Darren Jones says none of VAT cut is funded. There was zero in Government budget for Digital ID.
So you're saying, Darren, that your ID card project was completely unfunded and it's a massive gotcha that VAT on electricity bills is also unfunded.
Difference is he never said digital ID was funded. Burnham government did however say the VAT cut was funded. Either incompetent or dishonest.
ID cards are just as funded, or unfunded, as removal of VAT on Electricity bills. Darren Jones was simply, and inadvertently, pointing out this fact about his own project.
Governments can forgo tax or move expenditure around as they wish. On their own rules they are supposed to get OBR to check the numbers add up. Burnham can point to a temporary offset that will last them until the next budget when the whole thing will go through the OBR washing machine.
It's a nonsense basically.
It's worth repeating that the government is scrapping only the digital ID card, not the intended uses of the card. So the "plan" I guess is to rely on driving licences, passports, bus cards, gas bills, notes from a doctor, and all the other rubbish ad hoc approaches to determining someone's identity, age, residence, etc.
This is might be smart politics, but it's bloody stupid governing.
Yes and no. The ID card project was dead. Burnham had the choice of killing it off for the time being, letting it hang around as a zombie project, or put serious political and financial capital behind a workable replacement project. So he chose the first and killed the project in a performatively showy way.
But the logic of universal digital ID is unstoppable IMO and the need for it hasn't gone away.
The need of it was never there in the first place.
The need for it is there - just ask anyone living on a council estate without a passport Trying to get a job from a firm that outsources status checks
No, it is not. There are a myriad of ways to pass checks. Like many PBers I have to undergo strict background screening and had to go through it again recently and there were a plethora of ways to do so, which I was easily able to do - so no need for a new universal system to do that.
Now if you want to fix the problem for limited numbers of people struggling to access things then target them, not universality. Make it easier for them to get something, don't be creating a new behemothic system for everyone.
So you are 1 of 10 people want a simple (anyone can do it) job - and you don't have a passport. Well those other 9 people can equally do the job and have suitable id to pass the checks.
Care to guess what happens (and yes I see this daily because it's ID checks is one of my sidelines)..
The current system is very very messy and not at all good. I basically had a perfectly valid paper driving license to the 2040s, which I carried with me, but over the last few years it has become untenable, when I visit places they don't just want your company badge any more to sign you in, increasingly it is government photo ID. So, it got to the point where it was get a photo driving license or carry your passport with you everywhere so you don't forget, which I baulked at.
And I did forget and spent a day stuck in the reception area of a data center a few months ago. It is exacerbated by the fact that the people on reception desks have changed - they are a later generation, they themselves have increasingly not grown up in the UK, rules have tightened, so the level of sensible discretion is so much less.
It is not helped either by how much the ersatz bits of this ID system vary from check to check. If it is not to be a universal ID, then there is still a strong need to standardise how people are checked, so if you don't drive and you can't get a passport (my mother's passport was the better part of a year to sort due to her complicated history), that there is an easy path to verifiable identity.
To a great extent, at this stage, identity, because it has become a requirement for many entitlements, has become a personal right as well - denying identity for those excluded people is every bit as problematic as debanking. Unless you roll back identity requirements 20 years, the government should be providing good, simple and universal means of identifying oneself.
I had a meeting with a solicitor today. I had to prove who I was by producing my photo driving licence.
Burnham’s coronation had brought me back to PB after a long absence.
Healey was the obvious choice for Chancellor. I’m surprised the commentariat are surprised: Miliband too dangerous; Mahmood no proper experience.
Haigh becoming Minister for Policy (essentially) also a good move, despite my misgivings over her old fraud conviction. She was one of the few Starmer appointments with a working policy brain.
Streeting to Defence - interesting; Phillipson sidelined - good; new AI ministry - excellent.
In other areas, I have a more mixed opinion. Too many firings of perfectly serviceable ministers, just because they were Starmerites, if such a thing ever really existed. Perhaps more accurate to say they were not firm Burnhamites. The new government is thereby “clubbier” than any I remember - this can be seen in the sheer concentration of Northern ministers.
The electricity announcement shows that Burnham is politically canny in a way that Starmer could never be. It’s a rounding error on the national accounts, and it signals that the new government is “on your side”. This is a positive start.
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