There’s Something Starmer Isn’t Telling Us About His Digital ID Scheme

And it all centres around a little-known system called One Login.

From the level of outcry, it’s safe to say that many are now aware of Starmer’s scheme to impose mandatory digital ID, dubbed BritCard, on every working person in the UK—citizen and foreigner alike.

Addressing the Global Progressive Action Conference in London on Friday—attended by the likes of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Starmer said, “this government will make a free of charge digital ID mandatory for the right to work”.

BritCard was initially advanced by Labour Together, the think tank Morgan McSweeney ran before becoming Starmer’s chief of staff. The same man that co-founded anti-free speech pressure group, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in 2020, that listed “kill(ing) Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic goal.

Starmer top adviser Morgan McSweeney, who is also embroiled in a slush fund scandal.

Now, Starmer posits BritCard will help tackle illegal migration, and to be fair, it might—a little. The specific mechanisms by which it will remain murky and dependent upon implementation.

But this is coming from a man who promised to stop illegal immigration last July, and since then, we’ve only seen record highs.

What seems to have been entirely forgotten in all the noise, however, is that the government already has a digital ID service in place. And it would be an understatement to say there have been a few issues.

In May, journalist Andrew Orlowski reported that a government whistleblower had come forward with concerns about a system called One Login.

This is the digital identity service system created by the Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2021 that will help deliver BritCard.

Journalist Andrew Orlowski.

It was designed to give citizens streamlined access to hundreds of government services and, through the GOV.UK Wallet, store key digital documents such as driving licences.

The service currently processes the personal and biometric data of some three million citizens and has chewed through over £300 million in public funds.

In fact, the total cost of our digital ID escapade so far totals upwards of £700 million when you include the Conservative’s digital ID programme, Verify, which the Sunak government abandoned in 2023.

When the whistleblower, who worked as a senior civil servant, arrived on the One Login project to set up an information-assurance team in 2022, he encountered issues he did not expect.

The system was being accessed thousands of times a month by users holding unrestricted “do anything” system-administrator privileges. Many did not have the security-clearance required to work with such sensitive data.

So we’re talking about hundreds of government employees having access to an unprecedented amount of very private information.

To the average observer, it reeks of negligence—especially when considered alongside past cases of data misuse and clear signs of institutional political bias.

Just this June, former GCHQ intern, Hasaan Arshad, pleaded guilty to an offence under the Computer Misuse Act after he transferred top secret data to his home computer.

A 25-year-old intern duped the UK’s top intelligence, cyber, and security agency responsible for providing signals intelligence and information assurance to protect its citizenry from terrorism and cyber-attacks.

Perhaps some might ask: if our agencies can’t protect top secret data, how is the broader civil service going to handle our personal data?

Hasaan Arshad

Worse still, Orlowski’s whistleblower alleged that GDS did not require locked-down workstations for either its remote-working staff or the hundreds of external contractors involved in developing One Login.

In other words, the system’s open access made it ripe for cyber attacks.

But it got worse.

The whistleblower then discovered that part of the One Login system was being developed in Romania—a country Oxford University researchers recently identified as one of the world’s leading “cybercrime hotspots”.

Around three hours north of the capital, Bucharest, lies the city of Râmnicu Vâlcea. Many now refer to it as “Hackerville”. In 2017 alone, there were an estimated 140 million cyber attacks originating from the country.

Râmnicu Vâlcea.

Next come the conflicts.

According to the whistleblower, the same contractor responsible for developing One Login is the same one responsible for managing its risks.

Something that naturally begs the question: can a company objectively assess the risks of a system they themselves helped build? Theoretically, yes, it could but in reality, probably not.

Then came the most haunting revelation.

As the whistleblower told Orlowski, “third-line assurance—that is, security and risk evaluation carried out by an external, independent team—is not being performed at all”.

In short, the department responsible for the service is marking its own homework. Such neglect would immediately disqualify it for use in other sectors.

Tom Read was Chief Executive Officer of the Government Digital Service (GDS) from February 2021 to June 2024.

Perhaps one can guess what happened when all of this was raised with the GDS hierarchy.

Rather than investigate, senior figures reportedly reassigned staff from the assurance team to menial tasks. A formal HR complaint was then lodged against the whistleblower, and new officials were swiftly brought in to replace his team.

As one digital-identity expert remarked to Orlowski on the scheme’s potential dangers: “Imagine if [what happened to M&S] happened to Companies House or the Land Registry”

The M&S hack compromised the personal data of thousands of customers, including names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and online order histories. Entire departments were shut down for weeks, and £300 million in operating profit was wiped out in a blink.

Put simply, internal sources say the UK’s digital ID service is already plagued by serious security lapses, not just technical failures, but institutional ones, driven by a civil service more focused on concealment than correction.

Starmer’s (Blair’s) mandatory digital ID scheme, now being fast-tracked for national rollout, will likely only amplify such lapses. But it won’t be him who pays the price. It’ll be us.

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