Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

In all fairness, the “immigration” story is likely just a convenient spin on a more realistic goal of state surveillance on it’s own citizens.

While there is almost guaranteed to be an aspect of this, the UK is going through a period where immigration is in the news constantly and the populist party "Reform UK" are on the rise.

The Labour government has realised that whatever their own feelings are about people coming to the UK by irregular means and claiming asylum, they need to be seen to recognise the popular narrative right now that the boats must be stopped, and be seen to be taking action.

So I don't think the immediate state goal right here is likely to be anything deeper than desperately trying to head off Nigel Farage, who is capturing a lot of public discourse about this 'crisis'.

… except that trying to out-Farage Farage (by being bastards to asylum seekers) will lose them many of their traditional supporters (who are not big on being bastards to asylum seekers) and seems unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters (why would they take some half-hearted populist bastardry when they can have the real deal?).

The ‘small boats’ narrative is ludicrously over-reported here. It’s such a clear case of those with most of the resources scapegoating those with none of the resources as the cause of everyone else’s problems.

Never waste a good crisis

The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window.

What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.

I don't think any of that matters any more, the issue is so firmly in the public eye that Labour need to show that they've solved it whether it's a 'real' problem or not.

> unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters

Farage is polling ahead of both major parties at the moment. That support came from somewhere. To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue. Why have they turned to someone like that? Most likely they feel their own lives and prospects getting worse and in their dissatisfaction have turned to an easy answer, someone who promises to change everything and blame the outsider. To put it starkly, reductively even, you don't get nazis when everyone feels like their life is on the up and up. Well not many anyway.

The mainstream of UK politics needs to get to grips with (perceived?) worsening standards of living and failing services, and actually take action that makes people's lives better. Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air. It's not really a wonder to me that a sizeable minority are looking outside of that, or are getting frustrated that they can't get a doctor's appointment or the roads are falling apart. It's all too easy for Fartrage to say - look over there!

It’s amazing to see Labour fall for the same trick that the Tories did with Brexit, and also incredible that Farage is still a political force after all the Brexit lies.

Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.

I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration.

I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not.

Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street.

Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats.

Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back?

Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.

Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.

For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.

The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.

You are correct. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 was brought in by Blair’s Labour Government under the guise of preventing terrorism, the hot topic at the time. It was repealed by the incoming Tory/Liberal coalition under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Lobbying for Digital ID cards continued by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” amongst others.

Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries. It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west".

Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad.

At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades. Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients.

So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on.

A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs.

So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases.

I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.

> Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air

Speaking from the other side of the pond, we can say quite confidently that the solution is not electing someone who will make reckless, bold moves. The brain trust here voted against “ambitionless, measured improvements” and for that, we got a chaotic circus.

Agreed, but unfortunately at times when things seem not to be going so well in general, people are prone to electing the person that promises them large positive changes by throwing out the stale old rulebook. Even if it’s not credible. Even when large parts of what’s apparently going wrong have been invented by that same bad actor…

I think this is part of why Brexit got through as well, some people felt it was a way to shake up a crusty, unresponsive establishment. That didn’t go so great!

we spent decades dying to "measured improvements". I don't like what my peers did about the fact that they're angry or what in particular they demanded but I don't begrudge them being angry or demanding something. You can only bullshit people about their basic living conditions for so long and long ago our political class gave up on the idea of working for people as their raison d'etre and decided instead that their job was to give us as little as it takes in order to get our votes and then use the power we give them to funnel money back to their donors. The mistake wasn't in realzing that the "left" wasn't on their side, it was in thinking that the right was just because they were the ones who pointed out how feckless, entitled and self-absorbed the center-right elitists that pass themselves off as the left had become.

That's not a trick, it's how third parties have influence in a two-party system: the two main parties are compelled to steal any popular policy from a third party before it becomes a credible threat.

Any ideas how leaving the european convention on human rights, deporting some barbers, takeaway owners and illegal construction workers, and stopping small boats in the English channel will reinvigorate Sunderland, fix South Wales after coal mining stopped, restart British Steel, bring life back to coastal holiday towns in the aftermath of cheap flights to warmer places, fire up the tired overworked Londoner on the crowded tube, bring European finance investment back into The City, tempt foreign industries to open factories in the UK, cause more doctors and nurses to be trained and paid better, and give little Sally and Timmy something to look forward to in life?

"Freeze Non-Essential Immigration. Essential skills, mainly around healthcare, must be the only exception" - Reform manifesto page 5.

The main thing Farage supporters are voting for is to see fewer Muslims and brown people and Pakistanis and Africans, and the main thing Farage is doing is stirring up is racist hate and division; Reform's own manifesto tells their supporters that they will still be seeing an awful lot of foreigners under a Reform government.

