Comment by smashah
7 months ago
At this point, the UK government is beyond shaming. On the contrary, it shame and record-breaking unpopularity seems to empower them.
I wouldn't put it passed them to require the digital ID to access the internet passed curfew.
*past (in both cases)
Something that I think normal, decent people don't appreciate enough: you can join an organization without believing a word of what it stands for. It's perfectly possible to just pretend. It doesn't take a ton of resources or a big coordinated conspiracy to join and betray an organization, it just takes a bit of self-confidence, or chutzpah.
One person I believe knows this, is Keir Starmer. It's very hard to explain why things happen in UK politics without assuming he is trying to tank Labour.
What one might contribute to malice can normally be attributed to ignorance. I think the political class in the UK is just completely bifurcated from the public (not as much as the Tories were, but more than I though Labour would be), such that every decision senior Labour leaders are making is lauded in progressively smaller circles they keep and they're oblivious to the reality of the situation. They just don't feel the condemnation of the general public. I think current Labour genuinely thinks their popularity is higher than it is polling, and that they're doing what people want.
To caveate this, I am a Labour member (with the goal of advising tech policy such that they don't send our tech industry off a sharp cliff). I've spoken to a few in the cabinet now about growth and industrial policy, and there's no appetite for engagement outside of their think-tanks. I go to the conferences today, and in contrast to the Tory government days where the main topic of conversation was "what do people want" and "how do we gain seats in the election", it's now all navel-gazing about how "well" their policies poll (vs how well the party does, as if they're the same thing). It's baffling how out of touch the current power brokers are regarding the danger Labour are in. There's rose-tinted glasses, and then there's obsidian-tinted horse blinders.
Labour thought it was a good idea to follow Corbyn. I don’t mean that an insult or a gotcha. But it was not a well thought out plan.
The part about only listening to their own think tanks is weird. Academia leans left. American conservatives are suspicious of advice not from their think-tanks, but that’s because it’s hostile territory. The Democrats treat the university/expert/consultant class as free labor.
I don’t mean to be critical of your country especially given who is running America. But we do watch, and it has an impact here. Fear of an American Corbyn is one reason Democrats aren’t veering left.
Also I don’t know if this is related, but the fact that the US is about to install Tony Blair to head Gaza should make you rethink Labour’s capacity for thought.
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Malice is a strong word. I think they (because as another commenter points out, he can't do this entirely alone) primarily just don't care, and secondarily, just assume there's going to be a reward. They aren't told by some shadowy cabal there's going to be a reward, they just assume it.
It's not an unreasonable assumption either. Nick Clegg did seemingly get rewarded for tanking the lib Dems. The ones lower in the party hierarchy will also have seen plenty of examples of pyrrhic loyalty being rewarded.
What modern parties effectively teach - UK Labour is just one of many examples, not even the only example in the UK - is that the supreme political virtue is loyalty to decisions taken in rooms you weren't invited to. That, they think, will eventually get them invited to those rooms.
The sad thing is that whether the rooms actually exist or not, the result is much the same.
"Don't obey in advance" is Tim Snyder's first rule against tyranny. While that is a great moral rule to follow in tyrannies, all organizations want people to obey beforehand, whether tyrannies or not. It's called showing initiative, doing what's needed without having to be told explicitly, and no organisation can function without it.
But in organizations with opaque power structures, where it's expected that decisions are taken unaccountably ("Noen har snakket sammen", loosely, "There has been discussion", used to be an ironic phrase in the Norwegian Labour Party), people may easily slip into obeying in advance a tyrant who doesn't even exist. They're trying to please the responsible people who are surely in charge somewhere nebulously above them in the hierarchy, but those people don't exist, it's bullshitters like Starmer all the way to the top.
Snyder's had his first rule, but I have a first rule too, which I keep repeating, and that is that powerful people believe in all the stupid things regular people believe in. They just act differently on the beliefs. A common person who thinks covid was an ethnically targeted bioweapon rants about it online and gets banned from Reddit. A powerful person who believes it, thinks "it's important that we too get such a weapon, and don't trust experts who say it can't be done, they probably just have scruples". A common person who thinks a Jewish cabal rules the world maybe pesters his relatives with it all day. A powerful person who believes it - well, he's more likely to do something like what Starmer has been doing the last decade. You don't try to fight Bilderberg, obviously, you try to get invited to it. Once you do, (like e.g Jens Stoltenberg was) you probably get disappointed and try to figure out who the real competent ones behind them too are, and how to join them - but you're not terribly disappointed, because on the way up you've been rewarded by all the others who thought they'd be rewarded for supporting someone like you.
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If Starmer were trying to do this alone, then what are the other ministers doing? The UK is a parliamentary democracy, not a presidential government, so it's not just him, it's the rest of the Labour stooges too.
Power is very concentrated in the PM's office and with the Cabinet Secretary. Even to the point where individual ministers are relatively weak within the system. One of the common lines you can find in almost any political autobiography in the UK (last... say... 30-40 years) goes something like "I entered government eager to grasp the levers of power, but never managed to truly find them".
