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There was more than a hint of underpants gnomes behind Keir Starmer’s pre-conference announcement of an authoritarian digital ID system, mendaciously titled the BritCard. The reason given for rolling out the system was to prevent illegal migration… although stage 2 was entirely missing, and since most illegal migrants operate in the black economy, it is hard to see how compulsory ID’s would solve the problem.
Unsurprisingly, the announcement was followed by an official petition which reached 1.5 million signatures in 24 hours… among the fastest ever. The petition though, is too late as the legislative framework for the national surveillance system has already been enacted via the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 and the associated UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework. The aim is to pull together almost all of the data – government and corporate – held on every UK subject within a single, biometric top-tier key (which will link to the compulsory ID app on every subject’s mobile phone).
The three broad concerns with the scheme are:
- Fraud
- Bureaucratic intransigence
- Chinese-style social credit scoring.
Currently, our data is held separately. If a fraudster gets hold of your driving licence, they cannot automatically access your bank account or your health details. But under the proposed system, a hacker getting hold of your unique top-level identification could access all of your other data. And since the state already requires smartphone providers to maintain backdoor access to your data, some hacking of this kind is a foregone conclusion.
Less damaging but more likely is that someone steals and hacks your phone – a problem so widespread that London has purple warning signs on its pavements – potentially allowing thieves to drain your bank account in the same way as someone who steals your debit card might… except that without your ID app, it will be harder to get the bank to stop the transactions.
A bigger problem arises out of the Tuttle-Buttle issue that provides the storyline for the film Brazil. In the film, an insect landing on a typewriter causes the name “Buttle” to be entered as “Tuttle,” causing the accidental victim to get caught in a bureaucratic nightmare as he is deemed an enemy of the state. It is unlikely that anything quite so dystopian will come from the UK’s proposed ID system, but given the growing enshittification of the digital environment, it is easy enough to understand that a single erroneous data entry might result in a downgraded credit score or some degree of employment blacklisting. And since the problem will be algorithmic, there will be no appeal mechanism.
Ultimately, of course, this kind of total surveillance system is an authoritarian’s wet dream. We caught a glimpse of this in the demand for “vaccine passports” during the pandemic. Since the new system would link your health data to your top-level ID, using geolocation data from your phone, police could prevent you from travelling until you have the required vaccines. Similarly, you might face restrictions if you fail to “comply” with any medication you take, irrespective of any side effects this might cause. Linking health and bank data would allow the state to restrict what foods people with or at risk of metabolic disorders like diabetes or high blood pressure would be allowed to buy. And people who criticise the government may be subject to a raft of restrictions which would only become apparent when they attempted to breach them. And again, because this would be entirely algorithmic, there will be no appeals process.
Proponents and critics of digital ID may argue over the validity of these concerns. But they do agree that the proposed scheme is possible. The devil though, is in the detail. The shrinking minority of pro-Labour turd-polishers are desperate to claim that the proposal is merely for a dumb ID card scheme similar to those in Poland and Estonia. But these are “dumb” insofar as the card is not live-linked to a top-level key which brings all of a citizen’s data together. The proposed UK system would be the first in the world to do this… if it was possible.
The problem facing the UK state is the same problem facing Big Tech more generally… that active IT systems are energy hogs. And the one thing the UK is notoriously lacking is surplus energy. Last year the UK had to import more than 15 percent of its electricity – a figure that is expected to grow rapidly as its nuclear and gas generation is retired even as it builds out unreliable wind capacity. This is why Big Tech is currently pushing nuclear as the only means of powering the proposed AI datacentres. But here in the UK it takes quarter of a century to build a nuclear power station because of the pre-build approval process.
Three years ago, the International Monetary Fund produced a report into Central Bank Digital Currencies – which would be merely a subset of the data within a digital ID system. The takeaway was that while a dumb digital currency – similar to the bank credit in a current account but issued by the central bank directly – would require very little energy, a state-controlled system (which could force you to spend or save depending on economic conditions) would require more energy than is currently available. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the proposed UK digital ID system will require even more electricity which currently doesn’t exist. Not least because the UK already faces a 60GW shortage resulting from the bans on internal combustion vehicles and gas heating within the next decade.
Energy shortages – and the ensuing high prices – are also proving to be a severe brake on the roll out of the latest generation of communications infrastructure. This means that the UK lacks – and will continue to lack for a long time – the communications bandwidth envisioned for an active digital ID system. Just as banks and filling stations operate on the understanding that only a fraction of people turns up at any one time, telecommunication systems are based on normal usage, but breakdown when overloaded (try phoning someone at midnight on New Year’s Eve). Any government system that attempts real-time digital surveillance of more than 70 million people is going to crash the telecoms system as well as the electricity grid.
Although not widely recognised by the critics of digital ID, this points to the most likely problem of all – one to which the state’s increasing use of digital data has already made us vulnerable. At a time when a smartphone and internet connection are as essential as a bank account and a national insurance number, the coming power outages may prove devastating. Unlike the recent Iberian outage, which happened in ideal conditions, a UK outage is most likely to result from under-supply during an Arctic winter high pressure air system of a kind that regularly lingers over the UK for a week or more in winter. Without sufficient nuclear baseload and gas back-up, the slump in wind generation at a time of year when solar is useless, would result in either prolonged blackouts or electricity rationing (although even this assumes a degree of firm – i.e., not wind – generation). During this time, any system which requires digital access, from banking and shopping to medical records, will simply be unavailable.
For the political enthusiasts behind digital ID, they may well find themselves like children on Christmas morning… eager to play with their new toy only to find that batteries were not included. And for the wider public, this translates into further enshittification as we are forced to spend an increasing portion of our lives attempting to negotiate algorithmic digital bureaucracies that are no longer fit for purpose. Anyone who has tried to contact His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, to make an appointment with the Department of Work and Pensions, or even to get a doctor’s appointment already knows what wasting hours inside a digital system feels like. When the power goes off and the communications system breaks, those hours are likely to become days.
Nor is there a way out because of the time required to build a viable electricity grid and an over-sized communications network. The only way the UK could avoid the coming blackouts would be to invent a time machine and travel back to the 1990s and adopt wholly different energy policies. By the time government reacts – which will be some time after the lights go out, we will face the prospects of ongoing outages for a decade or more as grid managers are forced to rebuild the fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure… assuming – and this is far from certain – these are possible in a period of global shortages.
As you made it to the end…
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