Digital ID isn't just worrisome from the perspective of privacy, security and freedom. It's a major gift to Nigel Farage and Reform UK. What are Starmer and his strategists playing at?

There is no doubt that a) Digital ID will be wildly unpopular; and b) Farage will be completely against them, enabling him to position himself again as a champion of the people. In fact, he's already started.

The anti-ID cards position is very on-brand for Farage. He has a libertarian streak — at least for people like him — and reliably comes out against anything that could be seen as the state interfering with or inconveniencing him. We saw this during the Covid-19 restrictions, where he opposed masks, lockdowns, and vaccine verifications.

With already 1.5 million people having signed a petition to not introduce digital IDs, Labour has handed Farage an easy win. Why was this not completely obvious to Starmer and co.? Are they so desperate to recapture some of the enthusiasm for New Labour that they're taking advice from the Tony Blair Institute and reviving one of their least popular policies?

We do have a digital ID problem, and that is that US Big Tech already controls most people's online identities, whether by providing the major email services, or via "Sign in via Facebook/Apple/Google/Microsoft". But the public are (rightly or wrongly) even more wary about putting that power in the hands of the state. In an ideal world, we might use some form of public key cryptography for our identity — you give your public key to a service you want to use, and you/your device has the private key, and a trusted source such as your employer or your personal website could verify that your public key belongs to you, if necessary. Something like this will never happen, though — the whole point of the proposed digital IDs is the state gets to decide who is deserving of one.