The British government’s new Big Brother simulator, cunningly disguised as a digital ID scheme, has been roundly panned by parties across the North of Ireland. In a rare display of unity, politicians from across the ideological spectrum variously condemned the plans as “excessive and ill-conceived”, an “authoritarian disaster” and a “terrible idea”.
Gerry Carroll of People Before Profit (PBP) said:
This move is clearly motivated by a desire to appear tough on immigration, while distracting from Labour’s internal collapse and Starmer’s precarious position as leader.
Jim Allister of the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) expressed:
serious concerns about centralised control of personal data and its misuse.
Meanwhile, Alliance MP Sorcha Eastwood simply said:
It’s daft. People are frightened. I believe Tony Blair is at the heart of this.
Foul hand of the Tony Blair Institute detected
The latter point may be the strongest argument yet against the misguided scheme, which Keir Starmer has argued “will make it tougher to work illegally here.” Despot lover and world-class war criminal Blair has recently taken in £257 million for his noxious foundation from human data hoover Larry Ellison. The knock-off Marvel villain, who briefly became the richest person in the world, has expressed a desire to complete one of the final pieces of Britain’s total privatisation by buying the National Health Service (NHS) dataset.
If you’re concerned by dead-eyed Silicon Valley plutocrats peering into your stool samples, the additional treasure trove of personal info from the so-called ‘Brit Card’ that will likely be sold off to them in future should certainly set alarms bells ringing. Internet wits have already begun mining Blair’s role for memes. The disgraced former Labour leader has previously tried the authoritarian gambit, under similar confected panics around “illegal” workers and benefit fraud.
Downing Street has attempted to tout the benefits of the scheme, such as apparently:
making it easier for the vast majority of people to use vital government services.
Starmer’s chief secretary Darren Jones said:
If we get this digital ID system working and the public being with us, that will be the bedrock of the modern state and will allow for really quite exciting public service reform in the future.
Critics may wonder why the traditional approach to improvement of public services isn’t the first port of call – i.e. actually spending some money on them.
The planned scheme is intended for use on a smartphone, though the government insists it is committed to ensuring those without the use of one will have the chance to suffer equally under the new dystopian paradigm. The official press release promises a:
public consultation will engage with groups who aren’t as experienced with the digital world, like the homeless and older people, learning from other countries that have done this well.
Other countries do indeed have a similar ID system, such as the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan and China. Some of them aren’t even dictatorships, with fellow partial-democracies like France and South Korea also using digital recognition.
Mooted convenience, but at what cost?
Starmer’s promise of:
being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly – rather than hunting around for an old utility bill
does sound appealing, but whether it’s worth further entrenching the power and information imbalance between the corporate-state nexus and the individual is a question that hasn’t been convincingly answered by the PR thus far. Doesn’t really seem worth eliminating rifling around in a drawer for an old utility bill.
The case of the Six Counties is a further complication to an already ill-conceived scheme, as Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) MP Claire Hanna pointed out:
Northern Ireland has complexities of identity, movement and governance. A one-size-fits-all digital ID imposed from Westminster risks ignoring those realities and undermining the progress we have made.
The truth is that a Brit Card won’t fix the actual problems we face. Here in Northern Ireland, where people cross the border every day for work, family and study, imposing this scheme could be especially problematic.
She argued that the region should be exempt from the ID’s rollout. While the scheme’s backers are insistent it won’t bring about a ‘papers, please’ society – the card will apparently only be demanded in a work context – nationalists and republicans accustomed to British state repression will find the thought of carrying a Brit Card about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. Allied to unionist scepticism over privacy rights, the surveillance scheme masquerading as digital convenience is likely to be dead in the water of the Irish sea.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.