They're watching. Ian Waldie/Getty Images.
At nearly 2.5 million signatures, the petition against the Government’s proposed digital ID scheme has vastly exceeded the threshold — 100,000 — for parliamentary consideration. The plans have been decried by political figures ranging from the hard Left (Jeremy Corbyn) to the populist Right (Robert Jenrick). All the while, Cabinet ministers claim that the new IDs are designed to impair illegal labor rather than to tighten the grip of the state on law-abiding citizens.
Few seem to believe those claims. But the more significant phenomenon is not the particular tendencies of this or that politician: it is the struggle of this government, and of all modern governments, to maintain control of information in an age when the internet has begun to pose a dangerous threat to that control. Today, information can be distributed far more easily, widely and quickly than in history’s most searing periods of revolution. It is a reality that traditional mechanisms of government find hard to accept — a discord that can have devastating consequences.
Seen through this lens, the recent flare-ups of the free speech debate — the arrest of Graham Linehan, the reprimanding of Starmer by Donald Trump over free speech in the UK, the introduction of the Online Safety Act — can all be understood as responses to the challenges to government posed by the new technology. Societies across the globe are still digesting an extraordinary change, and the crises spreading across the world are in part a reaction to it.
Yet if governments now seek to control information via new means, their desire to do so is nothing new. And, as Elias Canetti, a Nobel laureate for literature, wrote in Crowds and Power, secrecy is a fundamental component of power. Governments have always sought to monopolize information and to shape it. They have often kept large swathes of it secret, whether it is records of government meetings or the tabs they are keeping on criminal gangs and geopolitical adversaries. At the same time, they have generally sought to censor materials which are contrary to their vision.
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”More from this author” author=”Toby Green “]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2024/03/the-false-prophets-who-doomed-nigeria/[/su_unherd_related]
Any politician who is truly ignorant of this basic fact of history probably shouldn’t be anywhere near government. For if, in theory, we object to secrecy: in practice, citizens of Western liberal democracies have been quite happy to accept this reality. This is why, for instance, UK government files are kept secret for 20 years before being released to the public. No politician has ever contested this rule. That is because, until now, all politicians shared the unspoken opinion that secrecy was an important part of government; until, that is, they started leaking excerpts of cabinet meetings to friendly journalists, a symptom of the transformations now underway.
Though secrecy of information has always been a key plank of political authority, there are of course different tiers of secrecy enforced by governments. As Canetti noted, autocracy of information has often been a symptom of dictatorships. The Stasi’s network of “secret informers”, members of the public who informed on each other, remain in the living memory of the former East Germany. I saw a similar phenomenon myself in The Gambia. There, in the years preceding the end, in 2017, of Yahya Jammeh’s regime, I was doing research on Gambia’s precolonial history. Such was the fear of government informers that, at any mention of Jammeh’s increasing turn to authoritarianism, people’s eyes would cloud over and they went quiet.
It is a reaction that would have been visible at many other places and points in history. Take the Papal Inquisition, set up by the medieval papacy to police heretics like the Cathars. Where Starmer’s digital ID proposes authority over our biometric information, in late medieval and early modern Europe the Inquisition sought authority over what it too deemed to be the most important information about citizens: the purity or otherwise of their religious faith.
Having almost died in the 15th century, the Inquisition was revived as a state-backed institution in absolutist Spain, and then in Portugal, from the late 1470s onwards. The Inquisition soon became a bulwark of what were then the most powerful states in Europe, useful for attacking dissenters and confiscating their property. A cornerstone of the inquisitorial judicial process was secrecy: not only did witnesses have to swear that they would keep all aspects of the trial secret, but the accused were never told who had accused them, or even what they had been accused of.
