Compulsory? No. Just “Voluntary” - Until It Isn’t

I'm on my favourite hobby-horse again - strategic overreach to get what you want.

Starmer has “backtracked” on compulsory digital ID. Or, more accurately, he’s stopped saying the quiet bit out loud. Because if you want to introduce a mandatory ID system in Britain, the quickest way to kill it is to announce a mandatory ID system in Britain. The country goes into instant civil liberties panic, the newspapers do their “internal passport” routine, and half the population suddenly remembers the Blair-era ID cards fiasco with the clarity of a war veteran. So the clever move isn’t to charge straight at compulsion. It’s to step back, call it voluntary, and let the thing walk in through the front door like a harmless convenience.

And to be clear, a voluntary digital ID could be genuinely useful. Less paperwork, fewer admin errors, quicker checks, easier access to services, less of that uniquely British misery where you spend forty minutes proving you’re you to a system that still thinks fax machines are cutting-edge. If it works properly, people will adopt it because it saves time and hassle. Not because they’ve suddenly become keen on government databases, but because most of us would rather not spend our remaining years wrestling with identity checks that feel like they were designed by a committee of damp cardboard.

But that’s exactly why my theory of strategic overreach makes sense. Labour reached too far by floating a compulsory use case, hit the predictable backlash, then “retreated” to voluntary while still achieving the practical effect: building the infrastructure and normalising the idea. It’s tactical in the short term, strategic in the long term, because once the system exists and uptake is high, it becomes far easier to turn it into a default and later argue for it to become a requirement, than to try to impose compulsion from day one.

Once the infrastructure exists and uptake is high, the argument changes. It stops being “should we have this at all?” and becomes “why wouldn’t we standardise it?” The opposition starts to look like it’s blocking something that works, rather than defending a principle. And once employers, landlords, banks and service providers start designing their processes around it, “voluntary” begins to mean what it always means in modern Britain: technically optional, practically unavoidable. Like self-checkouts. Yes, you can always go to a human till. If you can find one. If it’s open. If it’s staffed. If the queue isn’t halfway to Wales.

That’s where the civil liberties concerns aren’t melodrama, they’re realism. Mission creep isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a predictable pattern. Once you’ve built a national identity rail, every department will want to run something on it, and every contractor will want to sell something through it. Today it’s right-to-work checks. Tomorrow it’s right-to-rent, age verification, benefits access, healthcare, travel, who knows what else. Each step will be sold as “common sense”, and each step will be easier because the system is already there, already normalised, already embedded.

There are also hard practical risks that don’t vanish just because the intention is benign. A big identity system becomes a very attractive target. It’s a honeypot for hackers, scammers, hostile states, and anyone who fancies making money out of other people’s lives. Even if the technology is solid, the prize is enormous, and when it goes wrong it won’t go wrong politely, one person at a time. It will go wrong at scale. Then there’s exclusion. Britain isn’t made up entirely of people with the latest phone, stable housing, tidy paperwork, and the patience to navigate apps and verification loops. If “voluntary” becomes the default route, those who can’t or won’t use it don’t get freedom, they get friction. They get delays, suspicion, and the slow punishment of being permanently on the awkward path.

So yes, in the narrow sense it’s a backtrack, because the compulsory framing was politically toxic and they’ve pulled it back. But it’s also the smarter route if the long-term ambition is to build a system that can later be made mandatory, or at least become mandatory in practice without ever needing to say so. That’s why “voluntary” is not the reassuring end of the story. It’s the beginning of the normalisation phase.

If Labour want to prove they’re not playing that game, the test is simple: keep genuine non-digital alternatives, keep strict limits on scope, and make any expansion require explicit primary legislation rather than being expanded quietly as “just an upgrade”. Otherwise voluntary is just the warm-up act, and the main event will arrive the moment the public stops paying attention.