What makes this Government’s 13th U-turn in 18 months the most damaging yet for Sir Keir Starmer’s authority is that it was his project. No 10 can’t blame anyone else.
Come their introduction in 2029, digital IDs were originally going to be required for right to work checks as a part of a crackdown on illegal migrant workers. On Tuesday, sources said the Government will remove the required element and digital IDs will be sold simply as a tool to manage access to public services.
By Wednesday, Labour MPs weary of Starmer’s self-inflicted wounds were fed up. “You could see this coming a mile off,” one told The i Paper.
Some Labour strategists thought the Government’s digital ID idea was a disaster from the get-go last autumn.
Post-pandemic and relying on polling data, No 10 thought the public’s opposition to former prime minister Sir Tony Blair’s initiative in the 2000s had evaporated. But while Blair was a true believer in the transformative power of ID cards, there is no evidence Starmer ever had his heart in the project.
Starmer announced digital ID in September in a rush, but without a thorough plan to get public support. Attaching his name to the project also appeared to have made it less popular – what pollster Scarlett Maguire told The i Paper is Starmer’s “anti-Midas touch”. Once Starmer had lent it his support, polling numbers tumbled.
More broadly, ministers also worried it would drive left-leaning voters into the arms of the Liberal Democrats or Greens. There were also concerns it was driving conspiracy theorists to mutter about state control.
Just days after the Prime Minister made the formal announcement at the party’s annual conference, Cabinet ministers were telling The i Paper it would never get off the ground.
Digital ID had originally been sold by Downing Street as a way of reducing illegal working by migrants who do not have the right to earn in the UK. Employers could be fined £60,000 per illegal employee if they have not done the correct checks.
But ministers also complained the plan would fail to solve illegal migration because it was too expensive, too complicated and simply replaced e-visas for legal migrants which already exist. Some also thought it would have little impact on the “shadow economy”, where employers are hardly known for obeying the rules.
Now there will be more question marks over how Labour convinces voters it will crack down on illegal migration.
But in what appears to have been the final nail in the coffin for the scheme, No 10 asked ministers to find reductions in their departmental spending in order to fund the digital IDs.
Darren Jones, the chief secretary to Starmer, wrote to Government departments in December asking them to identify savings that could be diverted to finance the policy, requesting they reply this month. It is an understatement to say it was not a letter that was welcomed by overstretched ministers.
This is the 13th reversal from Labour. The party has backtracked on higher business rates for pubs and relaxed inheritance tax on farmers. It has also shelved plans to raise the main rate of income tax and dropped welfare reforms.
It has dropped plans for day-one protection from unfair dismissal; belatedly agreed to a national inquiry on grooming gangs; reinstated winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners. Starmer has also backtracked on his 2022 comment that “trans women are women”, about-turned on plans to limit academy freedoms, and abandoned a pledge to help Waspi women who have lost pension cash.
Just hours before the climbdown on Tuesday night, in a prescient warning, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told a conference in London that ministers should aim to “get it right first time”.
As The i Paper reported in October, some MPs argue that Starmer needs to simply “get the barnacles off the boat” to ensure a smoother ride.
But others worry the latest U-turn is emblematic of a premier without a cohesive narrative. A leader in name only who managed to turf out the Conservatives on a loveless majority but without a proper plan of what he would do in Government. A Prime Minister who buckles at opposition and, because he never truly believed in a policy in the first place, can’t make the case for it.
“He’s been learning on the job, but he really shouldn’t have made this many errors,” one Labour MP said of Starmer on Wednesday morning. Another Labour MP was more blunt: “What the hell was No 10 thinking?” they sighed.
A Conservative MP said of Starmer, “We had thought he would be better than this, we had wished him well. But God, what a disappointment.”
Despite a massive majority of 158 seats, Starmer’s standing is so diminished within his own Cabinet and party he can’t get a project with his name on it off the ground.
And on Wednesday, his own party was left thinking once again: where is the political judgment and strategic thinking in No 10?
Starmer’s authority, such as it was, is ebbing away in real time. A challenge after May’s local elections now looks almost inevitable.
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