BIT BY BIT, THE SWITCH FLIPS ...

Picture the scene, dear reader. Somewhere in a fluorescent-lit bunker that smells of institutional coffee and quiet despair, a group of extremely serious people in extremely expensive suits are nodding along to a PowerPoint about “streamlining identity verification.” One of them is Lisa Nandy, Culture Secretary at the time, looking for all the world like she’s just discovered the secret to happiness: forcing every adult in the country to exist as a neat little data packet that the state can ping whenever it feels insecure. She went on the telly and said it with the serene confidence of someone who has never once been on the wrong end of a government algorithm. All British adults will have a digital ID by the end of Parliament. 

Not a card you have to wave about like a Soviet internal passport, she insisted. Nothing so vulgar. Just a lovely digital thing on your phone that you’ll only really need to prove you have the right to work. It’s for your protection, you see. Against illegal workers. Against fraud. Against the terrifying spectre of people existing without the state’s prior approval. How thoughtful. How modern. How very, very fucking convenient for the people who will eventually own the off-switch.

The original objection still stands, and it stands taller than ever. Many people might want the sort of UN-flavoured, centralised data framework the government was so keen on building. Some will think it’s really convenient. They don’t mind the government being able to watch what they spend their money on, who pays them, where they go on holiday, what vaccines they take each year, how well they did in school and what their political opinions look like online. Some will even clap like seals at the idea that international Digital ID will magically stop illegal migration and fraud and make the streets safer. Fair enough. People clap for all sorts of things. Some people clap for reality television.

The problem—the screaming, copper-bottomed, Black Mirror-shaped problem—is that no one was asked to vote for it. Digital ID is not a card or a wallet on your phone. It is an entire YOU file, accessible by authorities, that will eventually grant you permissions depending on your behaviour. That framework was already being sketched in. The permissions logic is baked into the concept from the start. Once the infrastructure exists, the temptation to expand its uses is not a bug. It is the entire operating system of power.

If this was so marvellous, so obviously better for everyone, why didn’t the government spell out exactly what it was, what it would do, and—crucially—what it could do in five years, ten years, when the political weather has shifted and the same machinery is being run by people who make today’s lot look like soft liberals? Why didn’t the parties put it in their manifestos in plain English? Why the soft-focus language about convenience and “gateway to government services” while Nandy reassured everyone it would never, ever be used to restrict access to the NHS or pensions? Because they knew. They knew the majority would look at the full prospectus and say, in no undertrain terms, sod off. And that is not an acceptable answer in a country that still pretends to run on consent.

Bit by bit the control changes. First it’s just for right to work. Then it’s the easiest way to access benefits. Then it’s the preferred method for banking, travel, healthcare records, age verification, everything. Suddenly not having the digital equivalent of a gold star means life becomes a series of minor, grinding humiliations. You are not banned. You are simply… less convenient. Less trusted. Less permitted. The government does not need jackboots when it has an app that can quietly throttle your existence.

This was never just about Lisa Nandy, though she was a particularly enthusiastic salesperson for the product. It was the entire apparatus—ministers, civil servants, the think-tank circuit, the same revolving door of consultants and global forums that treat the population as a management problem rather than a collection of free adults. A cartel of the well-connected, convinced that the only thing standing between civilisation and chaos is more data, more verification, more central visibility. They talk about “trust frameworks” and “useful, inclusive, trusted” systems while building the architecture for something that looks, smells and walks like soft authoritarianism with a user-friendly interface.

Orwell didn’t warn us about the jackboot first. He warned us about the language that makes the jackboot feel like common sense. “Protect Britons.” “Tackle illegal working.” “Cut bureaucracy.” “Digital age.” Every phrase is a little anaesthetic. By the time you notice the needle, the drip is already running. The plans were eventually watered down under pressure, then publicly scrapped when the political weather changed. Three million people signed a petition. Public opposition was loud enough that even a government with a large majority had to retreat. That should be the end of the story. It never is. The infrastructure thinking remains. The appetite remains. The belief that ordinary people cannot be trusted with their own lives without a digital chaperone remains. 

And the next time the same idea is wheeled out—perhaps under a different name, with slightly softer edges and a new set of smiling ministers—it will arrive wearing the same patient smile Nandy wore while explaining that this was all for our own good. The only rational response to that smile is to treat it the way you treat a man offering you a free tracking collar “for your safety.” You smile back. You say "no". And you remember that the people building the systems of control are never the ones who will live under the worst version of them. This is point where "no" simply has to become "fuck off". 

