Will Tony Blair ever give up on ID cards?

Is Tony Blair ever going to give up hope of foisting ID cards on us? As prime minister, he was defeated over the issue – his plans were eventually dropped by the incoming coalition in 2010. He tried again during the pandemic, trying to sell us the idea of vaccination passports.

And now he is at it again, this time with his old sparring partner William Hague. Together they have written a paper for Blair’s Institute for Global Change, called A New National Purpose: Innovation Can Power the Future of Britain, making the not-altogether-novel observation that computers can be jolly useful. 

Central to their thesis is that all citizens should be given a ‘digital ID’ which could then be used for all kinds of purposes. ‘In a world in which everything from vaccine status to aeroplane tickets and banking details are available on our personal devices,’ they write, ‘it is illogical that the same is not true of our individual public records.