GOVERNMENT plans billed as shoring up British cyber security will effectively create mandatory digital ID for citizens and increase our vulnerability to cyber crime, the Conservatives said today.

Sir Keir Starmer announced wildly unpopular plans for compulsory digital ID last year, supposedly to allow more effective policing of people’s right to work in Britain.

The Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information) Systems Bill, which had its second reading in the Commons today, is “about protecting the essential services we all rely on,” according to digital government and data minister Ian Murray, and forms part of government plans to digitise access across public services.

But Conservative frontbencher Julia Lopez said it would “create a brand new one: a hulking great identity system mandated for anyone who wants a job, and now we hear, possibly for newborn babies.

“Mandatory identity by stealth, not consent, and with no honesty about it.”