They will have exemptions. They will have workarounds. They will have the power to redefine what 'behaviour' looks like when it becomes inconvenient. We were not asked. That remains the point. Everything else is just the long, darkly comic process of watching a political class try to sell the public their own subordination as an upgrade.

Time for that revolution, methinks.

9/11 @ 25: THE DAY THE ORDINARY ENDED

The towers fell on a Tuesday, which is the sort of day that usually reserves its dramas for committee meetings and the slow death of office plants. Twenty-five years on, one is still obliged to notice that the sky was the colour of a particularly smug postcard, the sort that arrives from a friend who has forgotten you exist until the photograph proves otherwise. Then the first aircraft arrived, and the postcard tore itself in half.

I was not there, of course, most of us were not, I was at home from University. Distance is the modern condition, and television made sure of it. We watched the second impact live, which is a phrase that still sits in the mouth like a bad olive. Live. As if death had decided to keep office hours. The commentary teams, those professional noticers of the obvious, fell briefly silent, which is the nearest television ever comes to dignity. Then they recovered, as they always do, and began the long process of turning horror into narrative, narrative into analysis, and analysis into the sort of solemn waffle that eventually requires a theme tune.

What remains, a quarter-century later, is not so much the image of the buildings collapsing—though that has been burnt into the collective retina with the efficiency of a branding iron—as the sudden discovery that the ordinary was not protected by its ordinariness. People went to work. They carried coffee. They argued about nothing in particular in elevators that would shortly cease to exist. The banality was the point. Evil, when it bothers to show up, rarely bothers with originality. It prefers the familiar street, the familiar skyline, the familiar assumption that today will resemble yesterday closely enough to allow for lunch plans.

The aftermath was a masterclass in competitive solemnity. Flags proliferated with the enthusiasm of a rash. Politicians discovered their inner Churchill, or at any rate their inner Churchill impersonator, and the language of resolution thickened like gravy left too long on the stove. We were assured that the world had changed forever, which is the sort of claim that looks impressive until one notices that the same people making it continued to book tables at the same restaurants and complain about the same traffic. Forever is a long time, and most of us are not built for it. We are built for the next news cycle, the next scandal, the next opportunity to feel briefly important by association with catastrophe.

There was, inevitably, the war. Or rather the wars, plural, which multiplied with the generosity of a bad idea that has found funding. One could argue about the wisdom of any particular response, and many did, at great and largely pointless length. What was harder to argue with was the spectacle of a civilisation that had spent decades congratulating itself on its subtlety suddenly discovering that subtlety is of limited use when the other party has decided that aeroplanes make excellent missiles. The satire wrote itself, which is always a bad sign. When reality starts producing its own punchlines, the professional satirist is left looking for alternative employment, preferably something involving less irony and more gardening.

Memory, meanwhile, has done what memory always does: it has edited. The sharp edges have been smoothed by repetition until the event resembles a particularly grim public holiday, complete with obligatory moments of silence and the soft focus of retrospect. Young people who were not alive at the time now study it as history, which means they study it with the same mixture of duty and mild boredom that earlier generations brought to the Treaty of Versailles. The photographs remain, of course—those terrible, beautiful photographs in which the light is perfect and the smoke is photogenic and the falling bodies are reduced to abstract marks against the blue. Art has always known how to make suffering look interesting. That is one of its less attractive talents.

And yet the lament persists, dry as it may sound. One does not need to inflate the occasion with purple prose to notice that something was taken that day which has not been returned. Not innocence—innocence is a commodity that was already in short supply—but a certain unexamined confidence that the skyline was permanent, that the morning commute was a private affair between a person and their destination, that the ordinary day could be trusted to remain ordinary. That confidence has been replaced by a low-grade vigilance, the sort that checks the exits in restaurants without quite admitting it is doing so. It is not heroic. It is merely accurate.

Twenty-five years is long enough for the politicians who spoke of resolve to have been replaced by other politicians who speak of other resolves. It is long enough for the children who watched the towers fall on classroom televisions to have children of their own, who will one day be shown the same footage and asked to feel something appropriate. Feeling appropriate is a skill that can be taught, rather like table manners. Whether it is the same as understanding is another question, and one that the anniversary industry is not notably eager to answer. The dead remain dead. That is the one fact that has resisted all attempts at narrative improvement. Their names are read aloud each year with the careful neutrality of a railway timetable, and then the living go back to their living. There is no satisfactory conclusion available, which is perhaps why the occasion continues to attract the attentions of those of us who make a living from unsatisfactory conclusions. 

