A Catholic Warning on Sir Keir Starmer’s Digital ID Plans

By the Archbishop of Selsey

We are told that salvation will come by means of a card. Not the holy card that carries an image of Christ or His saints, but a digital one — cold, impersonal, glowing with the light of a screen. Prime Minister Keir Starmer assures us that this “Brit Card” will solve our immigration woes and bring order to a troubled land. Yet it is not a solution, but a mirage. It will neither stop the boats nor restore justice. What it will do is place yet another chain upon the wrists of free men and women.

The illusion of control
A digital ID cannot halt the tide of those who cross our borders unlawfully. It cannot compel deportations. It cannot restore sovereignty. It can, however, make the ordinary citizen a suspect in his own land, compelled at every step to prove his right to exist. Starmer offers us not control, but control’s shadow — a symbol without substance, a gesture that punishes the innocent while ignoring the guilty.

History’s warning
This nation has rejected ID cards before. In 1952 they were cast aside, deemed a nuisance unfit for peacetime liberty. The Lord Chief Justice himself dismissed them as an unnecessary burden¹. When Tony Blair revived the idea in 2006, the Identity Cards Act provoked outrage. The scheme was repealed in 2010, with Theresa May condemning it as “intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive”². The British people knew, and still know, that a free citizen does not live by papers, and that liberty dies not with a shout but with the quiet submission of one more form, one more scan, one more demand to “show your pass.”

The dignity of the person
Catholic truth tells us that man is made in the image of God. The state is not our master, but our servant. Leo XIII proclaimed that “man precedes the State” and that governments must respect the “natural and inalienable rights of the individual”³. Digital ID systems invert this order. They make rights conditional upon verification, reducing the child of God to a barcode on a screen.

We have seen where this leads. In China, identity cards and facial recognition cameras are the tools of a Social Credit System that punishes the “untrustworthy” and rewards compliance. The body may still walk free, but the soul is shackled. Pius XI warned against precisely this tyranny, a state that “absorbs the individual in the collectivity”⁴. The chains may be digital, but they are chains nonetheless.

A false solution to a real problem
Immigration is a grave matter. Justice demands that borders be secure; charity demands that the vulnerable be treated with compassion. Both are betrayed when leaders offer a false cure. Digital ID is aspirin for a cancer — a placebo for a dying patient. It gives the impression of action while the disease advances unchecked.

And let us not forget the law of unintended consequences. Big Brother Watch warns that such a system would birth a “Papers, please” society, where access to housing, banking, even a doctor’s visit, would depend on the state’s permission. Already 63% of Britons do not trust their government to guard such data safely, and tens of thousands have voiced their opposition⁵. They are right. A government that cannot patrol the Channel cannot be trusted to guard the keys to your very identity.

The choice before us
The question, then, is not one of efficiency, but of destiny. Do we still believe in man as a free creature under God, or do we bow to the idol of the state that seeks to number, catalogue, and command its subjects? For “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor 3:17). And where the Spirit is absent, liberty dies.

My brothers and sisters, Britain must not trade its soul for a digital card. This proposal is not progress but regress, not modernity but bondage. Let us recall the instinct that led our fathers to cast aside ID cards in the past: the instinct that told them a man’s word, his character, his citizenship, were worth more than any paper or plastic.

Conclusion
If we accept this scheme, we risk becoming a people who no longer trust our own freedom, who no longer trust the God who gave it, but who clutch instead at the cold comfort of bureaucracy. This is the very slavery from which Christ came to deliver us.

Britain must reject the “Brit Card.” Not out of nostalgia, not out of partisan rancour, but out of fidelity to truth and freedom. For if we forget that man is more than a number, then one day we will wake to find that the number has replaced the man.

For a more indepth presentation visit Nuntiatoria.org

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1. Big Brother Watch, Checkpoint Britain (Sept 2025), pp. 4–6.
2. Lord Chief Justice Goddard, Willcock v Muckle (1951).
3. Theresa May, Statement on the repeal of the Identity Cards Act, 2010.
4. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891), §7.
5. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), §78.