November 2025 -

The BritCard and the Managed Future of Britain

This article is re-posted from the website of the Libertarian Alliance, which gives a blanket permission to do so, subject to certain provisions. The original article can be found at https://libertarianism.uk/2025/10/25/the-britcard-and-the-managed-future-of-britain/

The BritCard may be marketed as a public-service upgrade, but its deeper function is political: to fuse identity, economy, and obedience into a single mechanism of management. A system that begins with “Right to Work” can end with “Right to Exist.” Britain, the old laboratory of liberty, is becoming the prototype of digital feudalism — and this time the peasants will carry the badges themselves.

When the British government announced the coming “BritCard,” a digital identification system for every citizen and legal resident, most of the press treated it as an inevitable modernization—something like upgrading from typewriters to laptops. The official claim is that it will make life easier, safer, and more convenient: less paperwork, fewer frauds, faster service. Yet as I read the documents and news releases—gov.uk, Security Journal UK, and the excellent dissection by Iain Davis at iaindavis.substack.com—I felt an unpleasant déjà vu.

The language of efficiency is always the mask of control. Every bureaucracy learns that the best way to extend its reach is to call it “service delivery.” The BritCard is not about cutting red tape; it is about fusing it into a single electronic ribbon wrapped around every citizen.

According to the Home Office, the BritCard will be voluntary—except for those who wish to work, rent, or access public benefits. In other words, for almost everyone. The government states plainly that the digital ID “will be mandatory for Right-to-Work checks by the end of this Parliament” (gov.uk). This is the usual bureaucratic sleight of hand: when refusal entails exclusion, compliance is not consent.

Iain Davis calls this a “bait-and-switch psyop,” a staged rollout designed to normalize the very thing earlier generations rejected. (iaindavis.substack.com) His point is simple: when the state spends years denying that it will impose a national ID, then suddenly announces one under a friendlier name, the rebrand is itself the confession.

In the early 2000s, Tony Blair’s government tried to impose a physical ID card. Public backlash killed the idea. Now it returns as software. The difference is technical, not political. The phone has become the card, and the card the precondition of participation.

Supporters insist that the real challenge is trust: “Digital ID is not just a technology test. It’s a trust test. And the UK can’t afford to fail.” (medium.com) The phrase might have been written by a behavioural-science consultant rather than a civil servant. It presumes that citizens must prove they can trust their government, not the other way around.

Britain’s political class has squandered that trust through decades of surveillance laws, data leaks, and outright ideological censorship. Yet the same class now proposes to become the custodian of everyone’s biometric credentials. Their argument: “Don’t worry, it’s encrypted.” The counter-argument: “So was every breached database in history.”

Officially, the system is meant to promote inclusion—so that everyone, even those without passports or driver’s licenses, can prove who they are. (gov.uk) But as Davis points out, the entire logic of a digital credential is exclusionary. Those without smartphones or broadband—disproportionately the elderly and poor—will find themselves stranded. The government promises “fallback options,” yet the momentum of policy runs in one direction: digital or nothing.

Inclusion rhetoric always precedes compulsion. Welfare was once voluntary charity; it became a bureaucratic entitlement. Now identity itself is being nationalized under the same rhetoric. Once your ability to work or travel depends on a digital credential, refusal ceases to be an act of choice and becomes an act of rebellion.

The key to understanding systems like the BritCard is that they are platforms, not projects. The first purpose—employment verification—is merely a foothold. Once the infrastructure exists, the list of use-cases expands naturally: health records, tax payments, bank accounts, even social-media access. Each extension will be sold as “streamlining.” Each will shift power away from individuals and toward the data managers who mediate every transaction.

Critics often invoke the Chinese “social credit” system as a dystopian comparison. Britain is unlikely to copy it in form; the British genius is not for tyranny but for polite coercion. The same control can be achieved by softer means—by linking digital identity to economic and social participation. If you can’t rent a flat, get a job, or renew your driver’s license without showing your phone, your “freedom” exists only within the terms of the app.

No one should pretend that the digital-ID project is purely governmental. Its deeper foundation is the alliance of bureaucracy and finance. The push for “digital verification” comes as much from the banks as from the Home Office. The same oligopolies that profit from cashless payments and biometric security are writing the code that defines identity itself.

The argument from efficiency—“reducing fraud,” “simplifying access”—is only the front end of a new rent-seeking model. Data becomes property; verification becomes a service. The citizen becomes the product. As Davis notes, the British state has effectively outsourced the definition of legal personhood to private contractors whose interests are global, not national. (iaindavis.substack.com)

The official justification is border control: preventing illegal working and “small-boat crossings.” (gov.uk) It is an old tactic: invoke an external problem to institutionalize internal surveillance. In practice, the illegal-migration issue will remain untouched. Those already outside the law will continue to work in cash. Those inside it will be the ones monitored.

