the police, a taste for control. It is no coincidence that all those videos we have watched of coppers forcing their way into people’s homes because of something they have said online, or arresting people for calling other people names, have come largely since 2020. The British bobby is ceasing to be a citizen in uniform and becoming an agent of state ideology.
Let me make one narrow concession to supporters of ID cards. If someone wants to make a claim on the state – asking for benefits payments, say – then it seems to me legitimate for the state to impose conditions in return, including asking for proof of citizenship or residence in this country. That, though, is not what Starmer is proposing. He talks of a card being necessary to find work – in other words, being required to allow a contract between two private parties. That idea is fundamentally illiberal and un-British.
“If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear,” supporters of the scheme continue to chorus. Ah, if only that were true. In fact, every day we read stories of law-abiding citizens whose lives have been turned upside down by the bungling of some state agency. I used to take up such cases when I was an MEP and, as often as not, the first instinct of the bureaucracy that had made the error was to double down, deny everything and accuse the victim.
In China, ID cards have been combined with face recognition technology and geolocation to create a terrifying panopticon state. In the name of combatting fraud, the Chinese regime has abolished privacy altogether, building a state that is not so much Orwellian as Huxleian, where it is difficult even to think anti-social thoughts. True, Britain is not China. But our readiness even to countenance placing such powers in the hands of our rulers would have horrified our ancestors.
The only ray of sunshine in all this is that Sir Keir is now so unpopular that his advocacy is enough to kill any cause. Opinion polls suggest that the public is currently fairly evenly split, albeit with younger people much more strongly against mandatory identity cards. But, as the debate gets underway, opinion will harden against the proposal. At the time of writing, nearly 2 million people have signed a petition asking the government to drop the idea.
It seems a safe bet that, when Starmer is toppled, his successor will abandon ID cards. Though, frankly, with the state the country is in, that will, by then, be the least of our worries.
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