Digital ID: Is it the Hill?
The Plan is “Announced”
There has been wall to wall coverage on the serious matter of digital ID over the last few weeks. It was about three weeks ago, that Kier Starmer announced the Government’s intention to roll out a digital ID in the form of the Britcard. This to be free to all UK citizens, but a mandatory requirement if you want to work in the UK. There is so much opposition to this course of action: a petition against it with around 3 million signatories (to which the Government has responded that they are going to do it anyway), politicians on the left and the right denouncing the plan, and even Boris Johnson has said a big “No”. Most people recognize that this plan would move us into a permissions based society, needing ‘papers’ in order to participate. Kier Starmer has now suggested that it may be necessary to have the card in order to access our own bank accounts! (And to buy a pint). At the same time, the government is rolling out facial recognition cameras around the country, and this, together with mandatory biometric ID seems to lead to only one place - a surveillance state and the implementation of a social credit system. In such a system, if you don’t behave as the state requires, for example, you refuse to get the latest vaccine, then it could mean you are automatically shut out of buying food, accessing medical care, using the internet, and so on.
Red-Herring
Commentators rightly point out that, in order to implement such a surveillance state with social credit scoring, we do not need a card. So, it seems that the Britcard is something of a red herring - something for the people to protest against while the building out of the digital prison carries on around them, regardless. Because digital ID is already here. You will not need to be sent a card, or download an app in order to have one. You have various digital IDs for different things, and the plan is to centralize where all this data is held. In the UK, it seems that the vehicle for this is the Gov.UK One Login. Many people have already signed up for One Login, probably not realizing the dangers of this, and the Government tells us that we will need a One Login account to access any government agencies from 2027. So many people have biometric driving licences, passports and bank cards, that we are already well on the way to the surveillance state. Most of this ‘on-boarding’ is voluntary on our part, for our convenience. The plan is clear, that the information will be centralized (through mechanisms such as One Login), and, at that point, the digital trap will be shut behind us and there is no way back. This is a very real concern, but we are already in the digital ID mesh network, and probably started on this path decades ago.