Magnus Langton

For some time the British government have been talking about the Brit Card, a physical form of personal digital identification for the British people.

In September 2025 Sir Keir Starmer announced plans to launch a universal digital identification scheme in the UK. 

The Gov.uk website tells us the digital ID will hold:

1. Your name
2. Your date of birth
3. Your nationality and residency status
4. Biometric data in the form of a photograph
5. The ongoing consultation will consider what other types of additional information it would be ‘helpful’ to include.

The stated purpose of digital ID is to:

• Improve access to public services like education and social benefits – by making it easier for everyone to quickly and easily prove their identity when voting at elections etc.
• Reduce identity fraud by minimising personal details you give out
• Toughen employment checks, including across the gig economy, curbing the prospect of work for illegal migrants
• Streamline the verification processes across private sectors too – by enabling digital checks and efficient verification when doing things like opening bank accounts or proving your age.

Your digital ID is proposed to be a free, downloaded and held on your phone.

It will be designed to integrate with screen readers, voice commands and biometric authentication.

Regarding security, the government states it will only provide your information to thirdparties when it is permitted under UK data protection laws.

The take up of the UK digital ID will not be compulsory.

The British public will still require a physical passport when you want to travel abroad and a physical driving licence in this country.

The government led their campaign to justify the implementation of universal digital ID on the basis that the scheme would deter ‘illegal’ migration as the difficulties in obtaining work without digital ID would act as a disincentive to migrants planning on entering the country illegally.

On the face of it, this seems a weak argument. The international people smuggling market is currently valued at an estimated at between $150 – $500 billion, per annum in 2024. This is not a working-class crime. The execution of the transport of such large numbers of people can only be accomplished by large criminal entities. In many cases, with the support of institutional or government acquiescence around the globe either through corruption or ideology. Entities that make money in the face of, official opposition by the state are, perhaps, the people least likely to be intimidated by the legal requirement to hold digital identification. The government of Britain already requires all employers to collect the national insurance number of all employees, as a condition of employment. The lack of a national insurance number has not acted as an effective bar to ‘illegal’ immigration thus far. The idea that such systems and organisations that currently make so much money, because their activities are illegal, would stop their activities because of the introduction of a digital ID seems irrational. 

If the reason for the digital ID is not ‘to stop the boats’ what is it likely to be?

The British digital ID is being built upon a current system: ‘One Login’. This process was initially released in 2021 and has grown year on year since then. The current Labour government has seamlessly extended the ‘One Login’ roll out it inherited from the Conservatives. The system currently encompasses elements of the immigration service, The HMRC (Pay your Tax Bill service), Disclosure and Barring Service (2022/23 had over seven million applications). The government has not yet incorporated the Department of Work and Pensions and all its benefit services but has plans to. The government intends to subsume the primary portal for small businesses (The Government Gateway) into the One Login system. The Gateway system covers Business VAT, Corporation Tax PAYE employers and Self-Assessment currently and sundry other services.

The One Login system is proposed to allow individuals to sign in and prove their identity to access all central government services. The contract to provide ‘One Login’ was won by a consortium led by IBM, which subcontracts to smaller, specialist private companies. In this case, facial recognition technology is provided by iProov, and the data pooling platform is subcontracted to HooYu.

This follows the current system for government procurement whereby huge government contracts are initially issued to major ‘strategic partners’ who oversee the integration of large systems. Under the UK digital transformation programmes, these partners are:

Accenture (Previously Arthur Andersen Consulting), Capgemini, Deloitte, IBM, Price Waterhouse Cooper and KPMG incorporating Ernst & Young.

There are many criticisms of this cosy relationship between these (extremely expensive) accountancy and consultancy partners and the public purse, not least the ‘revolving door’ between top civil servants and these companies situated closest to government money tap.