The towers are gone. The sky is still the same colour on a clear September morning. The difference is that we now look at it with a certain suspicion, as if it might be planning something. That suspicion is the real memorial, and it requires no plaque. It is carried, uncomfortably, in the ordinary act of looking up.

BURNHAM'S CHOICE: WELFARE OVER THE REALM

There are moments in politics when a phrase drops with the soft, wet thud of a body hitting a skip. Andy Burnham’s contribution this week was one of them. Standing at the despatch box, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom delivered a line so perfectly calibrated for the current age that it deserves to be carved into the side of a white elephant somewhere in Whitehall: national security “can’t come at the expense of social security.” Let that settle for a moment. The first duty of any government, the one they all claim with a straight face when the flags come out, has just been politely informed it must wait its turn behind the housing benefit spreadsheet. The tanks can wait. The submarines can hold their breath. The serious threats that 'cannot wait,' as the opposition kept insisting, will simply have to form an orderly queue behind the resilience of our communities, which, as we all know, is best measured in the unbroken flow of local housing allowance.

It is a masterpiece of modern political English. It sounds compassionate. It sounds balanced. It even sounds vaguely profound if you say it slowly enough while staring at a middle distance that contains no actual enemies. What it actually means is: we will do everything for national security except the difficult bit that involves choosing. We will not be forced to choose between the two. Which is politician-speak for “we have already chosen, and the choice is the one that keeps the more immediate domestic constituency from shouting too loudly.” Imagine the briefing notes: “Prime Minister, the world is getting darker. Russia is poking around the North Sea. Argentina still mutters about the Falklands. Defence spending needs to rise if we are to keep pace with the commitments we keep signing.” Burnham’s answer, distilled: yes, absolute commitment, of course, but not if it means anyone ends up in temporary accommodation because we reformed housing benefit. Strong national security, you see, depends upon having resilient communities. And resilient communities, in this telling, are communities that continue to receive the current level of transfer payments without interruption. Deterrence, it turns out, is downstream from the benefits system.

There is a darkly comic elegance to it. Picture the hypothetical invasion. The enemy lands, looks around at the temporary accommodation statistics, and decides the game is not worth the candle because the social fabric is simply too robust. “Stand down the battalions,” the foreign general mutters. “Their housing benefit is intact. We cannot prevail against such resilience.” Or the cyber attack that pauses mid-keystroke because somewhere a young person is receiving enhanced mental health support. The absurdity writes itself, and yet here we are, treating the phrase as statesmanship rather than a sophisticated form of kicking the can while looking concerned. The real fury is in the false choice presented as moral clarity. No one serious argues that the answer to every problem is simply to slash the welfare bill and hand the money to the Ministry of Defence. 

But the inverse position—that the defence of the realm must never inconvenience the domestic transfer system—is not compassion. It is a refusal to admit that resources are finite and that some priorities are, by definition, prior. Burnham’s formulation pretends the two can always expand in harmony if only we fix education, support young people, and expand mental health provision hard enough. It is the politics of the perpetual free lunch, delivered with the solemnity of a man who has just discovered the secret to governing without trade-offs. And of course the language is designed to make any disagreement sound monstrous. Challenge the priority and you are apparently volunteering to put hundreds of thousands of children into temporary accommodation. 

The alternative—actually funding the hard power that keeps the soft power possible—is framed as cruelty. It is a rhetorical trap so neat it should come with a small round of applause from the people who write the lines. National security is important, naturally. Just not important enough to sit at the head of the table when the social security bill is already in the room looking hungry. This is the same political class that will lecture you about seriousness on the global stage while treating the defence budget as the residual claim after everything else has been protected. They will talk about resilience until the word loses all meaning, then act surprised when the actual threats do not check the latest welfare projections before acting. The phrase will be repeated, softened, explained away by spokesmen who insist the Prime Minister remains absolutely committed to national security as the first duty. The record will show the hierarchy he actually voiced when the cameras were rolling.

In the end it is pure Orwellian territory: a society so determined to protect every domestic comfort that it treats the protection of the society itself as an optional extra that must not disrupt the main programme. National security cannot come at the expense of social security. Of course it can’t. Not in a country that has decided the real front line is the benefits office, and the real threat is the possibility that someone, somewhere, might have to make a harder choice than the one currently on offer. The rest of the world can wait. The spreadsheet comes first.