They aren't bringing ID cards in to make people's lives easier, they are specifically bringing them in to make certain people's lives harder.

Whether or not digital ID is a good long-term policy, the politics of it are that Labour just set up a battle with its own party and all the others, promising to achieve something this scheme probably can't, at an obvious actual and opportunity cost.

This has brought to mind a thread Paul Embery did years ago about how damaging it was for kids to grow up in one-parent households, where it simply didn't occur to him that people in that category might be reading at all, let alone that he might be actively insulting prominent figures in Westminster

Estimates of the size of the "shadow economy" France 7% Germany 7% Italy 8% ..even Estonia 7% UK: 5% Idea that ID cards are some kind of panacea... www.ey.com/content/dam/...

Here's the press release for digital ID and it is quite the shopping list of features. My first concern here is for the team who need to deliver quickly against the mix of a general purpose "do everything" app and a fairly specific set of features set out here www.gov.uk/government/n...

First thought, was I know I'm tired but I didn't realise I'd slept for 3 years. This is an absolutely crazy way to use and report polling. It should not be getting this kind of priority at this stage in an electoral cycle.

Turns out if you spend five years advocating for the wallet inspector, it is really hard to let go of the idea you need your wallet inspecting every three months.

Well, this is a hot mess of dog whistles and utter nonsense. For a speech claiming to tackle "toxic" and "poisonous" rhetoric Starmer leans heavily into pandering to the usual misinformation about migrants and portraying anti-immigration ideals as "patriotic" www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09...

Hence what I wrote here on how the UK OSA’s general monitoring obligation for terrorist content is a problem. It provides the legal model for politicised _pre-publication_ censorship of anyone the demon spooge of Stornoway declares a terrorist. internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

If the aim was to 1) construct an even uglier, more extreme version of our already very racist, needlessly cruel persecution machine, then 2) hand the keys to the posh National Front by 3) collapsing as hated public enemies, in an avalanche of corruption scandals: how would it look different?

A double helping of You Were Warned Again And Again here. Nobody can say there were no telltale signs, for either story.

This is almost literally the ‘they’re right, vote for us’ meme.

Doing 5Live in a minute on ID cards and I'm wracking my brain as to why anyone would need an ID card to report a pothole? Could people get some kind of gold star for reporting more than 10 potholes? Penalised for reporting too many? WHAT IS THE USE CASE?

this might a stupid question but doesn’t this already exist in the form of the electronic ILR/visa/settled status schemes? so surely this is nakedly about adding another layer on top of that and applying it to even more people and, you know, getting more tech involved

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay “They were men who felt that The Time Had Come. Regimes can survive barbarian hordes, crazed terrorists and hooded secret societies, but they're in real trouble when prosperous and anonymous men sit around a big table and think thoughts like that.”

Let’s also set up infrastructure that a far-right populist party might abuse should they win an election.

I can't say for sure that with Musk, Thiel and Ellison making their moves that Britain is being treated as a potential MAGA/Broligarch colony for their experiments in data harvesting and algorithmic capture - but it sure looks like it

I chatted with the @financialtimes.com about my writing, the podcast, tech criticism, and being myself. archive.is/2025.09.25-0...

apparently being opposed to id cards is ‘middle class’. the ‘centrists’ got on their bullshit right quick. 🙄

not sure ive ever seen such a transparently cynical ploy to make an unpopular thing popular as trying to claim that digital id cards will do anything about a) immigration & b) *potholes* ffs

Michelle Mone

Who do we reckon they outsource the ID cards - The BritCard - to? Oracle got to be early favourites but Palantir feels just right.

I wrote this for @thefence.bsky.social in July 2024, on Tony Blair, Labout and the ID card mania that will never, ever die.

ID cards is an issue I've changed my mind on many times. There are big potential benefits and big potential downsides. But using them as part of anti-immigrant messaging as a means to exclude rather than include is just playing into the hands of the worst people. And "Brit card" is a terrible name.

If this intends to make it legally compulsory for every adult in Derry to carry something called a "Brit Card", then I'm willing to offer some high-paid consultancy on why this plan might be flawed.

