Latest news with #MorganMcSweeney
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Digital ID cards could be Starmer's poll tax
In March 1990, shops and cars in Covent Garden were set ablaze in the worst rioting the capital had seen for a century. Few things had angered the public like the new community charge. But something else happened too, which has been largely forgotten. Councils saw their revenue crash, as millions of names disappeared from the voter rolls. Now Sir Keir Starmer's favourite think tank has proposed what could turn out to be his very own poll tax. 'BritCard' is the name for a new digital ID app advanced by Labour Together, the think tank once run by Morgan McSweeney, who is now Starmer's chief of staff. The demand 'papers, please!' is not popular with voters, so to make it more palatable BritCard comes wrapped in the language of civic nationalism, serving as a cure for illegal immigration. The app and proposed wallet will be rebranded BritCard, to give us a nice warm, fuzzy feeling. We will love it so much that they believe it will morph into a full-blown digital ID system, acting as 'a familiar feature of daily life for everyone in the country'. But there are two serious problems here, and they are set on a collision course. First, BritCard will be mandatory, so we will be forced to use it or go off-grid entirely. Second – and this should alarm us all – Labour Together proposes that BritCard will use the Government's One Login digital identity service, which is mentioned 13 times in the proposal. This has become an expensive and sprawling Government IT project that has engaged hundreds of contractors, and cost taxpayers over £300m. What we know about it is very troubling – concerns have been raised about the security of the project at the deepest levels of the state. When we create a One Login account, it hoovers up our personal identification documents. This ID becomes the key that unlocks other government services, so an insecure system has serious consequences. It not only puts individuals at risk of identity theft and impersonation, but also makes defrauding the Government much easier. A fake ID can get you a long way. Phishing gangs accessed the records of 100,000 taxpayers, HMRC officials admitted last week, and used the IDs to steal an estimated £47m. An ID system like One Login is where criminal gangs would go first, and BritCard will forcibly enrol you into it. The Telegraph has reported the concerns of senior risk and cybersecurity staff working on One Login in some detail. The system was being accessed and modified by staff and contractors without the required level of security. Parts of the system were being developed in Romania, a fact that had eluded top management at the Government Digital Service (GDS). 'It's Horizon all over again,' one global security expert told this newspaper in April, referring to the notorious Post Office computer system. Of the 39 requirements in the National Cybersecurity Centre's cybersecurity checklist list CAF, One Login still only meets 21. But instead of taking the warnings seriously, One Login's senior management at GDS turned on the messengers who had brought them the bad news, dispersing the independent risk and cybersecurity team that first raised the issues. One Login's management subsequently began to mark their own homework. And earlier this year, a 'red team' exercise revealed how easily the system could be captured by hostile parties. The penetration test confirmed that intruders could breeze right in and take control of One Login without anyone noticing. Now recall GDS's own words – made in a business case that it refuses to release to the public – that an insecure One Login would empower 'hostile actors seeking to disrupt national infrastructure', with 'severe consequences for a large number of people'. As for Labour Together's proposition that a digital ID will help magically fix mass immigration, technology is not really the problem. Asylum seekers are already issued with a compulsory ID, but that doesn't stop them from melting into the underground economy, where the ID is never checked. And undocumented arrivals can gain a valid identity from the Home Office because it is promiscuously issuing credentials to undocumented migrants, taking at face value that they are who they say they are. Going digital won't fix either. Labour Together also thinks the public will rally around a digital ID app. 'Our polling revealed extremely strong public support for using a digital identity system for a range of use cases,' argues Labour Together. But only some. Polling by YouGov finds that around a fifth of UK consumers would not be comfortable with having an internationally recognised digital ID card or wallet like BritCard. Fewer than half, or 44pc, want a government ID that stores their biometric data, according to a survey for British payments processor History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it can rhyme. In 1990, millions went off-grid to avoid a hated new tax. Of course, it is very difficult to disappear today. But millions of us will face a profound moral choice similar to one that voters faced in 1990, as both the poll tax and digital ID were made compulsory. Must I expose myself to criminals and identity theft, or do I refuse to go along with this government scheme? Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Digital ID cards could be Starmer's poll tax
