A ‘centre-left’ think-tank linked to the Labour Party has released a report proposing a new digital ID card for UK Citizens. The proposed name is the “BritCard”, which seems to exclude Northern Ireland. I haven’t read the report, no time, but this is the link in the Guardian. The Daily Mail version of the story also adds that the ‘card’ (an app on your phone) could be used to check benefit entitlement as well. This proposed scheme could go nowhere, or this trailing to the press could be a planned softening up exercise.
One recalls multiple failed public sector IT projects – which have been used, historically, to loot the Treasury and transfer public money to private financial (often US) elites. The NHS Records scandal (£10 billion) [1], the BBC digitalisation project (£100 million+), the enormously expensive Track and Trace system (£40 billion) during Covid, which produced ‘negligible’ results, for example. So, this could just be another money laundering exercise in the making. On the other hand, there is a simple NHS App – which does seem to work, and connects to a subset of one’s medical records. So, the technology is ‘proven’, and it might be hard to mess up a new app.
The app. as described in the Guardian is all about proving that a person has the “right to work” and the “right to rent”. The point is that the are laws that landlords, and, employers, have to check that people they rent to and hire have a legal right to rent and/or work in the UK, respectively. So; the app. is aimed at people who hire themselves out for labour and who, lacking any property of their own, have to beg someone else for a roof over their heads. The people who propose these ideas do not, in general, fall into this bracket. The only people who will need to use it, in the main, are serfs. It should be called a SerfCard.
In terms of dystopian double-speak I rather liked this, written according to the Guardian, by two MP authors of the report:
[The app. is] progressive because it gives our residents and citizens the cast-iron guarantees they have not previously had. This is your country. You have a right to be here. This will make your life easier. It is at the heart of the social contract
Wow. “cast-iron guarantees you had not previously had”. So; I thought, that as a British citizen, with a passport (or the right to have a passport based on my birth certificate), I already actually had a “cast-iron guarantee” that I could get a job or rent a flat in the UK. Apparently not. It is worth thinking about the implications of that for a moment. It proposes a massive change in the concept of citizenship and rights. A UK citizen no longer has the “right” to work and rent because she is a citizen, but because she owns a mobile phone and has managed to get an app. onto it.
Like so many other government initiatives this is just adding one more layer onto an already heavy weight of surveillance and regulation. There are already plenty of mechanisms for, for example, employers to check the immigration status of potential employees. If they aren’t doing that now, then having an app. will make only a small difference. And, for that matter, if the Home Office actually enforced the current Visa regime there wouldn’t be around a million illegal immigrants living in the UK. [4] This is a classic example, of government proposing to solve a problem by adding another layer to a surveillance system when the problem is not that there aren’t mechanisms in place already, but that they aren’t used. These problems – lack of robust enforcement, will just carry through to the new layer. Meanwhile the makers of the apps. will do very well and will be in a strong position to use their networks to find lucrative directorships for those MPs who help set up the legislation for it.
Notes
- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn
- https://diginomica.com/bbc-spent-125-9m-digital-return
- https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/
- https://www.pewresearch.org/global/fact-sheet/unauthorized-immigrants-in-the-united-kingdom/