The UK government’s foundational cloud service providers are: Amazon web services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, as well as a host of other companies contracted to perform specific contracts. Amazon Web services are providing the ‘One Login’ infrastructure, via UK based data centres. The government’s in house web services (Government Digital Services [GDS]) are responsible for the code, security protocols and user experience. The UK governmental model allows for individual departments to buy data storage from a list of pre-vetted suppliers (corporates giants: AWS/Microsoft Azure/Google cloud/Oracle).

The government has published a Data Protection Impact Assessment  (DPIA)(http://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gov.uk-one-login-data-protection-impact-assessment)  designed to address concerns such as: what information is to be held, the purpose of the processing, data sharing- how much and to whom, the lawful basis for processing the information, identified risks, data accuracy and function creep- or the risk the system could evolve into being used for purposes beyond those it was originally intended, data security, data profiling and what measures were being undertaken to mitigate these matters and eliminate the risk?

In parliamentary debate on January 9th, 2024, Darren Jones (Labour, Northwest Bristol) described the One Login system as, ‘. . . a single, federated sign-on solution for all central government. . . The vision is for cross-governmental identity system that works for public and private sector’.

These sentiments were echoed by Sir John Whittingdale (Conservative) who said, ‘It will be a federated system, which means that it will work with a number of different certified identity providers, from both the private and public sectors.’

The Government was thrown into some disarray when a senior cyber security expert working at GDS made allegations of poor security within the One Login system in July 2022. His concerns had not been allayed by April 2025. An investigation confirmed these concerns. GDS Chief Executive, Tom Read was also forced to admit he had not been made aware that some of the development work (as part of a contract run by [trusted partner] Deloitte) on the One Login system had already been off shored to Romania. Despite these internal warnings, GDS had not admitted to them when an MP had written to the Cabinet Office enquiring about potential issues with the security of One Login. The whistleblower has now been informed by GDS that he will be facing disciplinary charges. Do these events make anyone feel the public’s data will be held securely?

The mechanism by which the government has chosen to shape the execution of the digital ID future is a decentralized system which allows multiple ID systems to exist that multiple private contractors can participate in as long as they meet the standards set out in the ‘Digital Trust Framework (DTF)’. A company can thus become ‘certified’ to be a supplier of a certified digital identity. The purpose of the push for digital identity is perhaps here. 

All digital government services must henceforth be accessible in accordance with the Digital Trust Framework protocol. This will ensure that all service delivery in the UK, throughout modern life will be in a format that can be read and accessed in accordance with the DTF. The trap is here. The digital ID may not be technically compulsory but, increasingly, every aspect of modern life will require a digitally compliant component to access it. The ability to access education, benefits, receive money, access healthcare, leisure facilities, acquire any licence or qualification will all be held in DTF protocol compliant forms. The scope of the types of information and permissions that can or may be digitally recorded, and read, can already be seen across the world. In Britain new passports and driving licences have machine readable photographs designed to impart biometric data. Many countries of the world already require identification with a biometric element to participate in the election process. 

Much information is already collected and collated in a digital form on individuals every day. The evolution, through the Digital Trust Framework, is all the digital information held in many disparate repositories will all now instantly, be centrally accessible. 

The government has repeatedly said the data will not be available for sale. 

The rate of digital technological advancement is beyond dispute. The multiple potential benefits are manifest. Satellite enabled internet access is designed to make the whole world connected forever. The benefits and convenience afforded by the power each one of us can hold in our hands is great indeed. Does this need to provided at the expense of such egregious and potentially irrevocable losses to our personal liberties?

There is currently no mechanism for transparency. The public cannot know what crimes have been sanctioned, making democratic oversight impossible. The potential for abuse is obvious with such poor drafting of the legislation including the words, ‘necessary’ and ‘proportionate’ in the justification of such acts. There are always concerns regarding the potential for flexible future judicial interpretations to police and governmental overreach, beyond the spirit and intention of initial legislation, despite assurances from the government of the time.