Upping this. I’ll update it at some point…

LOL why not, lads? Why would you guys be allowed to just run off at the yap with whatever seems half-reasonable to you, but the bad guys have to watch their mouths? Why would anyone think that would be the result.

Yeah it's been a rough year for believing in boring-but-competent centre left technocrats being the right answer to the Tory shower

Emotion is absolutely one of the best albums ever made. The B sides/bonus tracks are probably my faves. That's it. That's the skeet.

On this - if you are paying attention (which I know is a small number) it does further damage around the possibility of trust. It is reasonable not to trust a word that comes out of Torsten Bell's mouth. But that leads us to quite a dark place that you can't trust an exceptionally dull wonky man.

It's also worth noting that Torsten Bell - ex of this particular parish - knew this to his core, yet sat there on the flipping tellybox defending NOT lifting it. If the people who do this research and lobby for this change then go into government and...do nothing...where do we stand? I don't know.

Can we just ignore Tony fucking Blair. How about that

Christ imagine having to talk to these people as part of your job and always be going hahaha Toby, you have the most excellent patter, very banterific, you're kind of like that guy from in the thick of it

I am a bit biased but I read this and at the end actually say "well done, Jonn" aloud a bit more than is possibly psychologically healthy.

Seriously, numbers have taken a hit of late and I feel sad when number go down, if you like this stuff please do consider supporting. Go on, today it's 10% off the usual price AND two months free on the end! and I'll publicly cheer your name, probably

I agree with this while maintaining a massive issue this Labour Government has is how much the bad south, the patterless south, the joyless southern lads it is. It's Peter Kyle's Labour Party. Wes Streeting's. Steve Reed's. Keir Starmer's. No patter to be seen. Loads of snide though.

formally launching my "Burnham is a symptom not a solution" take if your Labour party finds itself turning to Andy Burnham and going ohhhhhh should we maybe go for him instead then that means your Labour party is feeling poorly and must be tended to, don't ignore the Burnham warning signs

Should you happen to be in Manchester this evening between 7 and 8, please pop along and hear my chat with @beardedgenius.bsky.social. Best question wins a *pack of Aunt Bessie's Yorkshires. *Small. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/daniel-gra...

These people are willing to let so much stuff get worse if it ensures the left never return. It’s what they were designed to do and it’s also why they’re incapable of doing anything else

Cannot stress enough how it is already possible to report potholes www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

We are well past debates about legal clauses about privacy or content moderation. We are in the hands of people who want Jesus Christ to emerge from the cloud or the Singularity to emerge from the Cloud. Anyone and anything in their way is the antichrist. That means us. You need to realise this.

Quite. So many Labour people on this website visibly have no idea of just how bad things have got for ethnic minorities since they came on, and how their visible indifference lands.

My dissertation made this point. Technology is in the hands of two movements (Christian Nationalism and TESCREAL) who are both guided by apocalyptic eschatology. These are people for whom everything is a battle for the final end. Which *they want*. Law, policy, regulations, and you are in their way.

Quite the day for Oracle, eh? (illustrated with an actual picture of a bin fire) www.theregister.com/2025/09/24/u...

Suspect this New Statesman deep dive into the Tony Blair Institute makes the case that the correct "Economist descriptor" for the TBI is now "Oracle dealership" rather than "think tank" www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

A nice example here of how absurd corruption that everyone quite clearly knew about all along goes through a long process from “absolutely insane, anyone upset about it is an apeshit deranged imbecile” to “old news, everyone has known about it for years, there’s really nothing to see here”.

Starmer's Labour are spinning out in a rudderless crisis because they truly believe it was kicking the fuck out of the left—and not the simultaneous collapse of Thatcher's Tories and the USSR—that drove their ascent in the '90s, so they've bought into it like Lisa's rock that keeps tigers away.

When it's brown people doing it, it's "economic inactivity". When they want white people to do it, it's "raising the next generation"...

Do you notice how in Britain, you can’t even enjoy obvious fraudsters being caught and exposed because the people explaining it knew very well they were fraudsters, actively helped their fraud and told the public anyone who said there was fraud going on was insane? And those people are going nowhere

A parade of Labour Home Secretaries from the late 1990s onwards, chanting "Bogus Asylum Seekers!" in an ominous chorus of demonisation...