Burnham will Starmers digitales ID-System im Rahmen einer „Neusetzung der Prioritäten“ abschaffen | Personalausweise
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/18/burnham-to-scrap-starmers-digital-id-scheme-in-reset-of-priorities
Von Subtle_Demon_72
44 Kommentare
There’s alot of people who can’t access passports and driver’s licenses for one reason or another
ID is mandatory for basically everything we do yet there’s no national ID program. It’s kinda silly. It’s left countless 1000s of people just sort of stuck.
Yeah. Just redress it and trot it out 12 months from now.
At least he’s learnt from the last time: https://planb.nicecupoftea.org/2005/09/25/all-very-well-mannered-and-polite/
I gotta be the only one who fucking wants a digital ID. Maybe cos I’m in my early 20s and still have a provisional license and get embarrassed showing it ahahah
Can we just stop looking like the idiot cousin in Europe?
He might just win me over. This was nonsense. We’ve got passports and provisionals, leave the tech nanny state creep alone and let’s actually focus on the real problems this country is facing
But he’s going ahead with the OSA and therefore we kinda need digital ID. If you cancel the OSA, great. But if it goes ahead, digital ID means you only need to give your ID to the government and everything uses that. Without digi ID you have to individually send your ID to every website and it spreads the risk.
Will it actually stay off the table this time or will he slowly edge it back in through other policies like Starmer did?
Labour wasted it’s goodwill on imposing the OSA, a massive data gathering and censorship exercise in the name of protecting the children.
Which left it with no political capital left to bring in the actual good idea that was digital ID. Or as it should have been actually marketed: a system to integrate government services and logins that already exist and currently involve a mish mash of scanning passports and driving licences, and posting things.
Digital ID involved no increase in surveillance, just making existing things work better for the state and public. It increased the power of the state by giving them better, more integrated data, but that is always a consequence of making things work better.
OSA increased the power and surveillance of the private sector.
Of all the powerful actors in the world, the state is the only one that is actually accountable to us. It’s power is our power, but we resist any increase in it’s power, while permitting the rise of unaccountable private power.
Didn’t we fight a world war so we would never have to „show your papers“
Lots of people here missing the point. Whether digital ID cards are sensible or not, they’re deeply, deeply unpopular. I really don’t think the positives outweigh the massive amount of political capital it would cost to force them through. There’s lots of popular, high impact stuff Labour needs to prioritise – nationalising utilities and improving the cost of living.
Digital ID is going to lead to mass surveillance and social credit score, you people really are clueless to the repercussions of digital ID
Jettisoning the single most radioactive Starmer Policy was a clear certainty for Burnham to gain goodwill.
Burnham with this and north gas exploration is getting on Donald J Trump’s good side early, smart play Andy!
The whole digital ID debate is so silly; you would think the UK is the only country in the world trying to get digital IDs passed. Fun fact: there are 89 countries that have some sort of digital ID. People in this country think everything is a conspiracy.
omg he might actually be learning.
Starmer doing absolutely zero in his first 100 days to tackle the cost of living crisis is pretty much what I attribute to his complete failure in government, he did nothing with the low hanging fruit that were relatively easy to address and instead went after pensioners winter fuel allowance.
Burnham just needs to focus on cost of living, renationalising as much infrastructure as fast and as sensibly as possible, closing tax loopholes, putting together a proposal for a real wealth tax and removing our support for the genocide in Gaza and he will not be able to lose. The roadmap is that simple, so be interesting to see if he does a Starmer and go wildly off path into the weeds of stuff no one cared about like Starmer did with ID Cards and VPN Bans.
Absolute slam dunk and no brainer decision for him. He should start by getting rid of Kier’s dystopian anti-privacy and surveillance laws
i actually do think a free id card for everyone is a good idea. most european countries offer the same
I have nothing against digital ID on principle, but I do not remotely trust a government under the current iteration of Labour or Conservatives to implement it it well.
Also, the way people dismiss any criticism of digital IDs as being from conspiracy theorists on par with flat earthers rubs me the wrong way, so I feel compelled to disagree with those people out of spite.
not holding my breath, I suspect there will be some small print attached to this
Great. We don’t need solutions to imaginary problems.