An ever-present concern with data is the potential for hacks and data breaches. There are very capable hacking networks and criminals who could benefit personally from accessing this information repository. The security services of many nations spend a lot of time and money trying to protect their own data and to infiltrate or corrupt the data of others. Security can always be attended to but the risk will always remain. What recourse would citizens have should their data be accessed through this system?

Oracle is a company owned by Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is, on some days, the world’s richest man. Larry Ellison is the largest funder to the Tony Blair Institute at £257,000,000 and the world’s largest private donor to the Israeli Defence Fund as well as owning large portions of the American media and is part of the consortium trying to buy American TikTok. Larry Ellison is on record saying he wants all the world’s data to be centralised so all planning and decision making can be taken over by artificial intelligence. Larry Ellison is paying the money to the Tony Blair Foundation to express his wishes, in legislation and geo-politics. Oracle secured a £850 million contract to provide data storage for The Home Office, The foreign Office, The Department of Work and Pensions, The Ministry of Justice and Defra. As part of this, Ellison’s firm was handed a £330 million pound contract in 2024 to provide some digital services within the NHS. Controversially there was not a full tendering process before Oracle won the contract. This contract was awarded to Oracle but with a key sub-contractor: Palantir. Palantir’s purpose is to ‘integrate and analyze massive, complex datasets to help large institutions make better decisions and solve their critical problems’. Palantir, named after the ‘all seeing’ crystal balls used by central characters including Sauron in the Lord of the Rings, was founded by billionaire Peter Thiel and funded by In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel which is the non-profit investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. In-Q-Tel was founded in order to ‘further the CIA’s missions’. The CIA provided seed capital and was a lucrative sole customer in Palantir’s early days. Palantir first entered the NHS during the pandemic, due to the demand of the NHS to have sufficient data analysis to manage the pandemic. Palantir was allowed access for £1 and initially provided its services for free. Once it had achieved this ‘foot-in-the door’ it has proven impossible to dislodge. In 2021 there was an outcry because the medical records of every single user of the NHS was to be handed over to Palantir. Due to one million people opting out, despite little publicity, this scheme was delayed. Through this most recent contract, Palantir’s ‘Foundry’ software is embedded with Oracle’s ‘Cerner’ cloud infrastructure within the medical provision future of the UK.

The NHS has also handed a £1.25 billion contract to Infosys, the technology company owned by ex PM, Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law. 

There are concerns  about the access big business and particularly big-tech have to the heart of British government. Anti-corruption organisation Spotlight on Corruption, have looked at ministers’ diaries and calculated the is a 22:1 bias in favour of lobbyists for business rather than charities, NGOs and Trade’s Unions. Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has Kirsty Inness as her special advisor. Kirsty came from the Tony Blair Institute. 

There are reasonable concerns that all these big-tech companies, none of whom have any national allegiance to Britain, with their bullying, corrupt and amoral histories might not be the best partners to hand all of the British population’s data to.

A common concern is that the digital ID would provide the platform upon which a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) could be enacted. There are plans to tokenise all the world into digital assets. Theoretically, these could be tracked (and taxed) as every single financial transaction was centrally recorded. This digital money could be programmable, allowing for only specific purposes or usable only at specific times. This could mean food could only be bought on certain days or in specific geographical areas. Digital money could be ‘turned off’ for purchasing travel or would ‘expire’ if unspent after a particular time period. As was seen by the Canadian truckers during ‘covid’, businesses were collapsed and people bankrupted following the Canadian government requesting private banks to seize bank accounts of the protesting truck drivers. Friends, families and acquaintances and supporters of the truckers were similarly cut off from the banking system, with no notice and no appeal, for the ‘crime’ of sending money to the destitute truckers. Such complete and arbitrary power would be gifted to those that had control or influence once a fully digitalised financial system was enacted. 

The British government has led the way internationally in requiring age verification in order to access adult material on the internet. Sir Keir has publicly stated his desire to ban the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN), so there cannot be anonymity when accessing the web. The digital ID could very soon be the required tool in order to access the web and through which an accessible record of all internet searches and activities could be recorded.

