Public Opposed to U.K. Government’s Digital Identity Expansion Plans

Fellow Daily Sceptic readers may remember that the Government intends to extend the use of digital identity verification across additional departments as part of its ‘digital transformation’ programme.

The Cabinet Office ran a public consultation on these developments in January-March this year. The results of that consultation have now been published, together with the wider Government response, and include some points of note. The figures and percentages used below are taken directly from the Government’s report.

The consultation received 66,233 responses, 99% of which were from private citizens: quite a decent showing for a little publicised consultation, especially when you consider that Sir Patrick Vallance’s April 2023 report on Net Zero Society: Scenarios and Pathways chose to engage just 29 citizens in a ‘public’ (and by all accounts, distinctly private) dialogue.

An overwhelming proportion of the responses were opposed to the Government’s proposals, as listed below, with support for the Government proposals shown in brackets. (The apparent increase in public support in questions eight and nine may perhaps be attributed to the ‘reverse wording’ of these two questions – i.e., by disagreeing with the Question, respondents were agreeing with the Government’s proposal; no doubt we can expect to see more of this grammatical sleight of hand.)

Question one: 73% opposed (2% supported)

Question two: 76% opposed (2% supported)

Question three: 75% opposed (3% supported)

Question four: 89% opposed (6% supported)

Question five: 93% opposed (4% supported)

Question six: n/a

Question seven: 87% opposed (3% supported)

Question eight: 58% opposed (25% supported)

Question nine: 54% opposed (29% supported)

Question 10: 83% opposed (8% supported)

There is a certain grim relish in seeing the Government’s squirming attempt to burnish these dire levels of public support as some kind of moral victory. A grateful Cabinet Office pays tribute, for example, to the positive responses (2%) to Question one: “Government welcomes recognition by a small proportion of respondents that services which help people prove who they are would deliver better, joined up services.”

Those figures are damning enough. But the Cabinet Office has other, larger worries: the majority of respondents have got hold of the idea that “an individual’s data privacy was more important than the benefits of improved services” and don’t show much confidence in Government’s ability to keep their data private. Worse, instead of answering the detailed technical questions in the consultation, many respondents raised wider, societal questions about where this may all be leading. And the Cabinet Office knows why: “There is clear evidence that… many appear to have been significantly influenced by commentaries against implementing compulsory citizen digital identity in principle and data sharing to support it.” Those “anti-digital commentaries” have fed “an underlying mistrust of Government use of personal data”. Perhaps a new sin of ‘digital denialism’ is on its way?

In mitigation, the Cabinet Office has decided to exclude “up to 20%” of responses from the analysis, where respondents suggested that expanding the use of digital identity might “mean citizens would not be able to use cash, that they would support a social credit system, that they would lead to an identity card being introduced or that digital identities are going to be made mandatory for all people. As these wider matters were not part of the consultation we determined these responses on wider issues to be out of scope for analysis.”

Even then, the Cabinet Office feels it must apologise, with a shudder of genteel distaste, that the results analysed nevertheless appear “overwhelmingly skewed towards the majority who used the consultation as a vehicle to express these opinions”.

So, a well-rehearsed response, which will no doubt be repeated when analysis of the CBDC consultation is published. Public opposition is acknowledged and immediately mischaracterised: opponents have no agency but have been misled by vague, unnamed forces (“anti-digital commentaries” – seriously?) and opinions based on ‘misinformation’ can legitimately – no, must, for the sake of democracy – be ignored. Familiar stuff: shift the debate from, say, “Do you support the EU?” to “Who is funding the Leave campaign?” If that still sounds fanciful, here is the short FAQ sheet released by the Cabinet Office as a form of press release – an increasingly desperate set of ‘fact checks’ on made up claims from the imagined ‘anti-digital’ lobby, which attempts to portray citizens’ valid concerns about the Government’s motives and competence into a set of anti-misinformation soundbites (helpfully forwarded to friends, such as the Global Government Group, who can write puff pieces on the Government’s noble struggle against ignorance and superstition).

FAQs on Government digital identity consultation response.

U.K. Government responds to digital ID ‘misconceptions’ after public consultation.

After this humiliating rejection, is the Government pressing ahead with the policy? Of course it is.

Jean Marat is a pseudonym.