And we don’t need to be a bottomless money-pit for those consultancies and contractors who keep coming up with these imaginary problems and their convenient ’solutions‘.
Who on earth are all these people worried about constantly having ID on them? Don’t think my drivers licence has left the house in about 7 years.
Wait thats actually a good move how is this possible?
I say good. ID cards were not part of the Labour manifesto when elected. No way should be mandatory or even psuedo-mandatory by other means.
Don’t take eye off ball… what’s the swerve?
Too many tin foil hat loons in this country. Give me a digital ID to go with my passport and driving licence so I’ve got the full set.
How long will it take for Reform voters to do an about turn and suddenly want Digital IDs, only because Labour want to get rid of it of course.
Good, but not nearly enough. They’re basically just scrapping about 25% of the stuff focus groups tell them people hate to keep the Northern Wall backbenchers from defecting to Reform in order to save their jobs. The Labour party will be redeemed when there is a full enquiry into the internal putsch that happened to Corbyn and the influence of the Lobby. Neither of which are going to happen under Burnham, or ever.
I want a *physical* national ID card. Cheap or available for free when you’re under a certain income and available for anyone aged 16+.
And don’t tell me about the citizen card, it’s just not the same. I want a National ID card that’s as strong as a Passport (just without the travel ability outside of UK territory I guess.)
> The UK’s CitizenCard is a voluntary proof-of-age or bare-minimum photo ID used for nights out or domestic flights. By contrast, European „National Identity Cards“ are *official, government-issued documents*.that serve as *primary citizenship proof* and can be used to travel internationally across Europe.
Is he gonna scrap Online Safety Act or is he gonna ban VPNs like a tech illiterate fool?
I give it six months then it’ll be back to tackle some issue the uk government have created.
Worthless as long as the failure that is OSA is still there. OSA does not protect kids, it is simply surveilance.
If this is true – Burnham’s not PM yet and the OP article says he’s „expected to“ scrap digital ID – then this is massively good news! I’ll wait to hear it confirmed by the Burnham government before celebrating though.
Will we be able to properly browse reddit without having to verify ID now?
Hopefully if he’s trying to win the public over immediately he’ll scrap the OSA too.
I could have sworn a few days/a week ago I saw a headline saying he was gonna keep the scheme going ahead
The worst part is is we need digital ID
Every time you upload your passport and driving licence as an image, rhey get left on a server, just waiting for hackers or corrupt employees and soon Hacking AI to take them and use them
Everything you do is digital and they want you to secure your digital life with easily duplicateable analogue documents.
It is already possible to have all your data gathered from the internet but in the next couple of years it will become easy. And combined with easy to find documents that you uploaded yourselft for verification you can have your identity stolen in a matter of minutes.
All those digital id companies that have been around for years that aren’t accepted anywhere that could have been lobbying Tony Blair hard or he owned shares in them are ginnna be pissed
I still don’t get why people were against digital ID
It was already scrapped by Starmer. They’re deploying right wing slop tactics of bread and circuses to great effect!
As a Brit that now lives in a country that is basically shaped around a digital ID, I honestly do not understand the ‘mass surveillance’ trope always thrown about.
With my personal number (DDMMYYYY-####) and BankID (linked to the personal number), I can literally sign electricity contracts, phone contracts, apply for credit, confirm my identity with state services, and the number is used for everything.
No separate tax number, NHS number, government gateway ID, hospital number (yes, it exists/existed and was different to the NHS one), no customer numbers to remember for anything else, it’s all that single number and i could not go back to not having it. Life is so much bloody easier. Even if the agency delivering the service can be worse than the UK in some way.
There’s no mass surveillance behind the number either. If I come into contact with an agency/person/company that needs to access the info behind the number, I have to verify it first to unlock it properly.
This is one thing that the UK is behind on compared to the rest of the world. We will never become a home to tech startups properly if we can’t bare harnessing the technology that’s evolving 🙄
Not getting rid of the OSA bullshit and this is only being pushed back, so no, still fuck you. This will be pushed again before they are done.
amazing news.
surprised how many people seem suddenly in favour of it when it was a deeply, deeply unpopular policy.
Great, now walk back the online safety bill requiring people to had over personal information to 3rd party (often foreign) companies.
undo the age verification and social media ban and I might believe it.