In March 1990, shops and cars in Covent Garden were set ablaze in the worst rioting the capital had seen for a century. Few things had angered the public like the new community charge. But something else happened too, which has been largely forgotten. Councils saw their revenue crash, as millions of names disappeared from the voter rolls. Now Sir Keir Starmer's favourite think tank has proposed what could turn out to be his very own poll tax. 'BritCard' is the name for a new digital ID app advanced by Labour Together, the think tank once run by Morgan McSweeney, who is now Starmer's chief of staff. The demand 'papers, please!' is not popular with voters, so to make it more palatable BritCard comes wrapped in the language of civic nationalism, serving as a cure for illegal immigration. The app and proposed wallet will be rebranded BritCard, to give us a nice warm, fuzzy feeling. We will love it so much that they believe it will morph into a full-blown digital ID system, acting as 'a familiar feature of daily life for everyone in the country'. But there are two serious problems here, and they are set on a collision course. First, BritCard will be mandatory, so we will be forced to use it or go off-grid entirely. Second – and this should alarm us all – Labour Together proposes that BritCard will use the Government's One Login digital identity service, which is mentioned 13 times in the proposal. This has become an expensive and sprawling Government IT project that has engaged hundreds of contractors, and cost taxpayers over £300m. What we know about it is very troubling – concerns have been raised about the security of the project at the deepest levels of the state. When we create a One Login account, it hoovers up our personal identification documents. This ID becomes the key that unlocks other government services, so an insecure system has serious consequences. It not only puts individuals at risk of identity theft and impersonation, but also makes defrauding the Government much easier. A fake ID can get you a long way. Phishing gangs accessed the records of 100,000 taxpayers, HMRC officials admitted last week, and used the IDs to steal an estimated £47m. An ID system like One Login is where criminal gangs would go first, and BritCard will forcibly enrol you into it. The Telegraph has reported the concerns of senior risk and cybersecurity staff working on One Login in some detail. The system was being accessed and modified by staff and contractors without the required level of security. Parts of the system were being developed in Romania, a fact that had eluded top management at the Government Digital Service (GDS). 'It's Horizon all over again,' one global security expert told this newspaper in April, referring to the notorious Post Office computer system. Of the 39 requirements in the National Cybersecurity Centre's cybersecurity checklist list CAF, One Login still only meets 21. But instead of taking the warnings seriously, One Login's senior management at GDS turned on the messengers who had brought them the bad news, dispersing the independent risk and cybersecurity team that first raised the issues. One Login's management subsequently began to mark their own homework. And earlier this year, a 'red team' exercise revealed how easily the system could be captured by hostile parties. The penetration test confirmed that intruders could breeze right in and take control of One Login without anyone noticing. Now recall GDS's own words – made in a business case that it refuses to release to the public – that an insecure One Login would empower 'hostile actors seeking to disrupt national infrastructure', with 'severe consequences for a large number of people'. As for Labour Together's proposition that a digital ID will help magically fix mass immigration, technology is not really the problem. Asylum seekers are already issued with a compulsory ID, but that doesn't stop them from melting into the underground economy, where the ID is never checked. And undocumented arrivals can gain a valid identity from the Home Office because it is promiscuously issuing credentials to undocumented migrants, taking at face value that they are who they say they are. Going digital won't fix either. Labour Together also thinks the public will rally around a digital ID app. 'Our polling revealed extremely strong public support for using a digital identity system for a range of use cases,' argues Labour Together. But only some. Polling by YouGov finds that around a fifth of UK consumers would not be comfortable with having an internationally recognised digital ID card or wallet like BritCard. Fewer than half, or 44pc, want a government ID that stores their biometric data, according to a survey for British payments processor History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it can rhyme. In 1990, millions went off-grid to avoid a hated new tax. Of course, it is very difficult to disappear today. But millions of us will face a profound moral choice similar to one that voters faced in 1990, as both the poll tax and digital ID were made compulsory.
Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- Times
By-election win a breather for Labour before spending review gloom
It was a brief moment of respite. At 3am on Friday the prime minister was woken by a call from an aide informing him that, against the odds, Labour had won the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse Holyrood by-election. There may have been just 602 votes in it, but for Sir Keir Starmer at this stage of his premiership a win is a win. It was, he said, a 'fantastic' victory. For one local resident it mattered more than most. Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, lives nearby with his wife Imogen Walker — she is the MP for the overlapping constituency of Hamilton & Clyde Valley — and is said to have taken a close interest in the campaign. The Times has been told that Starmer's decision to announce a U-turn on winter fuel payments earlier this month, rather than waiting until the spending review next week, was made partly with Hamilton in mind. Those on the ground said it had almost immediate cut-through, with winter fuel payments going from being the biggest issue on the doorstep at the start of the campaign to being relatively marginal. 'People got that we had listened,' was how one MP put it. But the win was far from clean. Reform UK went from a standing start to winning 26 per cent of the vote, just three per cent behind the SNP and five per cent behind Labour. It also showed Nigel Farage's party could siphon off votes from the Conservatives in Scotland as well as England, as support for the Scottish Tories collapsed from 17 per cent at the 2021 Holyrood election to 6 per cent. Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, claimed the result was 'truly remarkable'. The spending review promises to be one of the most challenging moments of Sir Keir Starmer's premiership THOMAS KRYCH/STORY PICTURE AGENCY A cabinet minister insisted that Labour's victory showed that the party could come through the middle to win next year's elections to the Scottish parliament. The SNP's tactic of telling voters to back them to stop Reform backfired dramatically. But any sense of relief for Starmer will be short-lived. The spending review next week promises to be one of the most challenging moments of his premiership. The government will seek to frame it as being about 'investing in Britain's renewal', with money going into security, the NHS and the economy more broadly. In one sense Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has a positive story to tell, with a £30 billion uplift in funding for the NHS, significant investment in the military and £113 billion worth of capital spending — including investment in local transport projects, nuclear power and other schemes. Reeves has been telling colleagues that the capital spending 'must be felt everywhere', with investment in shovel-ready projects across the country. But while the government would like to focus on the winners from the spending review process, many of the headlines are likely to be about the losers. The decision to increase spending on the NHS and the Ministry of Defence means that unprotected departments are facing real-terms cuts. Some of the negotiations between the Treasury and cabinet ministers have been brutal. Talks between Reeves and Angela Rayner, the local government and housing secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, are going down to the wire. The discussions between Cooper and Reeves in particular are said to have been particularly robust, with one Treasury official describing them as 'explosive'. Cooper has been making the case that without additional funding the government will be unable to deliver on several of Starmer's flagship pledges, including halving knife crime and halving violence against women and girls. Her case has been made both publicly and privately by the police. Sir Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan Police, has written to Starmer directly along with other police chiefs warning that without additional funding forces will face 'stark' choices about which crimes they investigate. When pressed on Rowley's intervention this week, Reeves's response was curt. 'We will be increasing spending on police,' she said. However she did not say whether she would meet the demands of police for a real-terms rise in spending, which lies at the heart of the row. JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE TIMES Rayner, who is seeking to protect local council budgets from cuts, is also said to have been 'forthright' in fighting her corner. One report claimed she had stormed out of a meeting with Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, slamming the door on the way out. Rayner's allies denied this, saying that while she had been tough in the talks she could not have slammed that door because the meeting had been held virtually. They added that they were now 'making progress' but were happy to go down to the wire. 'The deadline is when the document has to go to the printers,' they said. Reeves's room for manoeuvre is inherently limited by the state of the public finances and global events, something she alluded to at a CBI dinner on Thursday night. 'To be able to make decisions is a huge privilege,' she said. 'However, there's a lot of things that are out of [my] control as well, whether that is tariffs or what's happening in the global economy. You've got to be very agile and respond to the world as it is.' Paul Johnson, the outgoing head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that he has 'genuine sympathy' for Reeves and the difficult choices she has to make. • UK public borrowing tops £20bn in blow for Rachel Reeves Speaking at his leaving drinks in Westminster he said: 'We had an almost 20-year period of continual growth, a sense of real optimism I think, and that's really been sort of beaten out of the economy, and I think probably to some extent beaten out of the electorate. 'Not only have we had, up till the late 2010s, a period of really serious cuts to public services, but no increase in people's incomes either. There's just really hard trade-offs.' The question hanging over the spending review will be that of tax rises. The government's U-turn on the winter fuel allowance — which will cost about £700 million — will only add to the pressure on the public finances. Plans to reverse the two-child cap on benefits could cost as much as £3.5 billion a year. All of this against the backdrop of a growing hole in the public finances, and the estimate of some economists that Reeves could be as much as £60 billion in the red by the time of the autumn budget. Reeves did little to calm nerves at the CBI dinner, when she highlighted the huge tax rises of her inaugural budget and said she was 'never going to repeat anything of that scale' — which is not the same thing as ruling out any further rises. In the Treasury there are concerns that for all the fireworks surrounding the spending review the broader economic outlook is bleak. 'Everyone is talking about who gets what at the spending review but the bigger picture is that no one is really talking about the unsustainable path government debt is on,' one official said. 'We need politicians to start thinking about how we get on top of it. We don't have long before there is a serious risk of a debt spiral.'
