A demonstrator holds up a placard outside The Palace of Westminster during a march against the implementation of digital ID cards, in central London on October 18, 2025.
Chris J Ratcliffe / AFP
The government has itself poured cold water on suggestions this form of identification is dead and buried.
Reports that the Labour government has scrapped its plan to introduce digital identity cards are “overwritten.”
That’s not according to conspiracists or, as some mainstream journalists have chosen to suggest are behind criticism of such proposals, “far-right figures.” No, Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the BBC this herself on Wednesday morning, adding that “digital checks” will still be required to work in the UK.
So pro-liberty campaigners must be careful when celebrating the rollback, and keep an eye on the likely return of more serious, mandatory plans a little further down the line.
The government started publicly talking about illegal migration as a (phoney) ‘justification’ for mandatory digital ID cards last September. Even a decent number of Labour MPs quickly recognised that this really had nothing to do with migration. Note that leftist politicians have tried all kinds of other nonsense—and, thankfully, see-through—pretexts for stripping Britons of their most basic liberties over the years.
Officials have since left “open the possibility that people will be able to use other forms of identification to prove their right to work,” according to The Guardian. The paper also cites the government as saying that this change is “just a tweak before a detailed consultation on how the system will function.” So the details could surely change again, yet.
The Big Brother Watch campaign group described the “major U-turn” as “a monumental win for freedom in the UK,” adding: “It shows that when enough of us come together we CAN stop the charge towards a dystopian surveillance state.”
But, importantly, it added that the government must still drop digital IDs “entirely,” saying “we can’t stop now.”
🚨BREAKING: Prime Minister abandons plans for a mandatory digital ID
In a major U-turn Keir Starmer is dropping plans to force everyone who wants a job onto a mandatory digital ID scheme to prove their right to work.
Silkie Carlo, the group’s director, also said that “the proposal to make right to work checks digital could raise similar cybersecurity, fraud and privacy risks that digital IDs carry.”
The devil will be in the detail but this whole digital ID debacle smacks of incompetence.
Britons who want to ‘remain’ free must remain vigilant.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
