Here is a fun fact to keep in your back pocket the next time a politician appears on the morning TV sofas to explain that the government’s new face-scanning and digital ID regime is really, deep down, about protecting your children.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, spent the first half of his career as a human rights lawyer and the second half running the Crown Prosecution Service.
He has argued for the individual against the state and he has aimed the full weight of the state at the individual. He has, in other words, seen this particular movie from both seats.
So when he tells you he has stumbled, blinking and innocent, into the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in British peacetime history, do not extend him the courtesy of believing it. He spent twenty years learning precisely what these powers do to a person. He is not building this in his sleep.
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And what he is building is a country in which you must ask permission to exist online. Not ask the platform. Ask the state. Before you read, post, store a photo, or send a message, you are expected to step up to the booth, show your papers, and prove you are a citizen the government has pre-approved.
The default setting of a free society, that you are left alone until you give the state a reason, is being flipped on its head. The new arrangement is that you are a suspect with a phone until you prove otherwise, and you prove it constantly, because proving it has been welded onto the act of going online and speaking at all.
That is the whole game. Everything else is set dressing.
Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?
You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport.
The face scan is sold to you as the polite option, the velvet rope. It is, in fact, the funnel and, at the bottom of the funnel, sits the national identity check that three million people already told this government, in no uncertain terms, to scrap.
In September 2025 Starmer stood at a lectern and announced a mandatory digital ID scheme with the confidence of a man who assumed it would be popular.
The British public’s response was to reach for the rhetorical equivalent of a cricket bat. Nearly three million signatures on a single petition, the fourth-biggest in parliamentary history.
Public support belly-flopped from positive thirty-five to negative fourteen in the time it takes to renew a passport. Big Brother Watch branded the whole thing “wholly unBritish.” His own MP Rebecca Long Bailey, is warning of “an infrastructure that can follow us, link our most sensitive information and expand state control over all our lives,” which is a sentence you do not expect to hear from the governing party about its own flagship policy.
This was more than the usual rent-a-mob. This was the nation telling its Prime Minister, with rare unanimity, to take a hike.
A normal politician takes that hint. A human rights lawyer, in theory, frames the petition and hangs it on the wall as a cautionary tale. Starmer did something else entirely. He kept the goal and ditched the honesty. The mandatory card was quietly dropped in January, the ambition was not, and the operation simply moved from the front door, which the public had bolted, to the tradesman’s entrance round the back, which they had not thought to lock because who breaks into their own house?
The trick is almost elegant in its cynicism. You cannot sell the public a surveillance dragnet, so you stop calling it a surveillance dragnet and start attaching it to causes that make opposition look like a personality defect.
Don’t ask “may we build a national biometric database?” because the answer is a resounding no. Ask “would you like us to protect children from pornography,” and watch the same people who hated the ID card nod along, because the alternative is being presented as the weirdo at the dinner party defending kids’ access to Pornhub.
Which, by the way, is exactly where the government ran its pilot scheme. Age checks for adult content went live last July, Pornhub’s UK traffic promptly fell off a cliff by 77 per cent (most switched to a VPN), the image site Imgur switched off the entire country rather than play along, and the great public uprising against it amounted to roughly nobody, because marching for your right to watch pornography is not a hill most people will plant a flag on.
Lesson learned, filed away, reused. First, the embarrassing door, then the children’s door, and this week the door to the phone in your actual pocket, where Apple and Google have now been ordered to install spyware that pokes through your photos, on pain of criminal liability if they decline.
Different doormat, same burglar.
Knowing who you are is only act one. Act two is reading what you keep, and here the children conveniently evaporate, because there is no cuddly justification for the next bit, which is why it was done in the dark like most things you would be ashamed of.
The Home Office served Apple with a secret order to tear a hole in iCloud encryption, an order so secret that Apple was forbidden by law from admitting it had even received it.
The ambition is something to behold: a government wanting to force a company to break encryption in secret and then wanting the court case about the secret order to also be a secret.
Apple told them where to go and yanked its strongest encryption from every British user instead, meaning the government reached for one company’s lock and ended up ripping the door off millions of phones.
The French still have the protection. The Germans have it. The Americans have it. Britons do not. If Apple breaks end-to-end encryption for people in Britain, it breaks it for everyone, and the power to do it all again, to any company it fancies, remains fully loaded and pointed at the room.
Act three was already humming along before anyone was paying attention. British police arrested over 12,000 people in a single year for things they typed online, more than thirty a day, and managed to convict fewer than one in ten of them.
When the conviction rate is that feeble, the arrest stops being a step toward justice and becomes the punishment itself, the knock at the door and the phone in the evidence bag doing the work no courtroom ever will.
Over 133,000 “non-crime hate incidents” have been logged since 2014, which is the state’s charming term for keeping a permanent file on something you said that wasn’t actually illegal.
This is what speech policing looks like once the government already knows your name and can read your post. It doesn’t need to win. It just needs you nervous.
Bolt the three acts together and the production reveals itself. A state that checks who you are before you log on, reads what you store once you have, and arrests you for what you say if it doesn’t care for your tone.
Identity, surveillance, punishment, each ushered in through its own tear-jerking side door, each defended by a minister with their hand on their heart, swearing it’s really about the kids.
No single piece is a jackboot. Assembled, they quietly abolish the notion that a British adult can read, think, or speak online without the government’s full knowledge and explicit say-so. And none of it unbuilds. Every future Home Secretary inherits the encryption power. Every future government inherits the identity plumbing and the speech laws. The ratchet has precisely one direction, and Starmer the former prosecutor, knows that better than you do, because prosecutors are the people who get to turn it.
To be scrupulously fair, since the government will not be: there are of course some harms on social media. All true, and all completely beside the point, because a real problem is the finest gift wrapping an illegitimate power ever received. It lets the state answer a question you never asked. “Are children at risk online?” is not the question on the table. “Should the British government be able to identify, monitor, and punish every adult who uses the internet” is the question on the table, and it has already been answered, by three million furious people, which is the entire reason it is never the question they put to you.
None of this was ever really about social media. Starmer tried to sell people the identity state openly, the public broke his fingers in the door, and he came back through the backdoor with a child in his arms.
So here is the only thing worth remembering as the announcements keep coming. Nobody voted for any of this. It was not in the Labour manifesto. No party put facial scanning, biometric databases, broken encryption, and identity checks for the entire population to the electorate and won a mandate for it. There is no democratic permission slip for the biggest expansion of state surveillance in British peacetime history. There is only a government that asked once, got refused, and decided to take it anyway under a friendlier name.
And over the coming weeks, the British people are going to be told, by ministers and by a media that prints the narrative as gospel, that this is about keeping children safe, and that anyone who objects must therefore be on the wrong side of it. That is the trap. Falling for it means handing your government a machine it will never give back, in exchange for a feeling.
The children are the reason you are being asked to stop thinking. They are not the reason this is being built. The moment to notice the difference is now, while saying so still costs you nothing, and not later, when it costs considerably more.