Of course it won’t help. Never claimed otherwise. That’s my whole point - while everyone’s lives and the state of the country seem to get worse, people blame the other and look for the person offering them easy answers.

If their lives were looking good, if government services weren’t a mess, and if they perceived the government was actually changing things for the better, reform would have a hard time finding suckers to vote for them.

The small boats issue is enough in the public eye it’s going to have to be tackled. But beyond that, reform need to be beaten by the UK government fixing things and making the UK optimistic about the future, rather than just same-old same-old and the whole place feeling like it’s in managed decline.

What Brexit lies?

350m for the NHS.

> "The small boats issue is enough in the public eye it’s going to have to be tackled"

It has to be tackled even though it won't fix the things the supporters want fixed, because they're doing a surface level reaction. Your earlier comment opened with "To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue"; "blame the other and look for the person offering them easy answers" is the populist bastardry, it's not a surface take to say what people are actually doing.

If you'd tried to argue that people are liking Reform's plans to scrap thousands of EU laws, cancel HS2, roll back labour protection laws, cancel ULEZ zones and give more kids asthsma, scrap 20mph zones except "where safety is critical" (because some pedestrian deaths are less important than car drivers driving everywhere they like as fast as they like), encourage smaller landlords (because housing will be better when the wealthy own more houses), etc. then you could say voting for Reform wasn't a surface take. How many Reform supporters are switching because of their pledge to bring in "online delivery tax at 4% for large, multinational enterprises"? Who thinks "Cut A&E waiting times with a campaign of ‘Pharmacy First, GP Second, A&E Last’" will put the Hope back into Land of Hope and Glory? And how many are acting along the lines of "Nigel hates the people we hate! he will hurt the right people!"?

> "reform need to be beaten by the UK government fixing things and making the UK optimistic about the future, rather than just same-old same-old and the whole place feeling like it’s in managed decline."

So far in this government, that's feeling very a very remote and unlikely future.

> It has to be tackled even though it won't fix things

Yep, because it has become a public embarassment, it's very present in all the news coverage, and the government have promised to get a handle on the situation but haven't. If they don't get it in hand the press and opposition will continue to use it as a club to beat them with. Like as not this is now a large political issue in the UK. Yougov polls suggest that around 70% of the UK public now have negative views of people crossing in small boats -

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WTZfT/3/

But look beyond that (and the generic "people coming to work illegally" category). The support for 'populist bastardry' against the wider category of immigrants drops off substantially. So yes, a government wanting to stay in power in the UK is probably going to have to do something to reduce at least the perception that people are entering the UK this way, but they won't need to follow through and go 'full Farage' to placate a lot of the public.

> because they're doing a surface level reaction

Yes? Have I claimed anywhere that the reactions of the general public in this matter are rational, sensible, moral, or really anything other than misplaced and misdirected anger about the decline of their own circumstances? I think you'll find I even called them "suckers".

Don't mistake me for someone that thinks anything about Reform is reasonable or a good plan. It's fucking shocking.

> it's not a surface take to say what people are actually doing.

That's pretty much the definition of 'surface take' I'd go for. To be other than surface you need to look at motivations and beyond that the actual causes of the behaviour.

The poster I replied to and accused of having a surface take was saying Labour won't win many Farage supporters by tackling the small boats because the supporters are only interested in populist bastardry. Firstly, the figures above show us it's far from only Farage supporters who have views on this specific issue. Secondly, that's not all that Farage supporters are interested in.

For example look at this info on what reform supporters believe - https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49887-what-do-reform-...

Yes, there is a lot of populist bastardy of the "bring back hanging!" variety in there, including literally that. But there are also signs of wider disaffection and some quite left-wing views -

  "Rich people in the UK are able to get around the law or get off more easily than poorer people"
  "Big businesses in the UK take advantage of ordinary people"
  "Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation's wealth"
  "Utilities like energy, water and railways should be run in the public sector"
  "Rich people in the UK should be taxed more than average earners"

There are likely quite a lot of these people who could be won over to Labour by the government taking a fairly hard line on irregular migration but otherwise pursuing a pretty socialist agenda. Writing them off as only interested in populist bastardry overlooks that there are positive ways they could be brought around.

> If you'd tried to argue that people are liking Reform's plans...

I would be very surprised if most Reform supporters had the first clue what the party's actual plans are, beyond the headline of deporting immigrants.

> So far in this government, that's feeling very a very remote and unlikely future.

I very much agree, which is why I'm coming to the sad conclusion that Farage is quite likely to be the next PM.

tl;dr - Reform support is a symptom of mass disaffection and perceived decline in living standards. But Labour are backed into a corner and have to stop the boats regardless.