It's Another Winner

Team Starmer's plan, if plan is the word I want, to call back the halcyon days of Blairism by re-adopting his reverence's most popular policy after the Iraq adventure appears to have come a bit of a cropper. Of course, Team Starmer's proposed digital ID cards are more sophisticated than the sainted Tony's, and therefore still more difficult for the plebs to comprehend in their full patriotic glory. Besides opening a rollicking new chapter in the saga of His Majesty's Government's relationship with the Babbage computifying engines, they would enable the deportation of anyone who didn't have a fancy phone, and would wipe out illegal employment as long as all the employers who don't bother with the current checks decided they'd quite like to bother with the new one. Thanks to such relatively simple advantages, the arrangement was apparently jolly popular with the great British public until Team Starmer decided to give it a try, because even the great British public has its limits; and leaving aside the transparent use of authoritarian gimmickry as a look-over-there on behalf of Morgan McSweeney rather than as an end in itself, there can be few more off-putting prospects than being turned into a corporate data farm under the legitimate and understandable pretext of setting up a racist surveillance state.