The sheer scale and the intimacy of the information that is currently digitally recorded on the British citizenry is, by orders of magnitude, far, far, far in excess of anything any previous iteration of government could have dreamt of holding on its citizens. 

This simple fact raises questions as to the legitimacy of any entity holding and controlling this much information.

To better explore the mindset of the government that is planning on having centralised access to this motherlode of information on its own citizens, it might benefit us to look at the ethical direction of travel of Westminster in recent years including the current government.

The current Labour government is continuing the policies of the former Conservative government in actively participating in an ongoing genocide. 

Sir Keir Starmer was personally named as culpable and answerable for war crimes in The United Nation’s Special Rapporteur On The Occupied Palestinian Territories,  Francesca Albanese’s most recent report, Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime.

The Convention on the prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide1948 under Article III specifically prohibits assisting in a genocide. The spy flights from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus constitute a direct breach of this article.

Article IV establishes breach of any part of Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. 

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,  Article 124 defines criminal responsibility to include anyone who aids, abets or otherwise assists in the commission of a crime, including genocide. There is a manifest case for Keir Starmer and his cabinet to be arrested and made to answer for their actions under these statues.

The direction of domestic legislation is no less concerning. 

The Covert Human Intelligent Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act (2021):

 Allows for acts committed by agents in the name of the state, that would otherwise be considered illegal, to not be illegal if commissioned during (an agent’s) duty. The departments covered by the Act are MI5, MI6, GCHQ, The National Crime Agency, Police Forces, the Serious Fraud Office, HM Revenue and Customs, The Home Office, The Department of Health and Social Care, The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, The Financial Conduct Authority, The Environment Agency and various other regulatory and law enforcement bodies across the UK.

A state that acts above the law or fails to act against its agents that abuse the enormous responsibility the state is afforded must be held to a very high standard to maintain legitimacy.

The Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Acts 2022:

Allows sweeping powers for the police to limit the rights and manner of citizens to protest against the decisions and actions of the state.

The Online Safety Act 2023:

The governments introduced a personal responsibility through the regulator Ofcom for managers to be responsible for the content produced or hosted on their platform. The Act introduced the new category of ‘legal but harmful’. 

Such legislation creates a climate of fear and self-censorship for both private individuals and service providers or hosts compelling providers and hosts of internet services to censor what content is accessible through their platforms.

The Public Order Act 2023

This act introduced the Court’s power to impose restrictions upon individuals never convicted of an offence.

The Police and Crime Bill seeks to further undermine the freedom and right to protest as well as introducing further elements of pre-emptive policing.

There are very serious questions as to whether a state so determinedly seeking to introduce legislation, that might be described as a blueprint for authoritarianism, should be given the power to collate and access such enormous amounts of intensely private and personal data, for all its citizens. 

Transparency was always considered a founding principle for the modern democratic British state. Under the spectre of the new proposals regarding Digital ID, what hope is there that this will be respected by a government with such an authoritarian direction of travel?  In such times when levels of trust in the agents and institutions of the state are at historic lows, the political class are just not trusted by the people in whose interests it is meant to govern.

Permissionless blockchains could provide many of these services anonymously. If proof of address or of a qualification or of ID, could all be stored and accessed to provide specific information requests on demand but without being a key for all the other pieces of information to be linked to it. This would provide a foundation for many services to be performed or accessed but in a managed and privacy led fashion whilst privacy could be maintained. 

Why is this permissionless blockchain model not being championed by the government in the UK and abroad?

It is thought by some that the government floated the idea of the ‘Britcard’, raising the spectre of a single card, holding all your information, as a chimera, to distract from the fact that a deep and broad infrastructure of standardised, centrally accessible information sources are being covertly embedded into society, for now and into the future.

Who is influencing the implementation and operation of the Digital ID scheme?

