Why I will rebel against Keir Starmer’s digital ID card – and so should you

As Keir Starmer reportedly plans to announce a mandatory digital ID card in the coming days, we all have a right – and perhaps a duty – to follow Harry Willcock, stand up and say that we are against this sort of thing.

It would be hard in one newspaper column to outline the entire practical and principled case against bringing mandatory ID cards to the UK, from the enormous cost to the dangers inherent within centralised databases, and more besides.

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Lives free of state interference

Whichever way we vote politically, however, there is a deep-seated liberalism in this country. We are not a “papers, please” society. We have a long-standing principle that people have a basic right to live their lives free of interference, as long as we are not doing harm to anyone else.

That basic right would be turned on its head by mandatory ID cards. Participating in our society and our public services would become not a right but a privilege, bestowed on us by the state – just so long as we do as we are told.

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This is something that should immediately make liberally minded people suspicious. That is not because we think the government is all bad, but because we believe that the government gets its licence from us as citizens – rather than the other way around.

To concede that our freedoms are a privilege given by the government, rather than ours by default, would be to rewrite entirely the relationship between the citizen and the state. In a world in which constitutional frameworks and civil liberties are under attack from all sides, that strikes me as an inherently risky proposition.

An authoritarian power

I do not believe that Keir Starmer is planning to institute a personal dictatorship but he may be out of Downing Street before too long. Nigel Farage is already talking this week about revoking the settled rights of people who have lived here legally for years and in some cases decades. Imagine a Farage-led Reform government with the ability to examine and control the movement, the identities and the rights of citizens and legal residents of our country.

To allow a far-right government such authoritarian powers would be incredibly dangerous – but in truth, to allow any government in this country such powers is bad enough already. Whether it is the Windrush scandal of recent years or the Afghan data leak of the past few months, the risks in trusting our government too far with our identities ought to be clear as day.

So if Keir Starmer or any other authority tries to force me to produce my papers – digital or otherwise – to prove I have the right to walk in the street, I, for one, shall refuse.

I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland