Completely agree. I'm not too bothered Digital ID cards, I was mildly annoyed by the idea of actual ID cards (manly the cost) but as a free digital app, I don't have many objections. I've seen it from colleagues in Denmark. If they manage to build in some zero knowledge proof of age I might even support it.

But how this is supposed to stop immigration, illegal or otherwise, is beyond me.

I think about 90% of immigration to UK is legal so it won't. Seems like a huge expense when money is really tight

Why should we stop immigration?

I mean it's obvious to anyone who isn't an idiot that we shouldn't. However, populist parties banging the drum on this are looking likely to be at least the second biggest party in the next general election (and that comes with some wishful thinking given the recent polls). Labour's approach seems to be to validate their scaremongering but to claim they can deal with it without going full on Third Reich...

Oh, yes, I understand. Yeah, if this is meant to speak to Reform voters, it’s really unclear if it actually makes sense to them or anyone if this is actually an immigration thing.

Starmer seems to be under the impression that Labour needs to focus on immigration to stave of Reform. This is a mistake because most people don't really care about immigration as such, they care about cost of living, health care, and basic things like that. Research and polling in many different countries over many different years have shown this again and again and again. People like Farage like to present "one easy answer to all problems politicians don't want you to know!" First: EU, now: immigration, next: gingers?

Focusing so strongly on immigration and related issues only strengthens Farage. It does nothing to convince the die-hard Reform people and alienates your own voters. We're already seeing Labour split to a new party (well, assuming it doesn't implode in classic left-wing infighting). It's lose-lose.

Labour won 2/3rd of MPs with just 1/3rd of the vote, the biggest gap between MPs and vote share in modern history by quite a margin. In many ways they "lost" last year's election because that's a very underwhelming result after running against a deeply unpopular government that's been in government for almost 15 years. They've been on a thin ice since day one.

All of this is such an obvious mistake that I truly don't understand what Starmer is even thinking.

I completely agree with you.

I feel like there are two things... one, do Reform voters even understand that Digital ID is a response to immigration? It's not clear to me that they even do.

Two, obviously immigration is not the issue. As I understand, Starmer is going to attempt to mount a serious counter-narrative to Farage. I really hope that his answer will not be "look, we hate immigrants too!" They tried that a few months ago, didn't they? The whole "island of strangers" Enoch Powell thing. I hope that that was as bad as it gets.

If you want to improve the capacity of the state to deliver services and improve the lives of citizens, being able to easily tell who is who across a range of government departments is a pretty good place to start.

I wonder how we survived for a hundred years before that

We survive but with the caveat of people getting scammed for billions in every noteworthy currency there is, for starters.

I would hope they can do more than one thing at a time. On the economy, £30bn of tech investment was announced last week.

You're right. Another positive note is Miliband's stuff with energy -- my understanding is that they are doing mostly the right things and succeeding in the political battles they need to win.

But there's also the issue of selling this to the public. The stuff you and I are talking about is quiet, probably because it's not sexy. The digital ID thing is loud and prominent.

This is why "green new deal" is a good idea -- it's a loud, good way to sell the public on something they'd otherwise fail to understand.