Britain’s political elite learned long ago that the middle class will accept almost any intrusion if told it will target “illegals” or “terrorists.” The Patriot Act in the United States followed the same logic. In both cases, the dragnet captures everyone but the supposed target.

Supporters assure the public that the BritCard will use “state-of-the-art encryption.” They fail to mention that “state-of-the-art” lasts about six months. Every central database becomes, sooner or later, a honeypot for hackers and a temptation for officials. As Security Journal UK warns, the centralization itself creates a “single point of failure.”

In a sense, this is the modern form of the old British class system: an elite of administrators and IT vendors claiming omniscience, and a public reduced to supplicants for correction when the system misidentifies them. “Sorry, your data appears corrupted; please file Form 37B.” The polite tone will remain. The power imbalance will not.

The BritCard is not an isolated national project. It is the British implementation of a transnational template promoted by the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 and the World Economic Forum’s “digital-governance” models. Nearly every Western government now uses identical language: digital transformation, trust frameworks, identity ecosystems. The vocabulary is managerial Esperanto.

Britain’s system will plug into that global architecture. The justification—security, trade, and interoperability—will sound practical. The reality is integration into a worldwide grid of identification and compliance. Once each country builds its module, connecting them is an engineering problem, not a political debate.

The real triumph of schemes like BritCard lies not in technology but in psychology. The population must be taught to equate identity with safety. Hence the marketing tone of the press releases: “Doing the hard graft to deliver a fairer Britain for those who want to see change, not division.” (gov.uk) Such phrases could have come from a detergent commercial. They appeal to comfort, not conscience. Once enough citizens have accepted the premise—that showing credentials is normal civic hygiene—the political argument is over. Resistance will then be reclassified as pathology: only conspiracy theorists, extremists, or “disinformation networks” would object. The beauty of soft authoritarianism is that it rarely needs police; social pressure and financial dependency do the work.

Defenders like to cite success stories abroad: Estonia’s e-ID, India’s Aadhaar. They omit the darker records—mass data leaks, false positives, the near-impossibility of contesting errors when the system itself is judge and jury. The Indian Supreme Court has already warned that digital ID creates “a surveillance state.” But lessons from poorer or smaller countries rarely penetrate the British or American imagination.

Davis’s research reminds us that every supposed benefit of digital identity—security, convenience, inclusion—has an analogue in the old paper world. What is new is total integration. The very idea of separate spheres—work, health, finance, travel—gives way to a unified data profile. Bureaucratic curiosity becomes omniscient by design.

The great question is not whether the state will abuse the system—it will—but how citizens will adapt to it. When digital credentials become the price of daily life, the economy of obedience replaces the economy of exchange. You will “choose” to comply because non-compliance becomes non-existence.

This is the deeper meaning of cashless societies and “verified” platforms. They abolish anonymity, which is another word for freedom. An anonymous citizen can disobey quietly. A fully identified one can only request permission. After the mandatory right-to-work rollout, expansion will be incremental. Travel documents, vaccination records, tax filings, vehicle registrations, even online commenting—each will be added in the name of efficiency. The infrastructure of compliance is permanent; its uses are transient. That is why governments invest so heavily in it.

If history is any guide, the final step will come not from politicians but from crises—financial, environmental, or epidemiological. The next emergency will simply activate the network already built. At that point, the question “Should we have digital ID?” will be meaningless. The only question will be “What happens if you lose access?”

As an American observer, I find the British case instructive because our own government is moving along parallel lines—linking IRS databases, facial recognition, and “trusted traveler” programs under the rhetoric of modernization. The difference is that Britain, with its centralized health and welfare systems, offers a more efficient laboratory. The managerial elite on both sides of the Atlantic share the same ambition: to render every transaction legible to authority.

What strikes me most is how little resistance remains. The great British instinct for privacy—the one that once produced habeas corpus, trial by jury, and the sanctity of the home—has been dulled by decades of bureaucratic paternalism. Surveillance cameras arrived to fight crime; censorship laws to fight “hate.” The BritCard is simply the next iteration: bureaucracy with a friendly interface.

In common law, a person was presumed free [innocent – ed.] until proven otherwise. In the digital state, you are presumed unauthorized until your device proves you are permitted. That reversal of presumption is the essence of soft tyranny. It needs no ideology, only infrastructure. As Davis concludes in his essay, the BritCard is not a reform but a continuation—a further step in the long conversion of citizens into managed subjects. (iaindavis.substack.com) It is the logical outcome of a political order that no longer trusts its people and no longer bothers to pretend otherwise.

