A Perfect ID, But No Perfect Voice

On 26 September 2025, Sir Keir Starmer announced a new national digital ID scheme. The headline policy is blunt: digital ID will be mandatory for proving Right to Work by the end of the Parliament. The Government also repeats a reassurance line - no general requirement to carry ID or be asked to produce it - but then puts the labour-market gate behind digital verification.

The architecture is not a mystery. A House of Commons Library briefing says the mandatory right-to-work scheme will build on GOV.UK One Login and GOV.UK Wallet. It describes a credential stored on a phone, holding basic identity attributes, designed to be privacy-focused (encrypted, shared only with consent), with no centralised digital ID database and an inclusive route for people who cannot use smartphones.

One Login is the other half of the pitch: a single government account so people can access services with the same login and only need to prove their identity once. The Wallet is described as a place to store government-issued documents on your phone. In other words: one account, one verified identity, reused across the state.

Here is the duality. Ministers want the public to believe this system is strong enough to decide who can work, who can rent, who can access services - and, by implication, who is legitimate in the eyes of official Britain. They sell it as tidy, secure, privacy-minded, and hard to game.

If that is true, then the Government has already described the backbone of something far more democratic than a digital border-check: a secure, audited, inclusive method for direct public voting on major laws.

Verified identity at scale is the hard part. If a system can authenticate millions, prevent fraud, and handle inclusion for those without smartphones, it can do a national vote. That does not mean replacing Parliament tomorrow. It means stopping the pretence that technology is not ready while the same technology is being made mandatory for your livelihood.

Imagine the obvious next step: every major bill that expands surveillance, changes sentencing, rewrites immigration rules, or strips services could be put to a time-limited national vote - secured by the same verified ID. MPs would still exist, but they would stop acting like a five-year mandate is a blank cheque. If the Government insists digital ID puts power back in people's hands, this is what that phrase should mean in practice.

And if the system is not secure enough for citizens to vote on laws, it has no business becoming mandatory for Right to Work. That is the real test. You cannot demand faith in a secure identity scheme when it is used to control people's lives, but refuse to use the same infrastructure to give those people a stronger, direct voice.

Britain cannot keep selling itself as a world-class democracy while building world-class verification for control and none for consent. A state that can verify you can also hear you. The question is whether it wants to.

Sources (for fact-checking): GOV.UK One Login; GOV.UK Wallet; House of Commons Library briefing on digital identity and the Right to Work plan (Sept 2025).