Well, I really do think that Sir Keir Starmer ought to apply to do the knowledge. I’m a great admirer of the London taxi driver. I use their service very regularly and I think they are, as Disraeli said, the Gondoliers of London. But the thing they’re brilliant at is U-turns. It’s said they can turn on a sixpence, and Sir Keir Starmer does the same. And we’ve had another one today, this one I’m all in favour of, because there’s a U-turn on this dreadful idea of Digital ID. Digital ID has always been a solution seeking a problem. We have no difficulty proving who we are online, no difficulty using digital services.Governments just want to interfere, to control, to check, to follow up on what people are doing. It’s all about allowing the powerful state to override the individual.
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It’s one of those things that has been the case in the continent, because they have a civil code approach. Under civil code, you’re basically only allowed to do that, which is permitted under our common law.It’s always been the case that you are allowed to do anything that is not specifically banned. And that has meant that there has never been an obligation when you’re going about your lawful business, to prove who you are, because it’s assumed that what you’re doing is allowable, and it’s a fundamental change in the relationship between the citizen and the state.When you get to the point of saying, well, you can be forced to prove who you are whenever the state feels like it, whenever you engage with the statement ‘have you used the state services’, or possibly when they just feel like asking you for it so that big constitutional change is now being watered down, but this Government is so eyewateringly hopeless that it can’t set out a policy course and stick to it for four months.Michael Crick has helpfully told me that this policy was announced three and a half months ago, and already they are doing a U-turn.They don’t think things through. They don’t know what the plan is. They don’t have any principles or ideology that guides them, and therefore the Government is managing crisis to crisis.It does not have the energy, the vim and vigour that you need to govern effectively. It’s like a bagatelle machine as the ball bounces around crazily and falls into the zero points at the bottom of the machine. It’s absolutely hopeless.It’s indirection, indirection. No direction at all from a Government that has only been in for under two years, and yet it’s already utterly lost its way.So although I like this U-turn, I do recognise that it is a failure of an incompetent Government.
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