We can understand what this meant for the human experience of power only through individual cases, which — fortunately for historians — the Inquisition archived meticulously. In 1665, for instance, the Inquisition arrested Crispina Peres, who was the most powerful trader in the port town of Cacheu (today’s Guinea-Bissau, West Africa). Peres was charged with “witchcraft” after several years of interrogations led by an ambitious cleric. Her downfall came in spite of an uprising of almost 1,000 troops marshaled by the local king, who was her ally. She was eventually deported via the Cape Verde islands to Lisbon, a journey of more than 2,500 miles. Peres languished for three years in the inquisitorial jail, at one point spending over 12 months in her cell without being summoned for an interview. By the time she returned to Cacheu, after confessing her guilt in an ritualized form of penance known as an Auto da Fé, her health was shot through and the power she had held as a trader in Cacheu was gone.
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”Suggested reading” author=”Richard Godwin”]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2025/06/are-the-blairites-coming-for-your-kids/[/su_unherd_related]
For historians like me, the Inquisition’s insistence on secrecy is a gift. Because of their desire to rule out anyone whose evidence was partial, Peres and her husband Jorge spent long depositions mentioning all of their enemies, offering in the process a unique window into the daily lives of people who lived so long ago in West Africa. As her husband Jorge said, her actions were nothing out of the ordinary in Cacheu. Indeed, some of her main accusers freely admitted to partaking in the same African religious ceremonies as she did. In essence, she was arrested because her power threatened the secrecy which was the cornerstone of the political authority which Portuguese institutions of empire were developing in West Africa.
How does all this relate to the debates over digital ID and freedom of speech — and the recent comments by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and many politicians, over what the Government can and can’t do to police speech and information on the internet? The answer is that breaches of secrecy have always been seen by political leaders as constituting a major threat to power. This is an insight that helps us understand several key global events of the past 15 years.
The Wikileaks affair, which led to the multi-year solitary confinement of Julian Assange in HMP Belmarsh, is about more than the specific information that Assange leaked. Instead, the harsh punishment stands as a warning to any others who might seek to challenge the secrecy of our political elites. For them, Assange’s real threat lay not so much in the details of what was revealed as in the structural challenge posed by Wikileaks to their view of politics, which required their unquestioned right to secrecy in the exercise of government. Nor has this relationship between secrecy and power been just a Western phenomenon, as the widespread “secret societies” in Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa make clear.
In the 21st century, political elites impose censorship not only by punishing individuals, but through the actions of increasingly nebulous organizations. In June 2019 — two months after Assange was removed from the Ecuadorean embassy in London — an alliance of the world’s biggest broadcasters founded an organization whose putative goal was to combat misinformation. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is an alliance of the world’s biggest publishers: hosted by the BBC, it includes major news agencies, major newspapers from the UK, the US and abroad, and big tech companies such as Google and its subsidiary YouTube.
Within a year, the TNI played a key role during the Covid pandemic in censorship of “fake news” — including, in the first 18 months of the pandemic, the mere suggestion that Covid-19 could have leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Those from Left (such as me) and Right who questioned whether strict lockdowns were necessary, and whether a cost-benefit analysis including real-world harms to young and old in the West and the Global South should not be considered, had their views ruthlessly suppressed by the TNI in the press and in social media — with a price that the whole world is now paying.
The TNI was seen by conspiracists as a key plank in the “plandemic”. But skeptics of a different sort would see the TNI as a weapon created and deployed by political elites to defend their monopoly of information. In this sense, it doesn’t really matter whether the information is true or false. What matters is the importance of secrecy to political authority, and the vicious efforts which those in power will make to maintain their grip on this secrecy.
Thus it is no surprise that new research is revealing the lengths that the West’s political leaders are taking to impose their preferred information paradigm. During Covid, Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, tried personally to communicate in private with the then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey — to precisely what end, we still do not know — while French state-affiliated NGOs sought special access to Twitter’s internal data and content moderation process. Similarly, the UK, like the EU, has sought backdoor access to digital communications services such as WhatsApp. Woe betide those who do not comply: Pavel Durov, the defiant founder of the Telegram app, was arrested last year.
