UK leader Starmer is cursed with the reverse Midas touch: Martin Ivens

Key topics:Starmer’s mandatory digital ID plan sparks public backlashMultiple government U-turns fuel doubts about Labour leadershipPrivacy fears and poor communication hinder policy support.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Martin Ivens.In recent years UK voters had begun to warm to the introduction of digital identity cards — that was until September last year, when Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that his government would introduce compulsory IDs. Approval ratings for the policy crashed overnight, from 35% approval in the early summer to minus-14% that weekend, according to YouGov, a polling company. As they say of comedians’ jokes, it must be the way Starmer tells them. “We need to know who is in our country,” boasted Starmer of his new initiative, designed to be the centerpiece at his Labour Party’s annual conference. He argued that having to ask for digital IDs would deter employers from hiring illegal migrant workers — a questionable premise, since the problem is enforcement rather than paperwork. Yet this week the country’s leaders U-turned on making digital IDs mandatory in the face of a 3 million strong online petition and the threat of a cabinet revolt. By my rough calculation, that‘s 13 screeching U-turns on major policy within 18 months. Even his conference pledge to institute a “duty of candor” for public officials — to avoid a repeat of the cover-up around the Hillsborough football tragedy — is being rethought. There were complaints that this was too much openness for the security services’ liking..Read more:.Keir Starmer’s managerial mindset collides with political and legal principles.All of these changes of direction have prompted Labour’s centrist rivals, the Liberal Democrats, to suggest Starmer take pills for motion sickness. The climbdowns just keep coming as the government’s ship lurches. Over Christmas it backtracked on inheritance tax rises on farmers; only last weekend it promised to reverse the severity of its rate increases on pubs (and conceivably all small businesses). This week it’s the turn of mandatory IDs. Next, it is rumored that Starmer will need to retreat on proposals to abolish jury trials in most cases. The civil liberties lobby is well represented on his backbenches. Karl Turner, a prominent Labour member of Parliament who is (or was) a personal Starmer friend, is threatening to resign his seat and fight a by-election on the issue.Despairing Labour MPs say the prime minister can’t go on like this: But he does. Voters can be forgiving of U-turns. Changes of mind in the light of contrary evidence may even be applauded. It is the sheer number of them that reinforces a deep skepticism about whether Starmer stands for anything..His embattled chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, hasn’t helped. Her ill-advised tax rises and poorly communicated spending cuts have triggered most of the climbdowns. Putative leadership challenger Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who has taken to commenting on pretty much every area of national life, is more candid, telling a conference in London last week, “Getting It Right First Time… that should be our new year’s resolution for 2026.” A day later his criticism of Starmer’s ideological vacuum was even less coded: “Change begins with an argument, you don’t make progress without one.”The prime minister seems cursed with the reverse Midas touch, turning a good policy into a badly executed, unpopular one. In theory, a central bank of data allowing every voter to register access their births, deaths, marriages, driving licenses, bank accounts and appointments with the doctor should be a boon. One portal, no more pesky passwords. India has introduced a national ID scheme for hundreds of millions of citizens with only minor glitches. Estonia’s e-government lets adults divorce online and saves countless hours by automating and updating form filling. Digit-opia beckoned.But those of us who have tracked views on ID cards over many years warned that unless the ground was carefully prepared, the story would soon become “Big Brother wants to keep tabs on you” — with ministers accused of trying to replicate China’s surveillance state. Labour’s manifesto at the last election never mentioned digital government, and there was no coordinated campaign to convince voters. Ministers had clearly not been briefed properly by No. 10 and they quickly became reluctant to defend the policy. In this vacuum, conspiracy theories about the state’s malign intentions ran riot on social media. This paranoia should have been anticipated. As long ago as 1980 an episode of the BBC’s popular satire of government, Yes Minister — also entitled “Big Brother” — stoked fears that a secretive civil service was plotting to get peoples’ private data in its clutches. The episode’s fame lives on today in a suite of government artificial-intelligence tools named “Humphrey,” in honor of Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Machiavellian mandarin at the heart of the series. A quarter of a century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plans for European-style plastic identity cards were similarly howled down.This time around, it didn’t help that the Office for Budget Responsibility couldn’t squeeze out of ministers a realistic estimate of costs and timing. Whitehall bears the scars that justify caution: Blair’s attempt to create digital patient records for the National Health Service, dubbed “the biggest IT failure ever,” was a £12 billion ($16 billion) car crash. And it doesn’t help that Britain’s blundering police forces last year arrested 12,000 people for speech-related offenses, ahead of China’s 1,500 (although the UK statistics are inflated by including stalking offences and threatening phone calls). No need to get paranoid about the police misusing data when they’re already out to get you.Still, libertarians don’t quite appreciate the irony of their victory. Every day Britons allow the billionaire bros of Big Tech, weaponized with the latest AI, to use for profit the most intimate details of their lives and passions whenever they search the internet or access a website. Yet they revolt at collecting their data in a central holding tank..Read more:.RW Johnson: Starmer’s dilemma.This weekend the PM will enjoy a respite after the media’s focus moves to high-level defections from the Tory opposition to the populist Reform UK. But only briefly. Speculation about Starmer’s ability to lead will continue all the way to May’s local elections in England, and national votes in Scotland and Wales: an acid test for both traditional parties of government. Only Labour’s historic reluctance to change horses midstream is keeping him in place. But when a leader’s word is no longer their bond, confidence drains away..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

UK leader Starmer is cursed with the reverse Midas touch: Martin Ivens

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