Keir Starmer’s digital ID system will immediately become a target for foreign powers, ex-MI6 chief Richard Dearlove has warned. The authoritarian proposal, which has proved deeply unpopular so far, would soon be left behind by technology anyway.
Dearlove told shithouse merchants GB News:
When you aggregate data into one massive base, of course it immediately becomes a target for the country’s enemies. You therefore must be sure that the citadel is impregnable. However, secure you believe the system to be, quantum computing when it arrives could render redundant your defenses.
Dearlove led the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better know as MI6, from 1999 to 2004. A YouGov poll from September found only 14% of adults strongly support digital ID and 30% strongly oppose it.
Digital ID carries the hand of Blair
Manufacturing consent for the so-called ‘Brit card’ has fallen partly to the Tony Blair Institute (TBI). TBI knows a thing or two about authoritarianism: it snuggles up to dictators on the regular. And digital ID’s, for those old enough to recall two months ago, were a quintessentially Blairite idea.
Asked if Starmer should abandon the idea, Dearlove said:
Better not to create the target and the temptation in my view.
A petition opposing the ID scheme quickly gained two million signatures in September 2025. And in another weird moment of Anglo-brain, Louis Mosley, head of Palantir UK and descendant of British fascist Oswald Mosley, was forced to deny his firm would be involved.
As the Canary reported In October, Mosley told the press that Palantir that given digital IDs were not on the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 2024 general election the company therefore hasn’t seen “a clear resounding public support at the ballot box.” In other words, Mosley rebuffed Labour’s plan as unwanted and undemocratic. It’s coming to something when your government is told to roll back the fascism a little via Oswald fucking Mosley’s descendent on behalf of cartoon villains, Palantir.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson told GB News:
We’ve all been shopping and banking online for years. Its time public services are caught up. We are currently developing proposals, exploring how we can learn from other countries with successful schemes that make using government services much easier.
We will be consulting on the proposals in the new year, including by working with people with a range of know-how – from banks and the UK’s leading security experts to privacy groups and the wider public.
Dearlove ran MI6 at the start of the War on Terror – another of Blair’s greatest hits. It was a moment of increasing authoritarianism and Dearlove was centre stage. It follows that this is not a man who is squeamish about securitising national life or curtailing civil liberties.. The fact that even he is opposed to this hair-brained ID scheme, then, is deeply fucking worrying.
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on Canary.