Voluntary ID Is Useless

The current Labour government’s approach to Digital ID (DID) is a textbook study in the expensive art of the half-measure. We are watching a slow-motion collision between a desperate need for state modernization and a cabinet paralyzed by the ghost of the 2006 ID card failure. The result is a proposed voluntary system that manages to be both fiscally irresponsible and functionally illiterate.

The fundamental truth that the privacy grifters and the technocrats in Whitehall seem unable to grasp is that a voluntary ID program is an oxymoron. If an identification system is designed to secure a border, streamline a welfare state, or eliminate the "pull factors" for illegal migration, it must be universal. By making the "BritCard" or "UK Wallet" optional, Starmer is essentially building a high-tech biometric motorway and then telling the most dangerous drivers they are welcome to keep using the unmonitored backroads.

We are told that this compromise is necessary to placate the loud, ill-informed voices of organisations like Big Brother Watch. These groups are routinely quoted as credible sources despite showing a total lack of understanding regarding modern biometric security. They lean on a romanticized, 20th-century notion of personal freedom that simply does not compute in a world of mass migration and sophisticated identity fraud. Their primary argument—that a central biometric database is a "honeypot" for hackers—ignores the basic reality of biometric hashing. A one-way mathematical code generated from a face scan is not a photo. It cannot be reversed. You cannot make a pig from a sausage. Stealing a database of these hashes is as useless as stealing a list of salted passwords. Yet, no one in the current administration seems capable of defending this point in public.

The cost of this cowardice is staggering. We are currently pouring hundreds of millions into a digital infrastructure that will only be used by the already compliant. The law-abiding citizen will dutifully download the app to access the NHS, while the bad actors, the undocumented, and the unscrupulous employers will simply ignore it. The "informal economy" will continue to thrive in the shadow of this voluntary system, and the UK will remain the softest touch in Europe for anyone wishing to disappear into the grid.

If the government is not prepared to make a digital ID both mandatory and biometric, they should stop spending our money on it immediately. A halfway house is worse than no house at all; it is a billion-pound monument to political indecision. We are at a point where the only sensible strategy is to reject any proposal that isn't absolute. Either we implement a robust, mandatory system that actually works, or we accept that we have surrendered our borders and our public services to a cult of "invisible" citizenship.

Anything in between is just a very expensive way of doing nothing. The public may not realize it yet, but they are being sold a safety net made of holes. It is time to stop the bleeding of public resources on these "convenience apps" and admit that if a government cannot or will not mandate the tools required to govern, it has no business building them in the first place.