Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become?

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

After his landslide election victory in July, Keir Starmer promised that his new Labour government would “tread more lightly” on the lives of voters. It is one of a multitude of pledges Starmer has broken in just his first four months in office, during which time his approval rating has suffered the biggest post-election fall of any British prime minister in the modern era.

It’s worth recalling that his government’s massive parliamentary majority represents just about 20 per cent of the eligible electorate.

As the Middle East Eye journalist John Obourne warned in 2023, “you would be very unwise to believe a word Starmer ever says.”

Last week, he and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, broke their pledge that they wouldn’t raise taxes on working people — by raising national insurance contributions for even the lowest-earning workers. The impact will be felt most keenly by small businesses, many of which are already struggling. As Richard Murphy notes on his blog, “Big businesses can afford to pay, but small businesses rarely pay their owners a great deal (contrary to common perceptions), and they will suffer, as will employment prospects for many people who are on lower pay.”

The latest broken promise came yesterday with the announcement of a hike in student tuition fees, from £9,250 to £9,535 a year. It is the first hike in seven years, and it comes after a period of persistent high inflation. Starmer had pledged to abolish tuition fees altogether when he ran for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2020, saying the Labour Party “must stand by its commitment to end the national scandal of spiralling student debt and abolish tuition fees.” Once in power, he did the exact opposite.

And there will be no “treading lightly” on voters, either. On the contrary, as Starmer told delegates at the Labour Party conference in September, under his government, the State would take more “control” in people’s lives. None of this should come as a surprise, of course. The Labour leader’s ruthless purge of the left and pro-Palestine voices in his party as well as his role in the British State’s persecution of Julian Assange were all clear warning signs, wrote Oborne and Richard Sanders, two of the journalists behind Al Jazeera‘s “The Labour Files”, in 2023:

In the Labour party, not only is the right in control, it is brutally pummelling the left into the dirt, determined that it will never again wield so much as a shred of meaningful influence within the Labour movement.

At the start of the first programme in The Labour Files, a Merseyside activist, Paul Davies, posed a question:

“If a small group of secretive people manipulate and control one of the two great parties in Great Britain, what will they do when they have control of MI5? When they have control of all the levers of the state? Are they suddenly going to believe in justice and proper investigations and fairness? Or are they going to be the same as they are now? Or even worse?”

A New, Orwellian Government Office

One of the main ways the British State plans to exert greater control over people’s lives is through the rollout of digital surveillance technologies. As we predicted would happen four months ago, the Starmer government is pushing hard to make digital identity a reality. Last week, as the country’s attention was focused on the government’s first budget announcement, Downing Street quietly launched a new government office to oversee the UK’s digital identity market: the so-called “Office for Digital Identities and Attributes”, or ODIA (which, I suppose, could be pronounced, fittingly, as “oh dear”).

First launched in 2022 by the Rishi Sunak government as an interim governing body for digital IDs, ODIA is now officially part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Its responsibilities will include developing and maintaining the UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF), which outlines standards that digital ID providers must follow, maintaining a register of certified organisations, and issuing a trust mark to identify registered services.

As the industry news site Biometric Update reports, another key task for the new government body will be liaising with international partners to promote interoperability of digital ID platforms among jurisdictions: “Industry experts have noted that the UK is behind other nations in digital ID” — including, first and foremost, the EU and Australia.

But both the UK government and its private-sectors partners are determined to catch up, notes the website Think.Digital Partners, an industry association whose “content partners” include seven UK government departments and tech companies like AWS, Microsoft and Solar Winds:

In a panel discussion on the future of digital wallets and identity strategies, industry leaders outlined both the opportunities and challenges facing the UK as it looks to become a global leader in the rapidly evolving space.

They were speaking at the recent Think Digital Identity and Cybersecurity for Government event in London…

“We’re conflating payments with wallets, but what a wallet will be in the future is likely to be much more than just payments,” explained Jim Small, head of identity at Hippo. “It’ll be a secure repository where we can own our own data, our own information, things like verifiable credentials and decentralised identifiers.”

Small pointed to initiatives around the world, from the US tech giants’ digital wallets to the EU’s eIDAS-based ID schemes, as examples of the diverse approaches being taken. However, he emphasised the need for a more centralised, ecosystem-focused framework to drive widespread adoption…

With regulatory clarity, user-centric design, and a focus on high-value use cases, the experts agreed that the UK can emerge as a global leader in digital identity, transforming how citizens interact with both government and businesses.

This would be a dream come true, not only for the tech companies involved but also for Starmer’s mentor, Tony Blair, who has repeatedly called for the development of a digital identity system in the UK, after trying but failing as prime minister to introduce an identity card system in the country. In his speeches, Blair routinely emphasises how a digital identity will be connected to one’s vaccine status.

“More Dangerous Than You Think”

Digital identity systems may help streamline bureaucracy and reduce fraud, but they are also fraught with risks. As Brett Solomon, the then-executive director of Access Now, warned in a 2018 Wired op-ed titled “Digital IDs Are More Dangerous Than You Think”, digital ID, writ large, “poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.”

Those risks include massive breeches of personal data, including biometric identifiers; hacks and system outages; function creep as more and more basic services require digital identification; unparalleled government and corporate surveillance; the near-total exclusion of people who don’t have access to mobile devices or the internet as well as those who do but choose not to comply with governments’ increasing demands.