All this shows the depth of the political reaction now in place to shore up Western authorities’ control of information, in which digital ID is a further move. Yet the accompanying debates often show a general lack of structural understanding of the historical relationship between political power, secrecy, and information. In its pugilistic response to the Linehan affair and the Online Safety Act, the Right shows its naïveté: these instincts to control information are a fact of political life.
But the Left is guilty of comparable naïveté in its railing against conspiracy theories and the Right’s alleged predisposition to swallowing them. While egregious conspiracy theories should of course be called out, the Right — contrary to the dismissive claims by the Left — is correct to see conspiracy as part of power. The Left, at times, has shown similar attentiveness. Indeed, prior to their 1917 coup, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had a strongly conspiratorial critique of the levers of capital. And, in terms of more prosaic politics, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did not stumble into the leadership of their political parties. Instead, they reached the top thanks to conniving backroom deals, secret manipulation of information known only to a few, and conspiratorial deployment of relationships with various players which might often be kept hidden.
What this shows is that in this debate over information control and secrecy, both Left and Right are currently tilting at strawmen: the Left at the spread of conspiracy, the Right at supposedly unprecedented government secrecy and authority over perceived safety. Biometric information, which is the key resource for the “BritCard”, is simply the latest tug-of-war.
[su_pullquote]”In this debate over information control and secrecy, both Left and Right are currently tilting at strawmen.”[/su_pullquote]
This is all quite normal in politics, and distracts from the broader issues at stake. What is true is that, as Canetti observed, the impulse to assert control through a strong-arm policing of information tends to be typical of more authoritarian governments. This is what historians can observe in the absolutist dictatorships of Spain and Portugal in the era of the Inquisition, and with the trial of Crispina Peres. It is what we can now observe with the trend towards policing the internet and using it to monitor citizens. The question is not, therefore, whether governments should control information, since all governments of all time always have tried to do this: but what levels of control and secrecy are compatible with democratic life. With neither politicians nor technocrats to be entirely trusted with the levers of power, a different playing field if society is to manage the circulation of information. Perhaps the mechanism might be a combination of judicial separation of powers and sortition (election from the general public via a lottery).
At the same time, the firestorms around this topic are also a distraction from the enormity of the crisis which current governments have plunged into. Fear for the future is mounting as quickly as fury at politicians. The distraction, then, is highly useful to political elites in an age when over-reaction to threats to their control of information has caused such massive harm.
Toby Green is a professor of history and associate of the Global Health Institute at King’s College, London. His new book about Crispina Peres, The Heretic of Cacheu, is published by Allen, Lane.
toby00green 
“BritCard”? How the years roll back, and not in a good way. Tony Blair’s computerisation of the NHS was the biggest civilian IT project ever. 23 years later, there is still no sign of it. Set that alongside the cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover. Then ponder the digital ID that was proposed in June by Morgan McSweeney’s Labour Together, hence the hideously Noughties name. Announcing it now to deflect attention from the undeclared £700,000 displays undeniable self-belief.
Identity cards have always been a New Labour obsession to rank with NHS privatisation, although that was never to be attempted except in England, with the NHS recognised as the strongest argument for the Union in the other three parts of the United Kingdom. This Government is so bad at politics that it intends to impose the BritCard from West Glamorgan, to West Lothian, to West Belfast. There may be riots in Scotland. There may be worse than that across the Irish Sea.
Although the Coalition discontinued Blair’s attempt at this, it had in fact become government policy under John Major and Michael Howard. William Hague speaks for the grandees when he enthusiastically commends it today. Accordingly, Kemi Badenoch sits on the fence, while Chris Philp is positively enthusiastic, as have been several people who were now leading members of Reform UK. Ann Widdecombe was calling for this only three months ago, on exactly the grounds that Keir Starmer now purported to advocate it.
