Peter MacDonald
Keir Starmer’s announcement of a British digital ID system is being marketed as ‘modernisation’ and ‘public safety’. In truth, it’s the revival of an old project first floated under Tony Blair nearly 30 years ago. Blair still promotes this system with an almost manic obsession, like a man under orders himself. Starmer now follows the same script, acting less as an innovator and more as a courier for his deep-state British handlers who answer to the broader establishment.
This continuity is no accident. Blair and Starmer are not architects of policy, but delivery boys. The real authors are the permanent administrative class: call them the deep state, the British establishment, the Bureaucratic elite [as portrayed a few years ago, in the ’80s TV series Yes Prime Minister] or the security-industrial complex that ensures certain projects survive any change of party or government. Starmer’s job has simply been to introduce digital ID back into the public consciousness. That is all he was required to do.
We’ve seen the same playbook elsewhere. Switzerland has just rolled out Europe’s first digital ID for citizens. For now, it’s voluntary but anyone watching closely knows what comes next. Within a few years it will be shifted from optional to mandatory. Britain’s system will follow the same path. Step one is to get the public used to the idea. Starmer has now delivered that step.
In the process, he has also ticked other boxes for the establishment: maintaining Britain’s unwavering alignment with the Ukraine war narrative, and quietly making moves to bring Britain back into closer alignment with Europe. Each of these was a priority, and each has been carried out.
And once his work is done... Leaders like Starmer are expendable. My prediction: within six months, having served his purpose, Keir Starmer will be replaced by Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, who is already being groomed for higher office.
The uncomfortable truth is that politicians like Blair, Starmer and Burnham are not in charge: they are functionaries – temporary managers put in place to sell pre-packaged policies designed elsewhere. The deeper establishment with its financiers, think tanks and intellectual networks remains firmly in control.
Digital ID is not about convenience or safety: it is about power and control. And until the British public, and for that matter the Kiwi public, recognises that their leaders are only the messengers, not the authors, of these policies, the steady march toward a controlled, data-driven future will continue unchecked.
