Digital IDs Will Stop the Boats Says Yvette Cooper
- Philip James
- 28 minutes ago
- 2 min read
With record numbers of illegal migrants entering Britain this week, home secretary has announced to parliament that implementing Digital IDs will stop the boats.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has revealed that Labour is looking for a "digital ID" scheme in a bid to work out which migrants have the right to legally stay in Britain and which do not.
Yvette Cooper told the Home Affairs Committee this afternoon:
"We are particularly looking at how we have digital ID for everyone coming to the UK...
"We want to have a digital service linked to e-visas and linked to our border management process to be able to determine whether an individual is in or out of the UK, whether they have let at the point at which their visa expires or whether they are overstaying and immigration enforcement action is needed.”
"We also want to ensure e-visas can effectively be used as a way of having that digital ID around the ability to work, to be here lawfully," she added.
Her reveal comes some weeks after an open letter from 40 Labour MPs which warned that the digital documents could help target "off-the-books" employment - which has long been touted as one of the biggest draws of illegal migrants to the UK.
But many Britons have long voiced their resistance to any kind of ID system in the UK. For any ID system to work everyone would need to hold one. By default everyone over the age of 16 would need to have one to 'prove' they are a legal citizen of Britain. Campaign group Big Brother Watch warned that the digital system was "Orwellian", and pointed out that Winston Churchill was applauded for scrapping their analogue equivalents in 1952 after authorities began misusing it.
No matter what the crisis, Labour say Digital IDs is the answer. Legions of Labour MPs are pushing to revive a Tony Blair-era digital ID scheme in a bid to curb a surge in illegal migration to Britain.
Three groups of party MPs - the Labour Growth Group, the Red Wall Group and the Blue Labour group - have all told the Government to "get a grip", and have pointed to the former Prime Minister's long-held push for ID cards as a starting point.
However, despite all this, Yvette Cooper failed to provide any clear evidence of how Digital IDs would stop the boats, just as they didn't stop Covid, or benefit fraud, they remain the answer to a question nobody asked.
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