Thomas Hobbes wrote that men surrender their liberty to a sovereign in exchange for protection. In the digital age, protection has been replaced by convenience. The new Leviathan offers not safety but ease: tap here, sign there, and all shall be well. The price is the same—submission. The British people, who once resisted kings, inquisitions, and continental empires, are being invited to surrender to an app. Most will do so cheerfully, because no one ever believes a velvet chain can tighten. But once it does, no election will remove it.

Lefties in Charge: The Daily Telegraph Takes Note

This article is re-posted from the website of the Libertarian Alliance, which gives a blanket permission to do so, subject to certain provisions. The original article can be found at https://libertarianism.uk/2025/10/15/lefties-in-charge-the-daily-telegraph-takes-note/

Alan Bickley

The Daily Telegraph has just discovered that Britain is run by the left — and reports it with the astonishment of a man who finds damp in his cellar.

In “The Left-wing Bias of Britain’s Establishment” (9th October 2025), its Home Affairs Editor tells us that three-quarters of the country’s “establishment” — civil servants, judges, teachers, academics, media people, and the usual army of consultants — vote for parties of the left. Two-thirds voted to remain in the European Union. Nearly half believe that free speech “hurts minorities”.

Most think capitalism unjust and the Empire shameful. The pollsters, with statistical precision, tell us that our establishment now sits twenty degrees to the left of the national centre. Nigel Farage replies on cue that the establishment “needs wholesale reform”. Then the curtain falls.

Conservative journalism has specialised in this sort of thing since the 1950s. You identify some development that threatens national ruin. You describe it with gloating horror. Then you stop — never the final step, never the remedy. The function, of course, is not remedy but sedation. It instructs the faithful that resistance is futile, that they are simply “on the wrong side of history.”

Whether this paralysis comes from stupidity or cowardice no longer matters. The effect is the same: make every complaint a call to despair.

What to do about leftist bias in the governing and administrative class has been plain for twenty years. Sean Gabb set it out in his Cultural Revolution, Culture War (2006). Every leftist structure in Britain lives by State finance or privilege. A radical government, once in power, could close the entire apparatus within weeks: universities, fake charities, “arts councils”, regulators, broadcasters, the climate agencies — all of them exist because of state funding. Turn off the tap and the revolution stops.

Dr Gabb insisted that most welfare should be preserved. The working poor have been plundered by taxes and inflation. They need at least part of the 1945 settlement on welfare. The underclass will riot if starved, but is otherwise politically inert: therefore, keep the money flowing until the time is right for starving it.

But everything else not needed for national defence or internal order should go. The aim here is not to save money for the taxpayers — though it would, and that is good — but disestablishment of the left. The left without subsidy is the left without life.

My only disagreement with Dr Gabb is his proposal that the sacked lefties should keep their pension entitlements. But he was writing twenty years ago, before a growing problem had become an emergency.

My view is that the sacked lefties should keep neither their jobs nor their pensions. A man who has spent thirty years enforcing “diversity targets” should end his career collecting supermarket trolleys. Otherwise, it is uncontroversial how to end the bias of the British State. It really is that simple.

This, however, is not my main focus today. A purge of the apparatus is the indispensable prelude to recovery, yet the purge itself will occur only when certain deeper forces turn in our favour. My purpose now is to explain why those forces are turning — to restate, once more and without apology, the structure of power in Britain, and why the system that has governed us since 1945 has begun to go unstable.

I will also suggest what I cannot prove — that the Telegraph report, plus the one sentence Farage comment, can be taken as a part of a warning to the lefties themselves that, even if no Gabbian purge awaits them, they had better moderate their ways. But that can wait. Here is my restatement of the real power structure.

Ultimate power in this country lies not with the people, nor with the office-holders who solicit their votes. It lies with the monied interest operating from the City of London. Its members may carry British passports. They sometimes have a genetic connection. But, whatever their background, their loyalties are to their own order, which is itself transnational.

They are united by credit, not by kinship. Whether they are one with their cousins in New York, or like unto them, is unimportant. What matters is that they are part of a joint command system of global usury, enriching themselves through debt and the manipulation of paper claims. Their ideal world is homogeneous, borderless, and conveniently taxable — a map of feeding tubes running from every region into the same financial stomach.

So far as this financial oligarchy cares for Britain, it is as a platform — as a safe base of operations, a pleasant hinterland of grouse moors and Bond Street shops without prices in the windows. At the head of its political agenda for Britain has long been a determination that any institution capable of obstructing its operations must be neutralised. That is why, after 1945, it dismantled the Empire, which, though enfeebled by war, was still a going concern, and might have been restructured and restabilised. The motive was not philanthropy — real self-rule was never contemplated.

