KEIR STARMER’S plan to introduce digital ID cards has a recent history. It was a project of the Blair years. Tony Blair, who has never had a personal social media presence, was keen on ID cards because of the business links that he could promote.

Blair made a point of knowing nothing about labour movement or Labour Party history, and hence neither knew nor cared that the opposition to the state tracking what people are up to has a very long presence in working-class history.

By contrast, the British state has had an abiding interest in finding this out. It features in the present day, not just in respect of attempting to track down those who post racist and sexist threats on social media, but also those who promote political points it doesn’t like.

Is it actually known, for example, who the street artist Banksy really is? Is it known to the state that organises direct action on companies that have links with Palestine? Given the absurd ban on Palestine Action, it seems unlikely.

Historically, there are two threads to understand. The first is what EP Thompson called the Crime of Anonymity, which amounted in the first decades of the 19th century to threatening letters.

Sometimes these were demands for money or threats to kill. The state, however, was more interested in those who threatened employers or members of the ruling class.

The official London Gazette published weekly anonymous letters with rewards for information on who wrote them. If this was successful, the penalties for the writer could include death. The subject matter of Gazetted letters varied widely, but they were a feature of Luddite and Captain Swing activities to control the introduction of machinery and the destruction of jobs.

Thompson, by contrast, drew attention to the Freeborn Englishman, someone who cherished liberties, albeit limited ones (for most, the vote did not come until much later in the 19th century or even 1928). More particularly, he did not like being interfered with either by his own state or by the agents of other states.

Thompson summarised the perspective in this introduction he wrote to The Secret State (1978): “By the end of the 18th century, this was an all-pervasive Whiggish rhetoric, shared by Tories, Whigs and Radicals alike. Moreover, it was a rhetoric taken over and applied to greatly more democratic ends by the rising popular reform movement…

“In area after area, the ‘common people’ insisted that the civil rights of the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ were not the privileges of an elite but were the common inheritance of all: freedom of press, speech and conscience, rights of assembly, inhibitions upon the actions of military or police against crowds, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment or unwarranted arrest and entry upon private premises.

“The insurgent British working-class movement took over for its own the old Whiggish bloody-mindedness of the citizen in the face of the pretentions of power.”

Thompson noted that some left critics saw the Freeborn Englishman as a bourgeois individualist sharing a demand for free press and thought with the middle class.

However, the fight of the working class for the vote, workplace rights and organisation gave it a class content. It underlined independence from the state and opposition to interference by the state.

The latest proposal to introduce ID cards not only ignores this history of struggle it tramples all over it. The history is a reminder too that the right not to be watched over by the state was one that has been consistently fought for and maintained since at least the late 18th century by the working-class movement.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on X @kmflett.