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Keir Starmer's muddled politics are reaching their limit. It's time for him to make a choice
After less than a year in power, Labour has reached a familiar place. Keir Starmer's troubled government is at a fork in the road, wondering which direction to follow. With the delivery of its spending review next week after several acrimonious delays, and a Commons vote on its divisive welfare cuts expected later this month, the government's unity and morale are fragile. The public finances are severely strained, with ever more competing demands, such as for extra defence spending. Though much more energetic than its Tory predecessor, this government often seems opaque, unable to explain its purpose in a compelling way. Many voters and journalists – even more impatient than usual after years of manic politics – are already considering what might replace Starmer's administration. At barely 20% in the polls, Labour is as unpopular as in its most disliked days under Jeremy Corbyn – and unlike then, has been overtaken by Nigel Farage's latest vehicle. Most ominously of all, perhaps, even the government's successes, such as its trade deals, seem to make little or no difference to its public standing or sense of momentum. Both inside and outside the party, there is an increasingly widespread feeling that the strategy pursued by Starmer, his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, over the past five years – Reform UK-influenced, socially conservative, fiscally cautious and focused on rightwing pensioners and 'working people' – has been tested to destruction. Even McSweeney, previously revered by centrist Labour MPs and political journalists as a 'realist' about what the party needed to do to win power and hold on to it, is now being briefed against. But what alternative path might the government take? One ever more openly favoured by the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, and the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, leads broadly leftwards: raising taxes on the wealthy, building much more council and social housing, and no longer echoing Reform's reactionary rhetoric. The nationalisation of failing privatised utilities and the abandonment or loosening of Reeves's fiscal rules are also increasingly popular in the party, even among the centre-left conservatives of Blue Labour. Yet the problem for anyone hoping that the government will radicalise in response to its political crisis is that Labour governments rarely do. In opposition, when less cautious party activists and thinktanks have more influence, Labour does sometimes move to the left, as it did by making Corbyn leader after losing the 2015 election. But in office it more often does the opposite. The rightwing media, powerful business interests, conservative parts of the civil service, and voters and Labour politicians who believe that all leftwing policies are a risk: all these influences tell ailing Labour governments that their troubles are actually due to not being rightwing enough. In 1931, the Labour chancellor Philip Snowden – preoccupied, like Reeves, with making the government seem financially responsible – responded to the Depression and a growing budget deficit by rejecting expansive, more leftwing policies and proposing benefits cuts. Only a narrow majority of the cabinet backed him, and the government collapsed. At the election that followed, Labour was crushed. A similar story played out in the 1970s, when Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan's Labour governments – which, like Starmer's, had inherited a weak, inflation-prone economy from the Tories – cut public spending to secure a loan from the International Monetary Fund. At Labour's 1976 annual conference, Callaghan dismissed those who wanted a less austere approach: 'That option no longer exists.' It's easy to imagine Starmer sternly saying that to a left-leaning minister now. Yet in the 1970s, as in the 1930s, Labour's rightward shift didn't save it from election defeat. Despite these discouraging precedents, today's Labour centrists may not be deterred from pushing for another turn to the right, with further concessions to business in the name of economic growth and further clampdowns on immigration. One of the characteristics of Labour centrism, along with its lack of fresh ideas since Blairism, is a lack of self-doubt. Such a right turn could conceivably work this time. Labour could cobble together a new electoral coalition from voters who want to stop Reform at any cost, people who back Labour whatever its policies and former Tories who want to support a less chaotic party. Recruits could come from Reform, too, if Farage's inexperienced party makes