DIGITAL ID cards could be the nail in Keir Starmer’s coffin — and an opportunity for the left to lead a fightback in defence of civil liberties and human decency.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s denial that forcing digital IDs on us all will be a “dystopian mess” is revealing — because that is exactly where this policy will lead.

The British state is — rightly — viewed with deep distrust by many if not most of its subjects.

This is the state that has handed Palantir — a tech giant whose operations are thoroughly intertwined with the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Israel Defence Forces, whose “democracy-sceptic” founder Peter Thiel is known for funding hard-right political causes and whose British boss Louis Mosley is the grandson of fascist Oswald — the right to manage patient data for the NHS.

It’s all very well for Nandy to say the digital ID card will be used only to determine whether someone has the right to work. Its existence will facilitate mission creep given the growing authoritarianism of the British state across the board.

This is a state which arrests pensioners en masse for sitting in public squares with placards, which levels terrorism charges at musicians over the unveiling of a flag, which tries to clear city centres of protesters against genocide with sweeping exclusion zones. It is a state which can and does abuse its power over us and cannot be trusted with more.

Politically, Starmer’s ploy reveals his unoriginality and his team’s inability to think outside the New Labour playbook of the 1990s — this policy, as many have noted, has long been an obsession of Tony Blair’s.

It also reveals his desperation — since it is intended to steal a march on Reform UK, by showing how draconian the government intends to be when it comes to surveilling immigrants.

It is bad politics, which will hasten his own exit from Downing Street, but it is still dangerous. The left needs to turn the campaign against digital ID cards into a national debate on this country’s direction, one that applies pressure on all MPs to take a stand against authoritarianism and ensures any replacement PM is the product of a backlash against it.

This is a threat to all our freedoms, and all our personal data: in that, it is a clear example of the way attacks on immigrants pave the way for the degrading of everyone’s rights. That is an argument that needs raising in workplaces and high streets across Britain: endorsing state overreach against one group leads to state overreach against us all.

It is a question that raises the march of online surveillance and data harvesting, a process driven by the “tech bro” plutocrat pals of US President Donald Trump.

Again, this is something that should be shouted from the rooftops: even if you did trust the British state with your data, do you trust Trump and the megalomaniac Silicon Valley billionaires? Will our data be safe from these people, when the British government prostrates itself before Trump on tech taxes, medicine pricing and “inward investment” that, as the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty points out, involves building massive US-owned data centres on British soil that will suck up our water and energy and accelerate climate breakdown?

Pitched right, a campaign against digital ID can be a comeback for the left.

It allows us to reshape the narrative on immigration with an understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all.

It provides a platform to campaign against the encroachment on our rights to free speech, assembly and protest as part of a wider anti-authoritarian agenda that can win mass support way beyond those who consider themselves leftwingers.

And it is a chance to demand a breach with Trump and the sinister super-rich figures who promote the rise of the far right.