The accounting and consultancy firms that sit so closely to the British government are publicly owned and have the world’s largest asset management companies (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) as their largest shareholders. The other investors are largely a motley crew of institutional investors, Venture Capital firms, investment management houses, pension funds, national wealth funds, hedge funds, insurance firms, mutual funds and high net worth individuals. These companies hold shareholder value as their guiding principle. International capital has a fainter and fainter association even with their nations of origin. The Big Tech companies that are routinely awarded the contracts to hold the digital details of the British public are owned by many of the world’s richest people. The biggest enemy of capitalism has always been democracy because, Aristotle observed, a democracy will serve the interests of the people, and the people are the poor. Since 1979 Neo-liberalism has asserted itself and capitalism has tightened its grip upon the world remorselessly. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan furiously imposed the Monetary policies of Milton Freidman, fuelled by the ideology of Friedrich Hayek. The current theoretical hegemony of the neo-classical school has not only failed to diagnose its most egregious failures but has failed even to acknowledge the manifest failure of the system as the wealth disparity yawns ever wider wherever it is inflicted. The entire economic project of the nineteenth century was to wrest capital from the hands of the aristocracy, who had presided over centuries of extraction from the captured population and social stagnation. The nineteenth century economics projects resulted in post war Keynesianism, where the imperative of full employment led to a more equitable share of profits for the workers. In less than fifty years, the age of industrial capitalism has come to an end in the West as the economic priorities of the capitalist class have been to turn their collect backs on the productive activity of ‘making things’ in order to devote themselves to extraction and speculation. Rentier capitalism and speculative bubbles are what constitute the wealth of the few. The military industrial complex in America has a budget larger than the next ten biggest defence budgets from the rest of the world. This budget does not produce ten times as many weapons, but it does have far higher levels of profits drawn down by the select list of trusted contractors than its peer competitors.  For years the stock markets have risen and risen, fuelled by low interest rates and deregulated lending regimes whilst the rentiers have subcontracted out their mega contracts again and again so the profit to be made by the firms delivering the work can only be made by crushing the wages of the people actually doing the work. Homelessness, debt, despair and insecurity rise in the population as the money flows upwards towards the corporations and the banks and is shuffled away offshore or in speculative asset bubbles. The banks, freed by Thatcher and Reagan from lending controls have created more and more money to fuel the bubbles. The money created by banks behaves differently from money created by the government. The money created by the government passes through various governmental departments into the hands of the people where upon it is spent and saved in many  directions. This stimulates economic trade and creates a need for production of goods and services which produce real wealth through productivity. The banks do not lend out savers’ money, the banks create the money they loan. The money created by the banks, due to the exorbitant privilege of the banking licence, is created for nothing and given to the loanee in return for a promise to repay. The loanee spends it, mostly, on a single item, commonly their home. The loanee gradually repays that money, to the banks, in full, with interest. This money goes to only one place, the banks. The banks then dispose of the money in accordance with their own priorities. It is estimated that 96% of the annual money supply created in Britain is created by the banks. Banks were freed from governmental guidance to provide loans for productive purposes, and they chose to provide money for speculation on assets instead. Banks don’t prioritise productive wealth generation and neither do big businesses. Today directors prefer share buy backs to research and development and boardroom bonuses to shop floor wage rises. 

Even stock market investors behaviour has changed. Investors care less for business fundamentals, preferring to chase meme stocks. Mercedes-Benz and Tesla had annual profits of between 14.5 and 15 billion dollars in 2023, BMW about 13 billion. The stock valuation of Tesla was equal to eight times that of either Mercedes or BMW. The belief is Tesla shares have much greater potential but given the quality of Chinese EVs and the research and development capacity of the two German giants, such stock values can only be justified by the irrational’ fear of missing out’ on behalf of investors. Exactly the same is true of the Artificial Intelligence bubble in the stock markets. A.I is good but, the investment levels are fuelled by hope and speculation on as-of-yet unrealised results. The problems A.I is going to solve has not even been identified yet. The crypto markets are even worse. A tiny percentage of cryptos have a potential use case and the rest are just Ponzi schemes, and yet the market is valued at four trillion dollars.

