The Smile of a Psychopath

 

Last week, Keir Starmer took to X in a bizarre series of short posts promoting Digital ID, chirping out a supposed benefit of the Orwellian idea every few hours from Thursday and throughout the weekend. Apparently impervious to being ratioed worse than Labour’s candidate for the Caerphilly Senedd by-election, our Dear Leader continued to churn out classics such as “Digital ID will be a huge help in tackling illegal immigration,” alongside platitudes like “Digital ID will make our lives easier.” The result? Four community notes in just 24 hours — a spectacle both comical and telling.

According to Big Brother Watch: “Keir Starmer has already lost the public’s trust on digital IDs. Within hours of the Prime Minister selling the mandatory national ID scheme to the public on the basis of tackling illegal working, government documents emerged touting sprawling uses for digital IDs in our everyday lives and even suggested they could be rolled out to children.”

Perhaps the most disturbing and warped claim among Starmer’s string of delusional tweets was that an all-encompassing digital identity system — which will become a requirement to access public services, a requirement to access your own money, and quite possibly even a requirement to vote — will somehow “empower” us.

Digital ID is not empowerment; it is subjugation. It represents the construction of an invisible cage, built not from steel but from data and dependency. In combination with the Online “Safety” Act, it binds every individual’s digital activity — every search, every message, every click — to their state-issued identity. Combined with facial recognition surveillance, it creates a permanent, automated record of everyone’s whereabouts and associations. Together, these systems form the digital architecture of control, enabling unprecedented tracking, profiling, and enforcement.

What is presented as convenience is in fact compliance by design — a complete reconfiguration of the relationship between the individual and the state, one in which the governed must surrender every detail of their private lives simply to exist within the system.

When life itself depends on the State’s consent, citizenship becomes serfdom. Only a psychopath could push totalitarianism with a smile like this.