The central party has frequently removed left wing candidates elected by local constituency members and imposes right wing blairite candidates by diktat.
> It's very hard to explain why things happen in UK politics without assuming he is trying to tank Labour.
Or they just focused on getting into government with very little plan about what to do when there, and with a particularly inexperienced team (few former cabinet ministers in the elected Labour MPs).
The Starmer Cabinet's entire history points to the fact they they were engineered to take over in order to deliver 2 things: 1. The Holocaust of Gaza 2. A red carpet for Foreign Agent Traitor Langley Farage to take over.
If they cared about the country - they don't, they have complete contempt for the public - they would step down, dissolve the party and those in the party with a remaining qubit of morality put their efforts into atoning for their sins and crimes against freedom by working to get a Green/YP/LibDem coalition elected.
Every day they lolligag with this dead party is another vote for Reform - they know this.
something I think that needs to be taken into account here is that for 14 years the Tories made decisions far more harmful, far more disconnected, and--in isolation--far less popular with the public than anything Labour has even considered doing, and yet for most of that time actually gained in popularity. why? because most voters in this country read and read news sources in favour of right-wing politics, and even the news sources that are more "left-wing"--The Mirror and The Guardian--aren't as sycophantic anyway. if Labour had the sycophantic media support that the Tories or even Reform do, none of you in this thread would be saying any of this. you may ask "who even reads newspapers these days", but this is not really a useful point, as many people may not read them directly, but they still broadly set the narrative, the tone and the cycle, even if you're hearing it second or third hand via social media
this isn't to say that Keir Starmer is doing an amazing job. he's not. he's far too comfortable with authoritarianism and far too establishmentarian, and I would much rather someone like Andy Burnham in charge--even if you can trust his policy positions just as much as Starmer's from when he won the leadership--just because he has some energy and charisma about him, and you feel like he might be able to counteract Farage somewhat, but, at the same time, the level of scrutiny of Labour is incredibly unfair and before you criticise them yourself, you have to try and remember that you're viewing it all through that filter
Tbf, well implemented digital ID would be much preferable to the idiotic situation that we're in now. The emphasis on well implemented.
I still don't understand how someone is supposed to benefit from such a thing. If I want to use some service, I'll sign up for an account with it. The only thing a centralized ID is going to do is let the service correlate me with a different account on a different service, which is exactly the thing that I don't want.
How is someone supposed to benefit from a thing whose only function is to reduce the friction against forcing them to correlate their otherwise-independent activity against their will?
What I use my digital id for, is services, where the provider needs to know that I am me. I only use a small part of the services that we have in Norway that you can access with out digital id (BankID) solution, but those are useful for me, and I do not think all of them would exists without it.
For governmental services, I use it for things like logging into health care services. Where I've used it for checking my prescriptions, and communicating with my doctor. If I had kids I would have used it for contact with the school. An other governmental use is tax filling and tax returns which comes around every year, and this is just scratching the surface.
When it comes to non governmental usage, it is mostly bank and bank adjacent usage. I do use it to log into my different banks, my stock broker, and insurance providers.
The solution we have in Norway, is not perfect and one of the persistent problems, are that not everyone can get one, and since it is used a lot by the government, not having it, makes you a bit of a second class citizen. I do believe that they are finally doing something about that, and that the system will be redone a bit next year, so even if the banks don't like you. You will be able to get one.
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A well implemented system would somehow allow you to use your ID to prove you have the attributes a service needs (being over 18, able to drive, no criminal records, not a communist or whatever it is they need) without providing any further information that would allow multiple services to correlate ID's against eachother.
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Don't you want ai governance or something? If the last human, political act is to ensure deanonymised data online, and there is then the capacity to slurp all that data up and auto-governance is ushered in, you then just need think about how to tweak the algo to get the effect you want. Who owns the algo, is the question.
You're mistaken, the proposed system isn't centralized. The IDs only exist in the wallet.
The wallet uses Digital Verification Services (DVS) to poll APIs in front of the data the government already holds on you. These services check details you enter against that data and return cryptographic signatures for each. The wallet puts these together as IDs in a bespoke way, depending on what you need to prove. You can have any number of variations of ID and none of them are centralized.
Some of these signed proofs can be disclosed using Zero Knowledge Proofs (a cryptographic means of demonstrating something without demonstrating anything else) which would actually make it harder to 'correlate' you in the way you describe.
Another thing to bear in mind, the ID is backed up by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which reinforces data protection laws and actually wards against the use you describe.
There's a lot of misinformation flying around about this proposal, but the design itself doesn't match the negative characterizations. It's surprisingly good and weighted to the citizen.
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That would require trusting a government such as the British one to implement it well. That's far too big an ask for them, so the current situation is preferable.
Tbf, the team behind .gov websites has been exceptional and I think that part of the digitization of government services has been done really well. So I think it's definitely possible - the question is will the government do that, or will they pay someone few billion quid for an off the shelf solution from a company owned by someone's uncle/brother/cousin that will be a flaming mess.
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