The Empire had to go because its engineers and administrators were unreliably patriotic and had their own ideas of a British destiny. The Empire was a competing establishment. It had to go.

After 1960, the same logic demanded the destruction of manufacturing industry. Industrialists, with their factories and unions and local loyalties, were another rival interest. Finance does not like men who make things. The liquidation of industry also liquidated the working class that industry had created: a people too numerous, too cohesive, and too prone to strike for its rights. The monied interest has no use for citizens. It prefers clients.

Enter the Thatcherites. The destruction of industry was not an unfortunate side-effect of sound money. It was the policy. The simplest way to end inflation would have been to cut public spending and stabilise the currency against some reasonably hard currency, or against gold.

Instead, the Government chose what Dennis Healey called “sado-monetarism”. It throttled credit while maintaining its own deficit, forcing interest rates to suicidal heights. The pound rose; exports died; factories shut. A quarter of manufacturing vanished between 1980 and 1983.

Margaret Thatcher did not save England by destroying socialism. She began the liquidation of England, starting with the working class. She defeated the miners, who were a nuisance, but she also destroyed the only labouring class that might one day have defied the financiers. She freed the markets only to hand them to the monopolists. She was the surgeon who killed the patient on orders from his enemy.

During the 1980s, the governing class divided into two principal wings. On one side stood the Thatcherites: pious in the abstract about markets, deferential to money — though less so about those who made it by making things, contemptuous of the poor. On the other were the cultural Marxists, disciples of Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Foucault, intent on erasing the nation and reconstructing human nature.

By the 1990s, these two wings had fused into what we call the Blairites: politically correct free-traders. The fusion was inevitable. Both sides believed in management; they disagreed only about the vocabulary.

Therefore, putting the workers out of work was only the first act. The second was to replace them. Mass immigration supplied both cheap labour and permanent social disunity. Fill the country with strangers perceptibly different from the natives. Tell the natives that objection is a sin. Criminalise the objection. The result is a population too divided to resist. The doctrine of “diversity” was not a moral awakening. It was class strategy.

Here, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not say that the monied interest acts as a single conspiracy, or that its subordinates meet in smoky rooms to receive orders. Power in Britain operates by contagion, not command. Below the financial oligarchy stretches a vast managerial middle class — politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, consultants — whose ambition is to distinguish themselves from what they still regard as the great unwashed. They are by nature bossy and intolerant.

They once tried to suppress the propensities of the working class to strong drink and casual sex. They are equally happy now to have destroyed its economic base and to suppress its patriotism and sense of outrage. They never had to be told to do this or how to do it. They sensed it. They absorbed, as if by osmosis, the moods of the boardroom. They translated these into moral language: “market forces, ,“value for money”, “equality”, “sustainability”, “social justice”. In this way, snobbery disguises itself as virtue.

The immediate result was a golden age for the monied interest of globalisation. For nearly twenty years after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the world seemed a kind of human garden, where blossoms could be picked at will. Every so often, there were weeds to be eradicated — Iraq, Yugoslavia, for example. But there was no other part of the world that could not be covered with those feeding tubes.

I remember gushing articles in The Economist during the 1990s — how such and such company was no longer British or American or Japanese, but a global company that just happened to have its headquarters in the country where it was once founded. The role model endlessly promoted was a young man sat in an expensive coffee bar with his early notebook computer and mobile telephone. What productive work he was doing there no one ever bothered to explain.

Problems emerged after the financial crisis of 2008. Three facts became increasingly clear.

Western prosperity was a fraud kept going only by leverage and inflation.

Russia was emerging from its period of enforced Weimersation, still as a great power, still with the interests and the teeth of a great power.

The Chinese were not content to host a million tightly-controlled sweatshops making things that the British and American and other Western working classes were no longer employed to make. Instead, fuelled by Western investment, and by their own national feeling and high average intelligence, the Chinese economy took off like a rocket. By 2012, it was probably already bigger than the American in terms of productive capacity. The monied interest had created its rival and did not know what to do with it.

From that moment, every policy in the West — foreign, social, or cultural — was an improvised attempt to defend a crumbling pyramid of credit. The wars in the Middle East, the endless scolding about “climate”, the censorship of dissent, the absurd cult of gender — all these were methods of distraction and control, not expressions of principle. When an empire runs out of gold, it shifts its whole trade into lies.

