‘Victory For Individual Liberty’: Labour Govt Admits Defeat on Blair-Style Mandatory ID
by Oliver JJ Lane
Britain’s left-wing government has performed yet another about-face, this time on scrapping a mandate for all people wanting to live and work in the UK to have a digital ID, but Nigel Farage made clear there is still more work to be done.
National digital identity ‘Brit Card’ documents being introduced by Westminster will no longer be mandatory, the British government has said. The news was met with celebration as an important victory by pro-liberty campaigners, with the U-turn having come after months of pressure and even a public petition garnering nearly three million signatures, an impressive achievement for British politics.
Reform UK leader and Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage noted “This is a victory for individual liberty against a ghastly, authoritarian government”, but importantly recognised the battle on the Blairite digital identity has far to go. Noting the digital ID cards weren’t going away yet, he added, “Reform UK would scrap it altogether.”
Indeed, Downing Street explained away their ditching the compulsory element as removing a distraction from the wider work of the identity card scheme, and said they were still pressing ahead with rolling them out. That the digital identity system is to be created, and in order to get a job or rent a property in future, a check against that system will still have to be made — even if it’s done with alternative forms of ID — Britain’s Labour government is still creating a papers-please system where refuseniks are to be burdened with inconvenience.
The Times says a government spokesman told them of the change: “Stepping back from mandatory-use cases will deflate one of the main points of contention. We do not want to risk there being cases of some 65-year-old in a rural area being barred from working because he hasn’t installed the ID.”