As the WEF itself candidly admitted in a 2018 paper on digital identity, digital ID (emphasis my own) “open up (or close off) the digital world for individuals.” They can also close off vast swathes of the analogue world, too, as tens of millions of Indians have learnt since the rollout of Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital identity program, roughly a decade ago.

On October 1, the Kuwaiti government suspended electronic banking services, including cash withdrawals and payment transfers, for 60,000 people who had failed to submit their biometric data for the country’s e-ID program by the stated deadline. A few weeks later, those still in noncompliance had their electronic bank cards deactivated. Visa, MasterCard, and K-Net all complied with the government’s rules.

Like the EU, Australia, Canada and all the other Western “democracies” that are rolling out digital ID programs, the UK insists that digital identity will not be mandatory. But that’s exactly what India’s government said about its Aadhaar program. Yet as Kiran Jonnalagadda, an Indian digital rights activist, explains in Deccan Herald, enrollment in the program, while optional, “as repeatedly stated everywhere,… has been made mandatory in practice, via both illegal coercion and unconstitutional law, much of which is still being litigated in courts”:

The stated goal of Aadhaar is noble, of giving every individual an identity, but everything about it — the way it was proposed, budgeted, designed and implemented — has been inverted and used as a means to identify an individual for the convenience of the government.

Tip of the Iceberg

The Keir Starmer government is not only accelerating the development of digital identity. In the last four months, it has also:

• Unveiled plans to further expand the use of live facial recognition technology, on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force;

• Called for the creation of digital health passports for NHS patients, prompting a backlash over concerns about digital privacy and the possible sale of patient data to third-party companies — a policy that Tony Blair and former Conservative Party leader William Hague lobbied for just before the elections.

• Resurrected old Tory plans to grant inspectors at the Department of Work and Pensions increased powers to snoop on claimants’ bank accounts. Big Brother Watch warned that the increased powers could be used to spy on not only the accounts of pensioners and welfare claimants but ALL bank accounts. It was one of 18 NGOs and charities that signed a letter to the government warning that “imposing suspicionless algorithmic surveillance on the entire public has the makings of a Horizon-style scandal – with vulnerable people most likely to bear the brunt when these systems go wrong.”

• Announced plans to pilot a Central Bank Digital Currency by 2025, carrying on Rishi Sunak’s controversial Digital Pound plans, with a “blueprint” expected by Christmas. As we reported last week, the proposal is not just opposed by most members of the British public, according to one of the few public surveys conducted on the matter, but also prominent figures within the City of London.

• Launched a crackdown on lawful speech. After the riots in the summer, the Home Office is planning new non-crime “hate” measures. Again, this was a policy that was eventually dropped by the Tories, out of fears it would curtail free speech, but is now being resurrected by Starmer’s Labour Party.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. According to a recent expose by Matt Taibbi and Paul D Thacker, Starmer and his political circle are waging a war on misinformation far beyond British shores, and their ultimate goal is to destroy Elon Musk’s twitter:

“[I]nternal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate — whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign — show the group plans in writing to “kill Musk’s Twitter” while strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”

The documents obtained by The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket show CCDH’s hyperfocus on Musk — “Kill Musk’s Twitter” is the first item in the template of its monthly agenda notes dating back to the early months of this year.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is the anti-disinformation activist ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, and a messaging vehicle for Labour’s neoliberal think tank, Labour Together. Both the CCDH and Labour Together were founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street, much as Karl Rove is credited with guiding George W. Bush to the White House.

Lastly, while Starmer’s government is trying to massively expand the powers of the State, even beyond what it inherited from the Tories, it is using 0powers it already has — namely its anti-terror laws — to arrest and intimidate pro-Palestinian journalists and activists. As an op-ed in Middle East Eye reports, “protesters with placards with the ‘wrong’ slogans have been arrested and prosecuted, sometimes under anti-terror laws.”

In August, British journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested by anti-terror police as he disembarked from his plane at Heathrow airport. He was held incommunicado for 24 hours and his phone and laptop were confiscated. Since then, a string of activists and journalists have been arrested, including the human rights activist and reporter Sarah Wilkinson; Richard Barnard of Palestine Action; University of Portsmouth academic Amira Abdelhamid; Asa Winstanley, the associate editor of online news publication The Electronic Intifada; and, most recently, retired Jewish professor Haim Bresheeth.

Retired Jewish professor Haim Bresheeth, a child of Holocaust survivors and founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine, was arrested under a UK anti-terrorism law after speaking at a recent Palestine solidarity protest in London. pic.twitter.com/q2I27eIfYS

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 4, 2024

At the same time, Declassified UK has revealed that the Starmer government has ordered 100 spy flights over Gaza to assist Israeli intelligence — equivalent to more than one a day since taking office — while 13 out of Starmer’s 25 cabinet members have received donations from Pro-Israel lobby groups and individuals. 

Of course, most of these policies and practices — particularly the crackdowns on protests and free speech — represent a continuation, and at times intensification, of policies and practices already well under way under the Tories. 

Since decoupling from the EU, both Tory and now Labour governments have taken the UK in an increasingly authoritarian direction. This is, of course, a generalised trend among ostensibly “liberal democracies” — as broad economic conditions deteriorate and AI-enabled technologies advance, the temptation among governments to exploit these new surveillance and control systems is irresistible while the potential benefits for Big Tech are huge — but the UK is most definitely at its leading edge. Moreover, it is a trend that shows no sign of slowing, let alone stopping, especially given the size of Kier Starmer’s majority parliamentary majority.