Everyone on that march on 13 September put themselves on Palantir’s facial recognition system. The shock troops of the resistance need to come from elsewhere. My old friend Dr Dave Smith is now applying for a judicial review of the failure to call him to give oral evidence to the spycops inquiry. If that scandal received anything like the coverage that it deserved, then digital ID would have public approval below 10 per cent. Dave’s Blacklist Support Group is old school trade unionism, crossing over as that does with the justice campaigns around Shrewsbury, Clay Cross, the Battle of the Beanfield, Hillsborough, Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal, the Post Office scandal, the contaminated blood scandal, the WASPI women, the wrongfully imprisoned, the nuclear test veterans, and very many more.
A start has been made by Dave’s union and mine, Unite, which has declined to nominate either candidate for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. One of them is still a member of this Cabinet, the other said that the Winter Fuel Payment had to be withdrawn to prevent a run on the pound. They are both in favour of the digital ID that would be delivered by the Tony Blair Institute while Blair himself was spending at least five years heading “the Gaza International Transitional Authority”. I first told you on 13 November 2023 that Blair was being lined up to be Viceroy of Gaza, now on behalf of a State that would by then have recognised the Falkland Islands as part of Argentina.
No change there, of course, since Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War, with Menachem Begin seeing that as revenge. Israel is much closer to Javier Milei than even to Starmer, while Liz Truss has said that she would have endorsed Milei as a candidate for Leader of the Conservative Party. His Argentina is the latest Promised Land of the British Right, which always needs a Fatherland somewhere away from the NHS. The real sport will be over Israel’s attitude to the sovereignty of Gibraltar, since Spain has also recognised Palestine. Will Gibraltarians be issued with Blair’s BritCards while he ran Gaza on behalf of a foreign power that thought that they should not be British? Very possibly. Will Falkland Islanders be in that position? Without doubt. Unless we had stopped this whole scheme in its tracks.
Imagine digital ID during the Miners’ Strike. Now imagine it under a Badenoch, Jenrick or Farage Government, never mind under whoever might succeed any of those as a Conservative or Reform Prime Minister. By the next General Election, Starmer may have sailed off to enjoy both his tax-free inheritance and, by special legislation with his very name in its title, his tax-free pension. But whoever was Labour Leader by then will be urging a Labour vote to keep Nigel Farage away from the digital ID system that already existed. Here’s a thought. Just do not set it up in the first place. Even if Labour won in 2029, then that would only keep those powers in the hands of the people who had detained George Galloway at Gatwick.
Starmer is no Blair when it comes to either intellgience, guts, charisma,you can dislike Blair, i do, but you have to give him credit, he knew how to do politics
If Blair could’nt get them through, and Starmer who as polls suggest more than 50% of Labour members want gone, and i doubt many of his own MP’s like him. Plus their dreadful polling numbers, the Unions don’t want it, even the SNP don’t want it
As many have said, firms who hire illegals are not going be checking for this ID , add to that it will invitibility be breached, as someone in the field, Public Service IT projects have always been less secure than private enterprise
We hear their might be religious exemptions for Jews and possible others, now there might be a good historical reason for that, but once you go down that path, well maybe Gays, Muslims want an exemption and kinda of destroys the whole idea it will be used to protect against illegal workers
I suspect this will be quietly dropped, never to be mentioned again
I believe and hope you are right that it will be quietly dropped before 2029. Probably via the tried and true method of interminable consultations, reviews, collecting of expert opinion and judicial wrangling.
Then, if it gets that far, multiple pilots and aborts for re-testing.
ID cards are really all about Starmer trying to get some breathing space in the sea of troubles in which his incompetence has landed him.
It’s just a pathetic attempt from a flailing government to appear to be doing something to stop illegal immigration, without actually doing the hard work of changing any laws (or leaving any international agreements) that prevent deportations or enforcing the laws already on the books.
It’s just a distraction, nothing more
As someone pointed out yesterday, no mention of ID Cards was made at the Labour Party Conference. Not by Starmer, anyway. So the plan may already have been quietly forgotten.
Fingers crossed.
