Christians and the digital ID debate

This week's Labour Party conference in Liverpool proved to be a challenging time for Keir Starmer. It's not an easy time to be in government!

The economic situation is tough, immigration seems to be the hottest topic if the media is to be believed and international crises show no sign of abating. Since winning last year’s general election with a massive majority, Labour has plummeted in the polls and the PM is facing discontent among MPs and party members.

Christians on the Left

There are many Christians in the Labour party. Christian socialism, with its emphasis on co-operation, solidarity and improving the lives of working people, pre-dates the creation of the Labour party in 1900, and it has been said that Labour’s origins owe “more to Methodism than Marxism”. The party’s first leader, Keir Hardie, wrote that his inspiration was “derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined.” The Christian group within today’s Labour party, Christians on the Left, emphasises the principles of community, peace, equality and sustainability as key reasons why Christians support Labour.

With its emphasis on breaking down structural barriers to tackle poverty and inequality, and to enable people to achieve their potential, Labour is traditionally keener on state intervention than the other parties as a means of addressing society's problems.

Digital ID cards

Keir Starmer’s announcement to introduce mandatory digital identity cards therefore is not a huge surprise. Indeed, the previous Labour government tried to bring in voluntary ID cards in the 2000s, but the plans were scrapped by the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition after 2010.

The new proposals will require people to have digital ID on their phones to prove that they have the right to live and work in the UK. As well as streamlining identity checks for everyone, the idea is that it will crack down on illegal immigration by making it harder for people without ID to find jobs, which Ministers believe is one of the main reasons why migrants come to the UK.

The intention would be to strengthen UK borders, and those Christians who are concerned about the effects of immigration may legitimately conclude that this is a just and sensible way to go about it. Other countries such as France have ID cards… and while they take three times more refugees than the UK does, they have lower levels of so-called illegal immigration – although it has to be said that evidence of correlation is not clear-cut.

And after all, most of us have already given heaps of our personal information away to Google, Amazon, Meta and other tech companies, as well as various arms of the state such as HMRC, the DVLA and the NHS.

However, these are not joined-up systems, and so our data is scattered. And as data breaches become increasingly common, many people have raised concerns about creating a central database. A petition on the government website, simply entitled “do not introduced digital ID cards”, at last glance had almost 2.5 million signatures.

There are concerns that an ID scheme might be detrimental to vulnerable populations, and that it will simply push those on the margins of society deeper into the black economy.

It’s also clear that governments of all persuasions have pretty poor track records when it comes to big new IT or infrastructure projects. Costs often soar and millions of pounds have been wasted to little obvious benefit.

And perhaps the biggest concern is around privacy and civil liberties. This goes to the heart of the question about how much jurisdiction the state should have over our lives. Our society is regulated in many ways by government and its agencies, and much of this is practical and necessary for an organised society to work in a population the size of the UK. However, state overreach is something that lots of people, including many Christians, are wary about.

It is clear to me that any powers could be abused by a future authoritarian government, and some Christians have a longstanding nervousness around prophecies in the book of Revelation about the "mark of the beast" which is often thought to represent some kind of identification required for people to be able to buy and sell.

How should Christians respond?

I don’t think we can truly know for certain what those passages mean, but we do know that as Christians our ultimate allegiance is to God. Yet we should also “be subject to the ruling authorities” in our society (see Romans 13) because God confers legitimacy and delegates responsibility to human government. However, human governments are also fallible and flawed, and human systems are open to abuse. No state system should be all-powerful and we should engage with prayerful caution.

So as we enter into a public debate about identify cards, let’s pray for wisdom from the Labour government and its ministers, for people’s concerns to be properly heard and addressed, and for a proper holding-to-account of those who are making the decisions on behalf of us all.