UK border rules about passports are being changed at short notice – so short that some people have left the UK without knowing they won’t be let back in. Is the Home Office saying anyone who goes away must have their UK papers with them every time they travel? Will that extend domestically too? 

As ever, the3million are the guinea pigs in the ID coal mine, which now covers 10 million people – and the Home Office (and others) would like it to cover everyone. 

Now, even after you’ve proven your status and paid the Home Office for citizenship, HO is forcing you to maintain a passport before it will allow you back into the country of which you’ve become a citizen – or to pay £589 for a “certificate of entitlement” if you choose not be entered onto another of its biometric surveillance registers. (For those feeling this is OK for ‘others’, the same applies to Brits who live in countries with similarly black-and-white rules, especially if their kids were born there…)

Surveillance Nationalism isn’t just coming for you and your kids via your passports, as it did under the Blair Government’s previous ID scheme. In the 2000s, ID cards “weren’t compulsory” (sound familiar?) but you couldn’t get a passport without being numbered, biometrically verified, and captured permanently on a National Identity Register. 

Will the same be true in the 2020s for your ‘right’ to get a job or a place to live?

The same is true in other contexts, where other numbers are assigned to people. Using NHS numbers for health care is one thing; reusing them as children’s identifiers is quite another, even if it has DH involvement initially. Once used in that context, giving them over to the police as ‘victim identifiers’ for child safeguarding would be entirely within the remit of DfE and the Home Office – thus making child abuse victims traceable by the police, for life. 

While children stop being children after a while, they (hopefully) continue to be alive – and your NHS number follows you for life, available to anyone who looks you up. The very fact that someone’s number has been recorded in this context will show anyone who looks that they’re a survivor of abuse. 

Promises made about uses one day can be torn up tomorrow 

Wes Streeting has chosen to reuse data held by the NHS for pandemic-only purposes for other uses that he alone chooses, unilaterally revoking unequivocal promises made to ensure confidence in decision making. 

These are things that government can do when it wants to move fast, and the civil service sees no problem with any of them because permanent officials serving temporary masters rarely feel the burden.

Special Advisers* meanwhile want the political wins without adequate discussions across boundaries. SpAds think something is good because a Director General in DWP thinks it’s a good idea as it makes their life easier. Carer’s Allowance was fine because the DG and DWP said and still think it was a good idea – despite the independent inquiry confirming, and the Government supposedly accepting, that it wasn’t.

The scandals of officials and SpAds who don’t give a damn, cause widespread harm and blame anyone but themselves are a drum beat, steadily increasing in pace: from Windrush, Post Office Horizon, and Grenfell to infected blood, Child Benefit ‘crackdowns’, and quarterly tax requirements.

The system prefers to do what it wants as easily as possible, which means the costs fall on others. ‘Minor administrative cleanups’ (more pasty tax than Poll Tax) shift burdens onto the public, not the institution. As with Chip and PIN liability shifts in banking, supermarket self-checkouts and other Surveillance Capitalism wheezes, it’s what digital tools have always been used for.

Forcing people to maintain a British passport may make things easier for the Home Office, and maybe it’s even worth doing, but rushing out a scheme without considering the entirely predictable consequences looks more like malignity than mere incompetence. When PAYE returns became monthly, government took on some of the facilitation of that via software; for quarterly tax reporting they have refused to help, and tax payers must seek commercial solutions on the open market .

So rather than rushing into rewiring the state, maybe it’s time to take a breath, understand why and how damage is done and how it can be avoided, start to demonstrate some actual accountability, stop ‘innovating’ for innovation’s sake, and try to actually improve things for the people government is there to serve?

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*Complex decisions are increasingly made by “Advisers”, special or otherwise (Ministers acting as SpAds, PMs acting as Permanent Secretaries, Silicon Valley refugees and PMs-in-exile…) rather than by elected Public Servants acting with responsibility on behalf of the power of the Crown. And when Ministers rubber stamp “advice” – which may come from incorrigible former SpAds in Opposition too – without caring about the consequences for everyone, things tend to end in failure.

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