Some in the current Labour Government, egged on by Tony Blair and associates, are once again raising the spectre of Digital ID, this time via a ‘BritCard’ – a way of tracking activities of UK citizens – now in the name of immigration.
We’ve heard it all before. This is a gentle reminder that in 2021, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson along with his government and opposition cheerleaders attempted to roll out ‘vaccine passports’ and mandatory vaccinations to deal with Covid. However, they soon realised this wasn’t a popular policy with NHS staff and the wider public, and after fierce pushback both policies were effectively dropped in early 2022 – but not before losing 40,000 care workers, an exodus which has had enormous consequences for Britain.
‘Freedom Day’: July 19th 2021
On July 19th 2021, Johnson declared it was so-called ‘Freedom Day’ – the date when most COVID-19 legal restrictions in England were to be lifted. It was presented as a moment of national liberation, promising a return to normal life after 16 months of lockdowns and government control. Yet, in a move that many saw as contradictory, Johnson used the same announcement to signal the introduction of vaccine passports for nightclubs and large venues from September that year.
Rather than restoring civil liberties, ‘Freedom Day’ marked the start of a new phase of digital surveillance and medical segregation, where people were to be required to show private health information to access everyday parts of public life. For many, this heralded a shift towards a ‘papers please’ society — one in which freedom became conditional on compliance with government mandates. The irony was not lost on those who had hoped for a genuine return to pre-pandemic freedoms.
Johnson’s announcement sparked the creation of the #Together Association, a grassroots campaign that quickly gained support from across the political spectrum. By January 2022, #Together had gathered 360,000 signatures opposing vaccine passports and mandates and delivered them to 10 Downing Street.
Within weeks, the government scrapped both policies.
No to Digital ID – Yes to a Digital Bill of Rights
Now an established membership organisation, #Together is leading the call for a Digital Bill of Rights to safeguard core freedoms in the digital age. Together’s Digital Bill of Rights outlines key safeguards:
- Protection from digital exclusion – with millions of less tech-savvy people unable or unwilling to use online banking
- Access to cash – Together has previously campaigned around access to ATMs and local banking
- Protection from ‘debanking’
- Protection from bank ‘spying’ and the threat of civil servants without warrants accessing sensitive financial information
- The right to choose between digital and offline services
- Freedom of speech
- Personal privacy and financial autonomy
- Freedom from unwarranted surveillance or decision-making-by-algorithm, such as automated censorship on platforms like YouTube
- Greater transparency from both government and corporations
With some floating the spectre of compulsory digital ID cards, #Together has taken the message to our elected representatives at the House of Commons and in Downing Street.
What Johnson called ‘Freedom Day’ four years ago was anything but. Digital passes and apps were used to divide society, restrict freedoms and discriminate between people. Despite so many coming together to fight that off, there is now open talk about imposing digital ID on the public again. But the right to go about one’s life without constant surveillance or permission from the state is a core part of what it means to be British. With free speech under threat, widespread concern over new bank spying powers, and the digitalisation of everything that risks excluding millions of people who can’t or prefer not to use digital systems, the time has come for a Digital Bill of Rights to protect the public from constant encroachment while preserving freedom and choice.
Alan Miller is the co-founder of the #Together Association.
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This implies banks will be forced to provide a service. It is remarkable how often freedom loving individuals, want to take away the freedom of others to comply with what they want.
People will have a Right to have access to cash.
Quite apart from the tyranny, these Rights will have a cost the incidence of which will fall on a majority who are ‘tech savvy’ and who don’t need cash.
So the rest of us have to suffer to accommodate a minority.
For shame.
A.I. that beacon of customer service excellence that’s what they will offer, basically a talking jam pot
😀😀😀
There is a cost to receive banking services whic we all have to pay through unpaid interest on credit balance and bank charges. The status quo is that cash is legal tender and individuals such as I wish to exercise their continued right to use it. Those that wish to take advantage of perceived convenience of digital transactions most
of whom, smug in their tech savviness, don’t see the obvious surveillance and coercive risk. I am sufficiently tech savvy to see the necessity to choose to use cash going so far as to tell the local community pub that if they wont accept my cash I wont be buying any drinks there. Those that uncritically accept convenience will suffer far more further down the line. Shame on them
Knock yourself out. Use cash but those of us who are economics savvy know there is a cost to using cash.
Use it but don’t expect me to pay the cost.
Cash is FREEDOM cash is KING. Hope you enjoy the Gulag mate.
Something very wrong with you mate
Phoney Bliar. Nuff said.
You cannot trust anyone in Parliament, They are all Liars, Good Liars, bad Liars, One or two great Liars. But remember all are liars.
I wish that were less true. Until a few years ago the Netherlands, my adoptive country, had an apparently unshakeable tradition of very high trust in government. That trust had been genuinely earned over a century or more. It was what made the Dutch parliament believe it had the power and authority to introduce mandatory QR codes during Covid, and what made much of the unthinking public accept that decision at the time. Now, trust in politicians here is roughly where Britons’ trust in their politicians was perhaps 20 years ago: a certain cautious benefit of the doubt, perhaps, but always granted with great wariness.
That may be more realistic, but it’s very sad – most politicians here actually were and still are generally much more straightforward and trustworthy than Westminster ones, so that level of distrust is less realistic. It’s also pushing the more image-conscious and radical politicians (which group easily includes Frans Timmermans, may he never become Prime Minister) to talk in soundbites for their own faction rather than have the open and largely amicable debates they used to have when I started following Dutch politics 12 years ago.
What about non-citizens?
For them there’s the Migracard. Works like a Get Out of Jail Free card with the added benefit of getting £200 on a regular basis without passing Go
They aren’t concerned with those… as long as they keep voting the right way (by post, naturally)
I support this campaign and add: there are “less tech-savvy people” and also people who don’t want tech, but most of all, the 3.45 million people who CANNOT use smart tech. as they have electromagnetic hypersensitivity. This means being near smart devices, Wifi or phone masts makes them ill immediately. The rest of us are affected, but don’t know it because there are gradual changes to the DNA and mitochondria, leading to dementia, cancer, infertility and DNA damage in the long term. On EHS read: https://icbe-emf.org/activities/electrohypersensitivity/ and for thousands of studies showing healh harm go here: bioinitiative.org/
It is possible to use tech safely by wired connections. We don’t need smartphones to do most things. I am living proof. I agree with Alan’s article, but there is also the health angle and the Equality Act. Millions of people are already excluded from normal life and discriminated against. Gillian Jamieson
Bill of Rights requires a proper Constitution, which does not exist. A sort of digital Magna Carta, which serves not just the Knights of the Realm but also all its citizens. In other words, the voluntary overthrow of a thousand-year old type of government. This will not happen, and such as this articles only expose romantic authors’ wishful thinking. On the positive side, they offer group therapy to the commenters.
I agree – we need less laws, not more of them…
I have written a response to the consultation. It is a ‘no’ from me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/myrauk/p/digital-id-system-the-uk-governments?r=ylgqf&utm_medium=ios
Your consultation response had a lovely perspective lifting the issue above the utilitarian level
I think we’ve just had a very clear demonstration of how safe your Data will be in the Government’s hands.
They might just as well scrap the Data Protection Act since they don’t comply with it themselves; no-one gets punished and they use the law to hide their incompetence from the electorate.