THE reason independent thinkers are permanently on trial is their incapacity to come to terms with the rules set by the local executioner.
To a brain darkened by thought control, the arguments of an open-minded person are a blatant crime. No fact-finding, no chance for defence. To what end? The goal is to brand the imaginary foe as a disgusting danger that must be excluded, a regular practice in the Dark Ages that is gaining momentum in the presumably most advanced era of mankind.
Totalitarianism, in any of its manifestations, from the mildest to the harshest form, is a road that inexorably leads to sheer violence. The instinct to annihilate anyone who challenges the ideas consecrated by tribal chieftains is never far from being triggered. Instead, critical minds are cultivated by a tradition of intellectual independence nurtured by an environment that stimulates ingenuity and dissension.
In the midst of the colossal totalitarian drive that is sweeping away the most cherished Western values, the Labour Government has announced plans to introduce digital ID across the UK.
Sir Keir Starmer, who apparently doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut, had the audacity to say that the ploy will ensure the country’s borders are more secure. As if it were a kind of relief, bureaucrats at the helm of the state have declared that the IDs will not have to be carried day-to-day, but they will be compulsory for anyone wanting to live and work in the UK.
Translation: Hobson’s choice. They also announced that the scheme will be perpetrated by the end of this Parliament, in other words, before the next general election of 2029.
Digital ID will add another stratum to the existing layers of surveillance devices, expired or extant: birth certificates, driving licences, social security cards, NHS covid passes and conventional passports — not to mention the ubiquitous mobile phones and a legion of other cloud-connected devices that can pinpoint a needle in a stack of needles or a person on a toilet, for that matter. Notwithstanding all these redundancies, the enforcement of an ID card is a disgrace that turns a semi-respectable nation into a banana republic in the blink of an eye.
Our footprints are everywhere, indelible and with no expiration date. Digitalisation is the technological cornerstone used and abused by any self-respecting totalitarian regime. To ‘control’ — so they say — the 5 per cent who commit crimes they persecute and spy on the remaining 95 per cent who don’t. They excel at the latter and thunderously fail at the former. Thugs useful to the Government’s ideological narrative may roam the streets scot-free while an elderly woman is detained for a two-line comment posted on Facebook.
Privacy is a luxury already extinct. People are not fully aware that everything they are doing online and offline can be easily watched, tracked and measured. The records are as exhaustive as they are perpetual. High-resolution facial recognition cameras scan every public and private corner with ruthless accuracy. A simple stroll around a city is enough to edit an all-encompassing documentary about any particular individual. Progressively, and predictably, technology has eroded privacy into an obsolete rarity. The system requires persistent identity. Anonymity is a sworn enemy.
A digital ID system is not an exercise in ‘politics’, a word viciously raped by pundits and bureaucrats of every colour and hue. This is the exact opposite of politics: it is about preserving and increasing power. If politics is understood as a concerted endeavour to achieve the greatest possible degree of autonomy and well-being for the greatest number of people, then politics has been dying for a long time.
Today its demise is probably more evident than ever in the so-called Western countries where democracy and the separation of powers are meant to be cornerstones of a social order which professes to stand for individual freedom. In a police society — ultimate stage of a police state — individual freedoms gradually disappear until each person would become their own Blockführer.
No matter how hard the Labour Party tries to appropriate flags and redefine patriotism, the digital document is a journey of no return. Starmer already looks like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.
