If you want to know what our rulers think of us—what they really think—look no further than the Labour Government’s proposal for digital identity cards. The idea has been floated again by Labour Together, a policy shop set up to give intellectual cover to what is, in practice, managerial statecraft by committee. The “BritCard,” as it is now called, is to be our passport to life itself—required for banking, renting, working, travelling, voting, speaking. It will be single token of government recognition, without which you will become a ghost.

Polly Toynbee, that aged tribune of the middle-class puritans, has offered her blessing. To oppose the BritCard, she says, is like objecting to driving licences. But the analogy is dishonest. A driving licence is proof of a specific skill. A digital ID card is not. It is not proof that you can do something. It is proof that you are allowed.

The usual suspects have joined the chorus of approval—Alan Johnson, David Blunkett, Jack Straw, Charles Clarke. You might call them relics of the Blair years, but they are more like revenants: figures who crawl out whenever there is some further step to tyranny to justify. Their return is significant. It confirms what was always true: that the present Labour leadership is not a repudiation of Blairism but its continuation under cover of moral exhaustion. William Hague’s name also appears—usefully reminding us that the Conservative Party has spent three decades playing straight man to the Labour punchline.

The arguments in favour are familiar: that the cards will reduce fraud, streamline access to services, and allow us to “take back control” of our borders. In practice, they will allow the State to take full control of us. In its own words, the proposal is “interoperable across sectors”—meaning you will be unable to function without presenting your credentials to the right machine. Your life will be accessible, in full, to whichever junior officer has clearance. Your movements will be stored, your transactions traced, your loyalties noted.

If the authorities wants to know whether you’ve had your injections, they’ll know. If a bank wants to know what you post on social media before offering you an account, they’ll know. If the Home Office decides you no longer qualify as “of good character,” you may simply vanish from the digital map. The State will not need to imprison you. It will simply lock your file.

Now, some objections must be restated—if only because the regime depends on our amnesia. The first is that every ID scheme in history has expanded beyond its original mandate. What begins as “anti-fraud” becomes anti-dissent. What is proposed as “optional” becomes mandatory. What is said to be a convenience becomes a condition. The cards will not remain a tool. They will become a prerequisite.

The second is that such a system, once built, will be misused—and I am assuming more good intentions than I suspect: my suspicion is that the misuses are a subsidiary element in the table of planned uses. The people now in charge of child protection, net zero enforcement, and “hate speech” legislation will have direct access to your records. The companies that train their algorithms on facial recognition and behaviour prediction will have access too. There will be leaks. There will be hacks. There will be vendettas. The only people protected will be those who designed the system.

The third objection is the most obvious: we do not need it. We already have documents. We already have National Insurance numbers. We already have passports. The drive for a unified digital ID is not born of necessity. It is born of opportunity. The surveillance tools now exist. The State would be negligent, from its own perspective, not to use them.

A fourth objection worth adding is again the Toynbee claim that tagging the whole population is “popular.” Of course it is. So were lockdowns. So was the Iraq War. Popularity in an infantilised population means nothing more than unresisting acceptance. And even if we assume majority support, why should a free society allow the majority to vote itself into serfdom? The function of a constitution is not to ratify fashionable servility but to restrain it.

But here we come to the deeper truth. This is not about fraud. It is not about immigration. It is not even about efficiency. It is about control—total, frictionless, real-time control. The British State is not content to know what you do. It wants to mediate it. The State sees you not as a citizen, but as an exploitable resource. Your data is the real product. Your rights, if acknowledged at all, are an obstacle to be routed around.

As ever, the real driver is not the politicians, but the monied interest. The banks, the tech firms, the global compliance industry—all stand to benefit from turning the population into credentialled clients of the State-finance nexus. Fraud is a cost. Non-compliance is a risk. Dissent is volatility. Digital ID solves all three. It converts people into manageable inputs.

I will repeat—there are two centres of power in Britain. There is the genuine ruling class, a largely unseen and often inchoate set of interest groups which operate through finance. This is at the top. It sets the agenda. There is the governing class, this being the visible structure of politicians and administrators and enforcers. It is formally subject to democratic oversight, but that is a fraud. The governing class looks wholly to the ruling class for its agenda. Its party divisions then compete to sell this agenda, repackaged according to historic preference, to the electorate. Below this is the mass of policy institutes, of charities, of bureaucratic agencies, all staffed by the non-productive wing of the bourgeoisie, who have turned England into a digital prison with gourmet coffee and Netflix access. Ordinary people are outside this loop. Their job is to listen and vote, and to believe that somehow they have a choice in how they are governed.

This is how power works. If the governing class wants something, and the ruling class does not, it will not happen. If the ruling class agrees, it will happen. If the ruling class is indifferent, it may or may not happen. If ordinary people are so outraged that they are prepared the destabilise the system by withdrawing consent, it will be reconsidered. Since the first condition seems to apply here, and the last does not, there will be identity cards.

There is no easy escape. Parliament is irrelevant. The courts are useless. The opposition is fictional. The media are complicit. There may be street protests—there may even be a few brave refusals—but the system is designed to isolate, ridicule, or deplatform such people before they can attract a following. Resistance will be labelled “far-right.” Disagreement will be reclassified as “misinformation.”

What, then, can be done? The honest answer is: not much—yet. But we can refuse to lie about what is happening. We can name the system for what it is: tagging and control. We can keep a public record of who supports it. And we can hold in reserve the only real solution, which is political rupture—what the Romans called res novae.

If that day comes, we shall need lists. Not of criminals, but of collaborators. Not of abstract categories, but of individuals—named, documented, preserved. Let Polly Toynbee and her patrons enjoy their little wins. Let the Blairites rehearse their speeches. But let them do so knowing that, if they are watching us, we are watching them.