big mistakes – such as the sudden resignation of its chair, Zia Yusuf, after a public row about whether to call for a ban on the burqa – or loses its novelty in the long stretch until the next election. With politics unprecedentedly fragmented, an ever more conservative Labour government may not need many votes to get re-elected. If you find this prospect unlikely or just depressing, and want a frustrated Labour government to finally take the other, leftward fork in the road, there are some grounds for hope. The recent interventions by Rayner and Burnham reflect not just their own more left-leaning politics and possible leadership ambitions but also an awareness that Britain is in a less rightwing phase than many conservatives and centrists believe. Public attitudes to privatisation, nationalisation, inequality and trade unions have shifted leftward in recent years. During the Labour governments of the 1930s and late 1970s, public opinion was moving the other way. Moreover, Starmer's suppression of the Labour left has inadvertently helped make the Greens more popular and radical, led to the election of five leftwing independent MPs and created a large pool of discontented socialists which may crystallise into a new party. With Labour losing as much support to these forces as to Reform, the pressure on the government to move left could soon become too large to totally ignore. In some policy areas, it can even be argued, the government is already on that path. Better workplace rights, the nationalisation of rail companies, removing or lessening the privileges of private schools and non-doms, restrictions on the North Sea oil conglomerates and new infrastructure for neglected parts of England: a limited but much-needed redistribution of power and wealth is already under way. The problem is that Labour is too timid to say so. At the next general election, whether the government moved left or right when it hit trouble will matter less to Britain's many unideological voters than whether it did so with a clear and convincing rationale. Democratic government is partly about confidence: having it, showing it and persuading enough voters to put their confidence in you. Labour looks far from confident right now. Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
The Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Downing Street ‘exploring plan for digital ID cards'
Downing Street is looking at introducing digital ID cards for every adult in Britain in a move to tackle the UK's illegal migration crisis, according to reports. The new 'BritCard' would be used to check on an individual's right to live and work in Britain, with senior No 10 figures examining the proposal, The Times has reported. The card, stored on a smartphone, would reportedly be linked to government records and could check entitlements to benefits and monitor welfare fraud. The scheme's supporters think it would send a clear signal that the UK is not 'soft touch' on illegal migration and would help ease the small boats crisis. The idea was one of former prime minister Tony Blair 's flagship policies in Downing Street, but it was killed off after he lost power. The proposal from the thinktank Labour Together, whose founders include the No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, has been backed previously by dozens of Labour MPs, with the new paper endorsed by two 'red wall' MPs, Jake Richards and Adam Jogee. The analysis in the paper found that the ID cards – a hugely controversial policy proposal during Tony Blair's era – would make right-to-rent and right-to-work checks quicker and easier for tenants and employees. The paper reportedly said that it would cost up to £400m to build the system and around £10m a year to administer as a free-to-use phone app. In their foreword, Richards, the MP for Rother Valley, and Jogee, the MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, said the BritCard 'should form an important part of Labour's enforcement strategy that does not compromise our principles and values', according to reports. They said that those living in the UK without regular status were 'exploited by criminal employers, which in turn suppresses wages for legal citizens and migrants alike'. They said the coalition government's 'hostile environment' had made very little difference to the overall numbers but had had a disproportionately cruel effect on those unfairly targeted. 'The Windrush scandal saw thousands of people wrongly targeted by immigration enforcement, including many legitimate British citizens who were unjustly detained or deported,' they said. 'We believe that a progressive government does not have to choose between dealing with these injustices. It must tackle them all head on.'