Really not sure exactly what the author is trying to say here. A long article, but lacking in focus and big on waffly generalisations.
However, he does have a new book to promote which is mentioned here.
Too many people misunderstand what biometric digital ID is about (though probably not BTL here). Neither Agenda 2030 nor CBDCs can proceed without digital ID. All the noise about ID ‘cards’ and migrants is distraction; this is about linking databases and centralising data. Combined with the roll out of facial recognition, this is the beginnings of a social credit system.
The Chinese social credit system was built with western help. It is a model much admired by the globalist elites because they are few and we are many. Rumour has it that Ellison and Oracle will be handed the contract. They’ve been in the ID game for 23 years now. Ellison, last year: “Citizens will be on their best behaviour, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”
If you want to understand all this, then I think you can do no better than Prof David Hughes’ books.
Funny how citizens must be ” on their best behaviour” in Ellison and Blair’s utopia. While the politicians will continue to get away with their casual law breaking (that’s you Rayner and co).
Not just Politicians, even members of the once vaunted Judiciary, the names Denning and Hoffman spring to mind.
12:54. BST.
Denning? What did he do
Just when you thought the government couldn’t get any more hopelessly, technocratically sinister, it raises the spectre of a digital ID card. Because clearly, the most pressing crises in Britain aren’t any of the things that voters say they care about. No, it’s that you and I haven’t yet been neatly filed into a database – that some Whitehall halfwit will inevitably leave on a train.
What could thrill our managerialist overlords more than a slick little barcode for the masses? A system that promises control, compliance, and the illusion of competence, all wrapped in a shiny app. Never mind that the state’s track record with data is a tragicomedy of leaks, losses and bureaucratic bungling. Child benefit records vanished. NHS data spilled like confetti. Windrush victims deported by spreadsheet. I would no more entrust this Govt with all our data than I would a toddler with a Fabergé egg.
A QR code wouldn’t stop a benefit fraudster, let alone Beijing. State-employed hackers will be lining up like bargain hunters at the Boxing Day sales.
They’re selling it as a fix for illegal immigration, but the only people it won’t touch are the gangs, the illegals, and the black economy. The rest of us – the compliant, the registered, the digitally tethered – will be the ones jumping through Kafkaesque hoops to prove we exist.
As Gloria Estefan nearly tried to warn us: the algorithm’s gonna get you.
The salespitch, as ever, is drenched in management-speak: “streamline services,” “reduce fraud,” “enhance security.” Translation: let’s corral all your data in one place, watch the algorithm misfile it, and then act astonished when it’s nicked by a teenager in Minsk.
But fret not, dear citizen, it’s all voluntary. ……. ……. Until it isn’t.
This year’s “optional” becomes next year’s “necessary, but only if you want to buy anything online.” The year after that? “Compulsory, if you want to use your kettle.” Freedom, redefined as seeking state permission to make a cup of tea.
It’s the backdoor to a Social Credit system, and anyone with a functioning brain should be on their guard.
It’s insidious theatre. Bureaucratic pantomime masquerading as technological progress. It won’t solve any of the problems it claims to address. And soon enough, identity won’t be something you own – it’ll be something you rent from the state, subject to renewal at their pleasure.
So no, I don’t want their digital leash. I don’t want to be scanned, catalogued, barcoded like a tin of Tesco own-brand beans. Reduced to a number, for the convenience of our WEF overlords and their civil service minions. Transhumanism with a lanyard.
Britain used to pride itself on not being a “papers please” state. We didn’t wave IDs to go about our day, we waved scornfully at any weasel-featured commissar who mistook his clipboard for moral authority. If we let them win, every interaction with the State becomes Checkpoint Charlie. Drunk on power, one laminated badge away from declaring martial law.
Today it’s a card. Tomorrow it’ll be a tattoo.
Brilliant post! Far better than the artivcle’s verbiage and length!
