While Starmer’s government is trying to expand the powers of the British State, it is using powers it already has — namely anti-terrorism laws — to arrest and intimidate pro-Palestinian journalists, activists and protesters.
After his election victory in July, which by the UK’s first-past-the-post system gave his party a disproportionate majority in parliament (h/t Vesa), 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 veteran journalist Peter Oborne warned in 2023, “you would be very unwise to believe a word Starmer ever says.”
Just in the last week, he and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, broke their pledge not to 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 in England, 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 blossoming “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 breaches 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.
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The DSIT gives me the creeps. From the link provided by Nick:
I find the first sentence here absolutely at odds with the second sentence. To ensure privacy… are you promoting seamless data sharing and interoperability? Orwellian it looks indeed.
A party of Government which has already lost its own party member’s data to hacking is hardly one which inspires either confidence or trust when considering its ability and competence to administer any kind of data, never mind digital identities and health passports:
https://skwawkbox.org/2022/01/16/exclusive-labours-data-breach-means-local-parties-not-receiving-their-owed-funds/
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.
Yeah. But in the real world, how are they going to do that after Musk bundles X/Twitter with Starlink? And maybe throws in AI services to boot?
https://www.starlink.com/gb/residential
So when the rubber hits the road, this is about as realistic as US plans to win a military conflict with China over Taiwan.
As we’ve seen repeatedly, most recently in Brasil, Elmo backs down eventually when he faces the prospect of Twitter losing even more money.
Great article, just a minor correction :-)
Starmer didnt achieve a landslide victory. The fraud voting rules gave him a disproportiate majority in parliament.
This basic fact seems to have escaped the smugLibs in the UK. You’ll see them posting a lot in the Guardian comments that Kemi Badenoch’s right wing leadership of the Tories makes it impossible for them to win again. Ignoring that the UK FPTP is so broken now that a party can win a 420 seat victory on 32 or 33%. So she only needs a modest poach of former Tory voters from Reform, and that’ll be the end of the BLP. Good riddance to the scabs, says I, though of course it would mean 5 long years of Tory misrule.
edit to add: we’re only a few months into Starmergeddon, and the Greens have begun to poll in double digits. So much for the Mandelsonian “They have nowhere else to go” philosophy. Genius.
You’re quite right, Vesa. Have amended the first sentence accordingly, as well as given you a wee hat-tip. Thanks.
Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become?
Keir Starmer says hold my beer. Even though only a fraction of the population actually support him, he still has the numbers in the Parliament to push through whatever he wants. And a Tory party that is currently moving even more to the right is not the party to try to roadblock him. Sure there might be huge protests on the streets but the British police have a reputation from what I have seen of being very heavy handed. What is worse is that Starmer will take a page from the Zionist handbook. So in the same way that everybody that disagrees with Netanyahu’s government is Hamas, I can see how anybody that disagrees with Starmer will be considered a potential ‘terrorist’ and prosecuted under the terrorist laws which we are seeing already. Actually I saw this being done years ago when a protesting holocaust survivor was removed from a Labour conference under these laws. What might throw a spanner in the works is his declaration of war on Twitter and Musk might get it into his head to return the favour, especially if Trump become President again.
Thank you, Rev.
For twenty odd years, Israeli security personnel have been deployed on Britain’s streets, thanks to an agreement concluded under Blair and updated when Ben Wallace was defence secretary and Priti Patel was home secretary.
A friend, ex US and UK government official, reckons that Israeli personnel were involved in the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005.
The last Tory budget increased the funding for the Zionist Community Security Trust and the Shomrim mock police force. Labour has maintained that funding.
Israeli security personnel have been deployed on Britain’s streets, thanks to an agreement concluded under Blair and updated when Ben Wallace was defence secretary and Priti Patel was home secretary.
This is… incredible. Was that agreement made public?
Whoever might oppose such agreement would instantly charged as antisemite. Possibly.
Thank you, Vao.
The second one, updated under the Tories, was. There was a photo shoot, even.
The agreement provides for training, exchange of personnel, research and development, intel gathering etc.
there were a lot of rumours of Israelis showing the RUC and UDR how to deal with uppity natives in Northern Ireland back in the 1980s, more than 40 years ago. Though I suppose this is in the UK, not mainland Britain.
Some details on London NW Shomrim from May – never heard of them before. Photo of a Met-style police car.
Would this Israeli involvement also have been on the Met’s recent adoption of shoot to kill policies (aiming for the head, IIRC, rather than the heart)? I seem to.recall something about this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Kratos
Thank you, Nick.
A couple more tidbits:
A handful of academics are under investigation for anti-semitism, standing up for Palestinians in reality, and under threat of dismissal. Their employers would prefer that they go quietly, unlike professor David Miller, wrongly dismissed by Bristol*. *In a Zionist campaign part fronted by former Green MP Caroline Lucas.
Over October, IT firms and Bill Gates met the government to discuss greater automation and private sector provision. Gates also discussed opportunities in agriculture for his Cascade investment firm.
