Home Secretary reveals scheme to monitor who’s ‘in or out’ of UK after 40 Labour MPs met with Tony Blair to push controversial policy
Yvette Cooper has revealed Labour is planning a controversial “digital ID” scheme to track all migrants entering Britain – sparking fears of an “Orwellian” surveillance state.
The Home Secretary told MPs on the Home Affairs Committee this afternoon that the Government wants to create a comprehensive digital monitoring system to determine whether migrants have the right to stay in the UK.
In a move that has alarmed civil liberties campaigners, Cooper admitted Labour is “particularly looking at how we have digital ID for everyone coming to the UK.”
The revelation comes weeks after 40 Labour MPs held a secret breakfast meeting with Tony Blair, who has long championed digital ID cards through his think tank.
‘We want to track everyone’
In bombshell testimony to the committee, Cooper laid bare the extent of the proposed surveillance:
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 left at the point at which their visa expires or whether they are overstaying and immigration enforcement action is needed.
She added: “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.”
The Home Secretary’s comments confirm what critics have long suspected – that Labour is reviving Blair’s controversial ID card scheme that was scrapped by David Cameron over civil liberties concerns.
‘Orwellian nightmare’ warnings
Campaign group Big Brother Watch has already branded the digital system as “Orwellian”, pointing out that Winston Churchill himself scrapped ID cards in 1952.
The revelation is particularly striking given that just two years ago, Cooper herself shot down suggestions of ID cards when shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock floated the idea.
When asked if Labour was considering ID cards in November 2022, Cooper gave a flat “no” on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
But now in power, it appears the Home Secretary has performed a complete U-turn.
Secret Blair breakfast meeting
The ID scheme announcement follows revelations that 40 “rising star” Labour backbenchers met with Tony Blair at a secretive breakfast meeting in late January at his think tank, the Tony Blair Institute.
Sources familiar with the meetings told insiders that Blair appeared to be “building a network” and shaping broader Labour politics while keeping an eye on “talent” of the future.
The former Prime Minister has long called for the imposition of a digital ID system – and his think tank continues to lobby for it to this day.
An open letter from the 40 Labour MPs who met Blair warned that digital documents could help target “off-the-books” employment – long considered one of the biggest draws for illegal migrants to the UK.
Desperate bid to curb crisis
Cooper’s ID scheme revelation came as she admitted the scale of the migration crisis facing Britain.
“An entire criminal industry has taken hold along our borders,” she told MPs. Nobody should be making these dangerous boat crossings – they do undermine border security, they put lives at risk.
The Home Secretary said it was “completely unacceptable” to see record numbers of migrants crossing the Channel, with 2025 already the worst year on record for illegal crossings.
She also vowed that Labour must “end asylum hotels altogether”, blaming inherited contracts from the Tory Government for the crisis.
Attack on Tory ‘free market experiment’
In a brutal assault on her predecessors, Cooper laid into the Conservatives’ “free market experiment” in migration.
I think this really was a sort of free market experiment in which effectively employers were encouraged to recruit from abroad – including being given a 20 per cent discount on the wages they were able to pay for people who they recruited from abroad,” she blasted.
The Home Secretary also confirmed Labour was against international students bringing dependents and said: “We should not have the care work being recruited from abroad.
Civil liberties backlash
The announcement is likely to face fierce resistance from civil liberties groups and opposition parties who have long opposed mandatory ID systems.
Former Tory policing minister Kit Malthouse previously warned: “It’s not far to jump from that to us all having a barcode tattooed on us at birth.
Boris Johnson, who was a vocal opponent of Blair’s original scheme, wrote in The Telegraph in 2004: “There is the loss of liberty, and the creepy reality that the state will use these cards – doubtless with the best possible intentions – to store all manner of detail about us, our habits, what benefits we may claim, and so on.
The Blair blueprint returns
Under the Tony Blair Institute’s plans, all individuals would be required to produce their digital identity card, showing their legal right to reside, to access employment or benefits.
The think tank’s report said this would make it harder for undocumented migrants to “disappear” into the informal economy.
But critics warn that what starts as a system for migrants could easily expand to cover all UK citizens – creating the surveillance state that Churchill rejected over 70 years ago.
As one civil liberties campaigner put it: “First they come for the migrants, then they come for everyone else. This is how an Orwellian nightmare begins.”
Image: Official portrait of Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP (crop 2)
Author: David Woolfall
License: CC BY 3.0
Source: Wikimedia Commons