And if you want a current example of “Checkpoint Charlie, drunk on power” just view this video with its utterly thick police ‘officers’ chewing gum incessantly!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot7j_9qLUlc
CONTROL OF DIGITAL INFORMATION AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Excerpts from the article.
Source UnHerd 30/9/25
[…secrecy is a fundamental component of power. Governments have always sought to monopolise information and to shape it.
They have often kept large swathes of it secret, whether it is records of government meetings or the tabs they are keeping on criminal gangs and geopolitical adversaries [-military, economic, technology included].
At the same time, they have generally sought to censor materials which are contrary to their vision.
The question is not, therefore, whether governments should control information, since all governments of all time always have tried to do this: but what levels of control and secrecy are compatible with democratic life.
With neither politicians nor technocrats to be entirely trusted with the levers of power, a different playing field if society is to manage the circulation of information [rather than it be controlled by constituted authorities].
The [overriding dilemma] is not, therefore, whether governments should control information, since all governments of all time always have tried to do this: but what levels of control and secrecy are compatible with democratic life.
[And whether authoritarian control is an egregious assault on personal identity and denial of basic human rights!]
Who is this Toby Green person? Why aren’t they telling us?
In Weimar Germany, the shift from the worthless Papermark to the Rentenmark reset the financial system and ended hyperinflation. Today, we may be witnessing a similar reset in another form: the rollout of digital IDs as the gateway to digital money like Britcoin. Once that switch is made, citizens may have little control over the system, just as Germans had no choice but to accept the Rentenmark. What was once about fighting hyperinflation may now be about resetting fiat currency altogether — with the UK potentially serving as a test case for democracy itself, while the United States watches closely to see how it unfolds. Just my opinion…
Digital IDs give the government too much control.
What is essentially being argued here (and I certainly agree with the tenets of the argument) is that the State is a beast of pathological competition and will always be authoritarian by its very nature.
Thus any threat to this pathological competition will be dealt with severely. However, as Toby points out, is this level of authoritarianism really conducive to democratic norms or will it erode democracy to the point that the only alternative is rebellion.
So the question being asked here is whether Digital IDs is an authoritarian step too far.
Well of course it is. Not only because the State is inexorably driven by pathological competition but because humans too are driven by competition unless selective pressures like the rule of law forces cooperation.
So there is absolutely no question where Digital IDs and the State AI system that will undergird it will lead. It will lead to the political weaponisation of a centralised State AI system in order to target, track, threaten and eliminate political opponents.
This truism will lead to an unholy if not evil division between Centrism and Radicalism with Centrism the ‘civilised lot’ and Radicalism the ‘barbaric lot’.
This is exactly what is the mind of Starmer and Blair, the arch Centrists of the holier than thou order.
In this respect, for them their State authoritarianism is justified because they are the ‘civilised lot’ needing to manage the ‘barbaric lot’.
So the real question underlying Digital IDs is whether Starmer’s vision for the future of Britain holds true and that Britain’s “national renewal” should be one where we are socially sorted into the ‘civilised Centrist’ class and the ‘barbaric Radical’ class through which Starmer’s secret vision of a two tier society becomes irreversibly complete.
“The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is an alliance of the world’s biggest publishers: hosted by the BBC …”
Any ‘trusted news’ organisation hosted by the BBC is most definitely not to be trusted!
Gates has been pushing these too.
It’s part of a global operation to offer a level of insight and control that states have dreamed about for millennia.
Its consequences are so serious that, If it ever happens, humanity will cease being objective, thinking, independent beings.
“And, in terms of more prosaic politics, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did not stumble into the leadership of their political parties. Instead, they reached the top thanks to conniving backroom deals, secret manipulation of information known only to a few, and conspiratorial deployment of relationships with various players which might often be kept hidden.”
This type of thing happens in every single organisation when promotion of anyone is being discussed. Absolutely irrelevant to governmental control. Digital ID is quite a different proposition, though, and is absolutely consistent with all socialist thinking & desire.