SIR Keir Starmer announced Digital ID as necessary to prove eligibility for work, but Britons can prove eligibility with many other documents. These documents are cheaper than the estimated £400million required to establish the new system. Some persons might prefer Digital ID over driving licences or passports, but they could be allowed to choose, as in America, rather than compelled.
When cheaper and readier documents are available, one worries that Starmer has ulterior motives for Digital ID – motives he is covering up by gushing about eligibility to work.
Eligibility to work is a belated issue for the government, recently exposed as paying welfare to at least 1.3million foreigners with entitlement to work, accommodating hundreds of thousands of asylum claimants who can get away with working illegally, hosting about 1million undocumented foreigners who are somehow doing fine despite no right to work or reside here, and running an unemployment rate of 13 per cent.
Popular concern to reduce illegal immigration helps to explain why a poll suggests that a slight majority of Britons support a national ID card, particularly for controlling immigration. Yet almost everyone has a concern about privacy, government trustworthiness, or authoritarianism.
By pushing a national ID card as primarily about stopping foreigners from working, Starmer is exploiting the popular wish for controlled immigration. Meanwhile his administration is doing little to get more legitimate workers into work, or to stop illegitimate workers from working, or to stop illegal immigration – which leaves me to conclude that the unadmitted motivation is two-tier justice.
First, take the proof from the plan for the ‘BritCard’ itself. It would be required for getting work, but not required for accessing welfare, benefits, or the NHS! So getting work would become harder, but eschewing work in return for an above-average income and free healthcare remains as easy as ever.
Also easy? Work illegally, while still getting welfare benefits as if you’re not working.
Surely a Digital ID would help?
No. A national ID is unnecessary, given other proofs of identity. A national ID is insufficient if you don’t enforce the law.
Most continental European countries have issued national ID cards for decades. Yet a higher proportion of their citizens work illegally than British citizens.
European countries hardly enforce work laws. For one thing, the free movement of people discourages enforcement. You would be responsible for policing hundreds of millions of eligible workers, most of whom don’t speak your language, and don’t hold your national IDs.
Second, in most countries, enforcers are lazy or corrupt – which Greece has admitted in its mission to improve compliance with taxation.
Third, voluntary compliance tends to be lower in continental countries. Britons have hitherto been seen as compliant, although their high-trust society is collapsing.
Foreigners arrive without any enculturation in our high-trust legacy. They need more enforcement.
Yes, true, Britain already has high capacity for enforcement in every sense: material, statutory, and constitutional. The trouble with enforcement in Britain is that it is two-tier.
British protesters against foreign criminals in publicly-funded hotels are banned from the area, while police bus in counter-protesters. Foreign alleged rapists get anonymity, Britons do not. Authorities tolerate Palestinian flags, not British flags. A white Conservative critic of asylum hotels is jailed, a non-white Labour councillor is cleared of incitement to violence despite telling a crowd to slit opponents’ throats. A burner of a Koran is fined, the Islamist who came after him with a knife shouting ‘I’ll kill you’ is spared jail.
Similarly, foreigners are working illegally because the government doesn’t enforce the statutes that already oblige employers to prove eligibility for work. This eligibility can be proved easily with several allowable documents. Employers can be slapped with debilitating fines if they are found to have hired someone illegally, even if unintentionally. Negligence can be punished just as much as willfulness. The trouble is, the government isn’t checking. Some employers hire scrupulously, some don’t. It’s a reputational choice, not a legally enforced choice.
Undeclared work is rampant in the service sector, by both Britons and foreigners. But this is really about foreigners. Two-tier justice privileges foreigners, even though they are easier to police.
Asylum claimants are not allowed to work for 12 months, or until they are granted asylum. In May, newspapers revealed that asylum claimants are working for couriers and food deliverers within days of landing in Britain. Most seem to be working within days, even though asylum claimants (unlike working Britons) get free transportation, accommodation, food, healthcare, clothing, security guards, entertainment and spending money. The government promised to crack down, then did nothing.
Was the government curbed by lack of evidence? No. In June, the Conservative MP Chris Philp, acting as Shadow Home Secretary, filmed bikes branded for food delivery companies and couriers outside an asylum hotel. Residents confirmed they are asylum claimants. Nevertheless, the government would not confirm this use of the hotel.
The government is keener to blame private employers. This is like blaming knife-sellers for the explosion in knife crime. Still, employers like to play along, because it’s good PR. At the end of June, Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and JustEat agreed to increase facial verification and fraud checks to exclude illegitimate employees. The Home Office agreed to allow 90 days for implementation. That period ended on Sunday, by which time those companies had barred hundreds of employees.
Going back to the end of June: Immigration Enforcement officers arrested immigrants outside the Thistle City Barbican Hotel as they returned from work on bikes carrying their employer’s branded bags and operating their employer’s apps. Some were arrested for violating bail conditions too. But those officers did not go to any other asylum hotel.
A few days later, the Home Office released a statement promising ‘a major operation to disrupt this type of criminality’. But no ‘major operation’ materialised.
Deliveroo contacted the government for help to identify asylum hotels. Deliveroo can easily identify employees at these hotels, given that employees must use an app that tracks their location. But the government refuses to share the locations of asylum hotels for the protection of asylum claimants.
Privileging of foreigners is political, not economic. In recent years, most immigrants have proven to be net recipients of public wealth, more criminal than Britons, less educated, less skilled, less open to integration, more extreme.
Britain does not need uncontrolled immigration to fill vacancies in skilled professions, such as medicine. Britain already has special visas to fill skilled professions.
Yes, true, employers can use special visas to recruit foreigners to take jobs for lower pay than they’re paying paid to Britons…but Donald Trump’s administration has already solved that problem, by forcing employers to pay a whopping $100,000 fee in application for a H1-B visa. Britain should adopt the equivalent policy.
Britain’s government is privileging foreigners, not for economic gain, but political gain: because it expects foreigners to support its radical leftist politics. And Britain’s government is using two-tier injustice to suppress opponents to radical leftism. The government’s claim that a national ID is motivated primarily to enforce work eligibility is not credible from a government that already goes out of its way not to enforce work eligibility!
The ‘BritCard’ would not be a work-eligibility card so much as a two-tier justice card. A ‘Britcard’ could be weaponised. It could be confiscated, denied, indefinitely processed, so that dissidents can’t prove eligibility to work.
Card-holding could be made a condition for keeping a bank account, attending a protest, entering a public space, accessing your political representative, accessing your kids.
Meanwhile, privileged groups would continue to suffer no enforcement at all.