Digital ID is being introduced to the UK under a highly spurious justification. The determination of the government to have a universal underlying protocol, without the safeguard of a permissionless system to minimise abuse of the data is reason enough for warning bells to ring for anyone who values privacy. The greater problem lies in what the system will look like in five to ten years’ time. As computing power increases and as more and more tranches of information are laid upon the system, the potential for a staggeringly frightening level of data and potential intrusion into the lives of Britain’s citizens cannot be understated. There are those in power that would seek to introduce A.I guided predictive policing. Various trials have already been introduced in the West Midlands, Northumbria and London. Already Britain is one of the most heavily surveyed populations in the world. Cameras on bridges, on streets, ring doorbells, even phones and televisions have the capacity to watch and listen to the user. Smart phones offer voice activated digital assistants such as ‘Siri’ and ‘Alexa’. The users’ voice is recorded in such a fashion that a biometric voiceprint can be developed for the user. Bank apps and even logins for a phone offer fingerprint of eyeball recognition, this is all biometric data being collected. Every website you visit asks for permission to store cookies. These cookies allow your personal data to be harvested and sold by the many companies that are paying to have access to it. 

 Supermarkets constantly record the shopper throughout the visit and then home in for a close up should you pay at the automated checkout. This data can all be used to add to facial recognition and gait analysis. None of these things need to happen. There could easily be a bar to intrusive and surreptitious data harvesting, the Ring doorbell could not start to record until a visitor rang the bell, televisions could not have the capacity to record the watcher, as a default. None of these things need to happen but choices have been made by manufacturers and by governments to allow them.

In a society dedicated to the wellbeing of its citizens this information could be invaluable with respect to central planning, facilitating wealth production and service provision for the nation. Instead it is being enacted by a government corrupt and in thrall to the richest and worst of humanity. Neo-liberal elites who are implacably opposed to a fair, equal and just society. When Keir Starmer was a first term MP he was the only MP to have been invited to join the Tri-lateral Commission. This is another billionaire boys club where the rich and powerful go to plan how to have their political agenda adopted around the world. Famously whilst he was attending another such junket, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Channel 4’s Emily Maitlis asked Sir Keir if he preferred Davos or Westminster, to which he replied “Davos”. He may not be a very good politician, but he certainly is very well connected. Keir Starmer stated at the Labour Conference launch that ‘by the end of this parliamentary term, it would not be possible to have a job without a digital ID’. Given his lack of personality or political vision, perhaps it is his ruthless ambition to crush all opposition and secure the future for the billionaires that first attracted him to the  uber capitalist with whom he prefers to spend time.

At the time of writing the world is teetering on the edge of world war three, imperialism is in full flow once again in Africa as proxy forces are used to destabilize and pillage multiple countries for the benefit of America and its allies, the everything bubble in the stock markets is possibly bursting and our government’s response to this in 2008/9 was to bailout the banks had that benefited most from the bubbles they created and impose forever austerity on the many. The states’ responses to protest have become increasingly authoritarian and in America’s case full scale martial law in its inner cities. The prime minister has actively participated in a genocide, has done nothing but attack the working people his party is meant to support, and increasingly attack the middle classes, in order to maintain profits at the levels the richest demand. Sir Keir Starmer has presided over the continued instigation of a legislative framework for fascism, arresting pensioners for holding placards and has accepted more ‘free’ gifts from wealthy admirers than even Boris Johnson. The man is morally incontinent.

As Aristotle wrote, if a group of wealthy control the state through the democratic process, by funding politicians, influencing rhetoric (the media and propaganda) and directing policy- the state is fundamentally an oligarchy- even if it has democratic institutions. Rule by the few in the interests of the wealthy.

With great power comes great responsibility. Does anyone trust Starmer, Badenoch or Farage with that power?

Magnus Langton