With regard to Labour MPs, one hears that a few are privately critical, but fear the loss of the whip and don’t want to push their luck. Most are like farm animals in a field watching a train / reality pass by. Few will or expect to make minister. Many, like mine* with her majority of 500 odd and already being targeted by the local Tories, expect to lose in 2029 and wish to have options in the NGO-charity-lobbyist-think tank etc. complex*. *Friend of David Miliband and ex International Rescue Committee.
I should have added that I’m sure Nick meant the indefatigable Peter Oborne.
You’re right, Colonel. Thanks for the heads-up (and apologies to Peter).
Nick Corbishley has written a fine, incisive post and the comments are interesting.
A couple of important points to make are that Tory government set the UK on a very low investment to GDP ratio. Labour evidently means to continue the low ratio, and this has contributed to remarkably low labor productivity growth since 2007 and low per capita GDP growth in turn. Debt is relatively high, investment and growth low and Labour is making sure the UK will continue to lag.
Also, Tory and Labour disdain for China can only be self-defeating and needs to be set aside.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qFRz
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and China, 1977-2023
(Indexed to 1977)
Peter Oborne, rather than John Obourne?
I believe that is correct, I might not see eye to eye with his high tory politics, but there’s nothing wrong with his sense of smell.
Very informative, and very scary.
(P.S. Where can I buy those massive breeches?)
All this is kind of inevitable. Yes, the corrupt politicians are what they are but the problem is less them and their oligarch masters–it is the hyper-materialist, hyper-hedonistic, and consumerist public. When culture changes and people begin to realize that there are more satisfactory ways to live, i.e., in relative freedom from coercion, then change can begin. We aren’t there yet in the Empire. The UK is kind of a test-kitchen for the USA. Fortunately for us we have a Second Amendment.
Hamas has similar weapons to those you Americans possess under the much-vaunted 2nd Amendment, itself a product of the first drafts of the 1689 Bill of rights in England giving Protestants the right to bear arms.
However Hamas light weapons are not able to deal with U.S. 2000lb bombs or Drones with Sidewinder missiles and I wonder what you expect when US Feds decide „to Waco you“ will be left of your AR-15 or hidden M-4 ?
Might be better to ask the Vietnamese or Afghan Taliban that question. ;-)
As expected . More and more dictatorship by parliament.
A good question is why. What do the senior politicians personally benefit from this?
Perhaps it is US money delivered by Israel, scattered over the herd of members of parliament, epically the senior members and Banked overseas.
Why?
“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
Leeds University must have had some peculiar Law Lecturers to have Jack Straw or Keir Starmer as alumni – with their strange anti-English cultural political orientation
I had hoped for a surge in Muslim candidates splitting Labour vote but they simply created new splinter factions to prevent that as with George Galloway getting sandbagged
Then with Reform taking conservative voters the split vote gave Labour lots of marginal victories with a few hundred votes susceptible to eradication come a by-election but which could lead to a party split
After all lots of seats implies breadth but low majorities implies no depth and nervous MPs unable to absorb too much anger in constituencies
I see Starmer in crisis within 15 months and sooner if the US-U.K. Defence Agreement is not renewed by year-end
Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham, referred to the British system of government as an “elected dictatorship” which was temporary and the “dictator” could be changed at the whim of the House of Commons or the people at a general election.
The UK, like much of the Western world, has begun to consolidate power as a liberal autocracy, ruled by an unchallengeable leader, and in which the only liberal right is our duty to agree with whatever that leader says is acceptable, whether it is legally codified or not.
It is a system of government ideologically freem or indeed duty bound, to ignore the wishes of the people it governs and it has the moral obligation to impose that system, along with all the elements of the “international rules based order”, on all those other countries it considers incorrectly governed whether it is the Ukraine, Georgia, Muldova, Libya, the Lebanon, Serbia, the Palestinian people, et al, but, unfortunately, less so the Iranians and Russians who have the power to resist any Westen army and to retaliate harshly against any of the Western powers deep into their own territory.
I live in a country where it has become a crime to call a genocide a genocide, an anti-Zionist Jew can be arrested for antisemism, and in which the government is the single major source of systematic disinformation to be disseminated by the MSM and government trolls, and censorship and lies are both the foundations and building blocks of the system.
How long will it take before Starmer enters every home and deals death to the tame pet squirrel, confiscate the old lady’s budgerigar and deprive the lonely, childless cat lady of her only companion? And doubters of their freedom and lives?
Like so much the problem lies with Lloyd George. The 1911 Parliament Act is the only British Act with an explanatory preamble stating it was temporary until an elected Upper House was arranged. The Parliament stopped the Upper Chamber obstructing spending or taxation and gave it limited power to block the Commons.
That is where the elected dictatorship evolved – in having no real Revising Chamber. The other problem is the party system with centralised control over constituency parties
When Trump declassifies files on Nordstream it should blow up Germany and U.K. and probably Norway as Russia has grounds to sue for damages