In 2014 the West tried its usual remedy: disruption. American and British intelligence sponsored a coup in Kiev to replace the elected government, and intending to put NATO weapons on Russia’s border. The aim was to provoke Moscow into overreach and fracture it into manageable pieces through the usual sorts of “colour revolution”. There could soon be NATO bases on the border with China.

The mark was missed. The Russians retook the Crimea, but were not provoked. They could not be tricked or bullied like Serbia or Iraq.

The next step was biological warfare. In 2020, the Americans released a modified influenza virus in China, its purpose to wreck the Chinese economy. This was the beginning of disaster. The virus did harm the Chinese economy, but spread straight back to the West. No one who ordered those panicky lockdowns realised that the virus was not as deadly as intended. But the effect of the lockdowns was far more damaging to much of the West than it was to China.

Then, in 2022, the Russians finally invaded the Ukraine. The West believed its own propaganda and expected collapse within weeks. It received instead a war of attrition. Sanctions punished the sanctioners. Energy prices soared. Germany began to crumple. Russia survived and adapted. China supplied what the West no longer sold. The military balance shifted. The financial empire that had dominated the world since 1990 could no longer impose its will.

The campaign meant to finish Russia ended by exposing the West. Our rulers, or their frontmen, had dismantled the means of war — the factories, the mines, the workers who knew how to use them. Their empires of credit were useless without production.

For the first time in living memory, the monied interest faced the truth that it could not buy reality. It had turned the West into a service economy, and a service economy cannot fight. American weapons were useless. Britain, stripped of production, could not rearm. Inflation returned. Debt soared. The monied interest, having fed for decades on an illusion of infinite credit, began to quarrel within itself.

This brings me back to the Telegraph story. How anyone of intelligence had failed to spot the truth from the outset is beyond me. But it was plain, by 2023, that the whole position of the British and American monied interest rested on hard power. It had been imposed by the armed forces of America and Britain and France.

Now Britain and France, followed by America, were made into deindustrialised police states, governed by men whose main impulse was continued national sabotage, this armed force was not available. Countries that make nothing cannot rule the world: countries ruled by and for a monied interest will not make anything.

Therefore, the falling out of two factions within the monied interest. Perhaps they had been arguing for decades. But this is not important. What is important is that the realists seem to have gained the upper hand over the wreckers.

The main agenda is unchanged — to make the world into one compelled blood donor. But the secondary agenda has changed. America and Britain need to be reindustrialised and remoralised as weapons against Russia and China. This means an end to official transgenderism and cossetting of hostile and unassimilable immigrant populations. It means some restoration of free speech and some allowance of national feeling.

Young white men must be given enough freedom and enough productive work to believe regime lies again and be willing to fight for their masters.

This is the real meaning of the second Trump presidency. It also explains the gathering collapse of the Starmer regime in Britain. The Starmerites are like Inner Party members at the Victory Parade who cannot understand that the enemy has changed. They will be liquidated, not for treason, but for loyalty to yesterday’s imperative.

They will be replaced by repurposed Blairites. These are the natural administrators of the new phase. They have no convictions, only ambitions. They destroyed Britain once in the name of globalisation. They will rebuild it now in the name of “renewal.” And what they call renewal will be rearmament. Britain is to be reindustrialised, not as a nation, but as an enforcement agency.

When the Telegraph complains about “left-wing bias”, it mistakes shadow for substance. The real policy has already shifted. The ruling class no longer needs the priests of equality; it needs foremen. The slogans will change, the structure will not. As said, the sudden realisation that the left is in charge can be taken as a warning to the left. Those members who fail to spot how the old posters are being torn down and replaced will lose their present easy ride.

So a report that looks like yet another invitation to despair can be taken as a sign of better times ahead. There will not be an end to the present order of things. The main agenda of global rent extraction is unchanged. What may change is the means of execution. We shall not be moving from tyranny to liberty, but from chaos to order within tyranny. The regime, having made a strategic mistake, will loosen the leash for a while. There will be talk of free speech, of family values, of British industry. Some of it will even happen. But it will be done for their reasons, not ours.

Better times, even so, are to be welcomed. They are not to be welcomed passively, as farm animals may welcome an increase in their grain allowance. Our duty is to exploit this interval. Every inch of restored liberty must be used as a weapon. When they rebuild industry, we must rebuild independence. When they revive pride, we must revive truth. The weakness of the ruling class is our opportunity. It is divided, frightened, unsure of its own future. A weak tyrant is an enemy who can be overthrown.

It may be surprising that The Daily Telegraph has finally apprehended what everyone else with an interest in politics has known for a generation. Or we may be told this truth more often and more urgently with every downward turn in the spiral of the Starmer Government.