Labour Government’s Beloved Digital ID Scheme Got Hacked

"UK governments have a dismal record of doing things properly and protecting our data."

KernowDamo: Keir Starmer’s Digital ID scheme is being sold as modernisation — but it’s modelled on another system that's already been hacked!

Right, so Keir Starmer hasn’t discovered digital ID — he’s resurrecting one of Labour’s oldest obsessions in his own seeming obsession to make himself even more widely detested than he already is.

From Tony Blair’s ID card plans to Gordon Brown’s “national identity register,” the party has championed this idea for two decades, dressing it up each time as efficiency, fairness, or modernisation. Keir Starmer’s BritCard is the latest rebrand: a mandatory digital identity system meant to prove competence while promising control. Competence would be a fine thing coming from Team Keith. His government says it will stop i*legal migration, cut i*legal working and streamline access to services. Cyber-security experts say it will create one of the largest hacking targets in Europe, not just because the model he’s copying — Estonia’s — has already been breached and suspended multiple times, but so have numerous services here in the UK, such as the NHS. UK governments have a dismal record of doing things properly and protecting our data, so what Labour calls progress looks more like a sequel to its own history of wanton public surveillance dressed up as reform and asking for trouble.

Right, so Keir Starmer calls it modernisation. His ministers call it efficiency. His think-tank calls it progress. What it looks like is malpractice on a national scale. The “BritCard” — Labour’s proposed mandatory digital ID — is being marketed as the backbone of a new modern Britain, the administrative key to unlock everything from healthcare to housing. But behind the language of convenience lies an unprecedented risk: one system, one breach, one country exposed. Every British citizen’s identity in one vast centralised database — a single point of failure for seventy million people. Who’s prepared to bet against it?