On 28 June 2005 the House of Commons debated the second reading of the Identity Cards Bill. My sole contribution to the debate was an attempt to intervene on Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, who was leading for the government, an attempt he completely rebuffed, and so I am recorded as having said nothing of note. But all I wanted to say was said soon afterwards by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, Mark Oaten:
Let us first consider the Bill's purpose. The Government keep changing their minds—every time that they advance an argument and it is knocked down, they have to find a different argument in favour. They started off with terrorism, before moving to health tourism; then it was benefit fraud; then illegal working; and now, finally, they are going for ID theft. On each occasion, the argument is put forward and then defeated.
Fast forward just over 20 years and here is the same Charles Clarke in a letter to the Times on 5 September 2025:
Theresa May’s first act when she became home secretary in 2010 was to … abandon ID cards and set up a photocall to destroy the hard disk containing the data. This decision severely weakened our capacity to control immigration, with the disastrous consequences we see today.
Charles Clarke, and other Labour veterans of 2005 such as David Blunkett and the otherwise estimable Pat McFadden are looping through their list of justifications for this solution looking for a problem and have clicked back to ‘illegal working’. The trouble is that this justification is even less convincing now than it was in 2005.
The question you always have to ask about ID cards (or, to be more accurate, a massive single ID database under the exclusive control of the state, attempting to cover everyone in the country) is, ‘How?’ How, precisely, will this database prevent illegal working?
Anyone who has had anything to do with employing people in Britain will know that since 2006 (under another New Labour era statute, the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act) it has been an offence to employ someone who lacks the right to work in the UK. This duty is now enforced through compulsory ‘right to work’ checks that require employers to examine not only a potential employee’s passport but also, if the passport is not British or Irish, their immigration documents. Those documents now come in the form of photo-ID biometric cards or stickers in their passports. From July 2025 all these cards and stickers are being replaced by eVisas, which are online photo ID and biometric records. Both British and Irish passports and all eVisas are checkable online. So the question for ID card enthusiasts is what gap in the system would a British ID card fill? Everyone not British or Irish who is entitled to work in Britain will already be on a checkable ID database. People who are not entitled to work will not be on the database and so employers have no excuse for employing them.
Charles Clarke also said in his letter to the Times:
Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, said in 2008 that by 2014-15, 90 per cent of foreign nationals would have a card.
But that is not as good as the situation we have now, under which 100% of foreign nationals entitled to work are on the system and people not entitled to work are not able to prove otherwise.
That is not to say that illegal working is not a problem. Enforcement, both of the right to work and of other aspects of employment standards, is insufficient. But ID cards would make no difference to enforcement. Employers willing to take the risk of making no right to work checks would take those risks regardless of whether the checks are of eVisas or identity cards.
Another current problem is the scope of the obligation to make right to work checks. Some employers, especially in the gig economy, have been claiming that the obligation does not apply to them because their riders or other collaborators are not ‘employees’. The government is proposing to close this loophole in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill currently before parliament.
A further gap is that genuine self-employment is not covered, but that gap is not accidental. No government has been prepared to impose right to work checks on the vast number of householders who occasionally pay a window cleaner or a jobbing gardener. And again, ID cards would make no difference. They would merely add a different way of checking information that can already be checked and would be no less vulnerable to forgery or theft than what we have now.
In any case, as the Oxford Migration Observatory, drawing on World Bank findings, says, illegal working is possibly bigger in France, which has ID cards, than in Britain, which does not. ID cards are irrelevant to preventing illegal working.
So the puzzle for me is what drives Labour politicians (and some others) around the ID card loop? What is the enduring appeal of ID cards that always survives facts and logic? Paul Krugman talks about ‘zombie ideas’, ideas that keeping coming back to life no matter how many times they are apparently killed off by reason and experience, such as the idea that the path to national prosperity is taxing the rich less. For New Labour, with Tony Blair still out ahead, ID cards are a beloved zombie.
Why do they do it? Admittedly, it is just as difficult for Liberals to understand non-Liberals as it is for non-Liberals to understand Liberals, but here are a few observations from the Liberal side of the fence.
An essential background point is that Labour (old, new or whatever it is now) has always been complacent about the state, both about its capacity for malevolence and about its competence. In the 2005 debate, my old office mate Martin Horwood asked Tom Harris, then a Labour MP but now, it seems, a legacy Conservative Party supporter, whether he accepted that the problem with a national identity database was that ‘there is no guarantee or safeguard that once data have been collected it would not be abused by a future Government?’ Harris responded:
I shall not submit to that nonsense—that a dictatorship is waiting to be elected to the government of the UK. The Executive is held to account by the House and I am confident that the country can rely on that safeguard.
The current generation of Labour politicians seem equally complacent about the possible election, on 30% of the vote, of a Trumpist, Viktor Orban-admiring, Putin-friendly British government. It is far from nonsense to worry that such a government might be tempted to turn off the transactional lives of its political opponents, their access to healthcare, work, benefits, housing, finance, and even, according to some lists of the ID system’s proposed functions, their ability to make valid contracts.
Equally big a danger is government incompetence. Anyone who has tried to get the government’s current ID verification system to work – a daze of websites, apps, QR codes and inaccurate instructions – will know that a fully-fledged national ID system is unlikely to work as intended. Being accidentally excluded from your life is almost as bad as being deliberately targeted. Having one centralised database to control access to everything that matters to people creates an enormous single point of failure, which multiplies the cost of the failures that will inevitably happen. Multiple forms of ID might be less convenient, but they are unlikely all to fail at once.
But what specifically motivates Labour support for ID cards? Part of the explanation is the Blairite obsession with ‘modernisation’, which includes applying the latest fashionable technology – online this, digital that, AI the other – to political problems. They combine this techno-faddishness with a form of historical determinism that claims that technological change leads inexorably to the social and political change they want. Blair in 2003 waved away practical and political objections to his first ID cards project with the words ‘I just see this as an idea whose time has come’.
That technocratic instinct melds into a more traditional Labour trait – a belief that equality requires uniformity and that achieving uniformity means that individuals must bend to the state, not the state to individuals. Blunkett admitted as much when he claimed in the Financial Times on 6 September 2025 that ID cards ‘would … reinforce our sense of belonging: our personal identity is bound up with the integrity of the nation state, our pride in who we are and a positive version of patriotism’.
Crucially, a national identity database treats everyone alike. All are given a number, then coded into a set of standard classifications and tracked every time they interact with the state. Surely, Labour politicians think, there must be a practical use for such a perfect device for treating people in a uniform way. No such use has yet been found, of course, but they feel that the search must continue even if it means that, like people who can’t find their keys, they end up looking in places they have already looked. And so around the loop they go.
Liberals’ instincts are quite the opposite. They hate uniformity, surveillance and shoving individuals into standard classification schemes and they think that it is bizarre to base patriotism on such sinister foundations. For Liberals, one loop was more than enough.