PM to People: Drop Dead

Starmer storms ahead with digital ID as the UK careens toward dystopia...

“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

~ World Economic Forum “thought experiment”

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

We left you on Wednesday with a sinister portent. Having noted that the United Kingdom will join the long and growing list of countries to mandate national digital identification, we dared ask:

“What could possibly go wrong?”

Apparently, millions of sensible British people were thinking along similar lines. Polls indicate just 31% of the public support the ID... while 45% oppose it, making the Britcard only slightly more popular among His Majesty’s subjects than Meghan Markle. (It’s probably fair to assume the remaining “undecideds” did not complete their reading assignment, Mr. Huxley’s Brave New World.)

Given the gross unpopularity of the wretched thing, you might be tempted to think the Labour government, under the tone deaf leadership of Keir “Two Tier” Starmer, would quietly scrap the idea and move onto something slightly more palatable than creepy, mass surveillance.

But you would be wrong.

PM to People: Drop Dead

After a petition to bin the ID garnered a record 2.7 million signatures in a matter of days, the people’s case was duly presented to British parliament yesterday. The government’s reply shows why, no matter your level of apoplexy, you simply don’t hate the state enough.

From the UK parliament’s petitions website...

How’s that for seething contempt? It’s literally:

The People: “Do not do this.”

The Government: “This.”

What about representative democracy, you wonder, that sacred cow we’re always hearing about? What about the “will of the people” and the “consent of the governed” and other such quaint and idle notions?

Oh dear reader, don’t make us laugh! These are people who never met a disaster – either natural or purpose built, by them – that they didn’t use to leverage more power. They were the ones who saw a global pandemic and thought, “Hmm... how do we use this to gain total control over the unwashed masses? How can we play this to our maximum benefit? To what groveling, servile, spineless pulp can we grind the public, before they start waking up?”

Indeed, one wonders at the nearly one-third of Brits who voluntarily wish to give these people more control over their already heavily supervised lives. Then we recall the words of Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World:

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude.”

Non-Crimes

As to our question regarding what could go wrong... it hardly takes a Huxleyian imagination to be able to envision a scenario where, for example, a wrong-thinking epsilon might be denied any number of “privileges” (formerly “rights”) for having transgressed against the all seeing, all powerful state.

Already, the UK records thousands of what it categorizes as “Non-Crime Hate Incidents,” or NCHIs, every year. According the the creepily-titled Home Office, NCHIs are defined as:

“A non-crime hate incident is an incident which is not a criminal offence, but which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards their protected characteristics.”

“Protected characteristics” include all the usual triggers, think race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, transgender identity, etc... basically anything that was once the punchline of a Joan Rivers joke (RIP).

Note, too, the phrase “perceived by the victim.” In other words, whenever some giant crybaby’s feelz get a bit hurty, a metropolitan police officer could be lurking in the shadows, ready to file an NCHI (because, you know, it’s not like police officers in the UK have actual crime to attend to... )

The “incidents” are then recorded in a giant police database, and can be accessed to conduct enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks (the kind of background checks used for jobs in teaching, healthcare, etc.)

And because NCHIs are not crimes per se, there is no right to trial for the accused... nor do they have a right to face their accuser... and, in most cases, there is no required disclosure of who reported the non-crime in the first place!

Guilty... with no opportunity to prove your innocence.

Huxley + Orwell = UK

Now imagine that all being connected to your digital ID, following you around wherever you go, like a little social credit tracker, right there on your device, mandated by the state. Tell an off color joke... or even a joke that some emotional haemophiliac “perceives” to be off color... and good luck getting that job you’ve spent the past X years (and Y pounds) studying for.

How likely is that to happen? Alas, such incidents are not as rare as you might think/hope...

To the surprise of approximately zero people (certainly no one with a moderately-developed sense of irony), the state is not particularly forthcoming with data on just how many NCHIs are recorded per year, although best estimates, from Freedom of Information responses and media reports, indicate some 120,000 filed between 2014-2019.

And it’s not just IRL (In “real” life), either. It’s social media posts, too.

Right now, in the year 2025, the UK arrests over 10,000 people per year for posting, re-posting or in some cases “liking” or even viewing content the state deems to be “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing electronic communications” (as per the Communications Act (2003) and the Malicious Communications Act (1988)). It also extends to “spreading misinformation” ... misinformation being, naturally, defined by the government doing the arresting.

According to an investigation conducted by The Times newspaper, there were 12,183 arrests made by 37 police forces across the UK in 2023 alone. That’s 33 people per day... arrested for alleged anti-social media posts... in a country with only the faintest grasp on free speech, one that is rapidly vanishing.

In a letter to his friend and fellow author, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley warned:

“The real menace to our democracy is… the development of a vast mass communications industry, capable of influencing the minds of almost everybody… The producers of a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism may learn to combine efficiency with a semblance of freedom.

With digital IDs, total censorship now meets total surveillance. The Brave New World has already begun...

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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