He’s been chasing the far-right for the past year under the belief that he can win those voters back by adopting their political positions but it’s not working. I think he thinks this makes him look tough on immigration, but ID cards are a really unpopular policy in the UK and it will not go down well at all with the public.
For some reason ID cards have been an obsession of successive Labour prime ministers, and this policy was pushed by a thinktank led by Tony Blair, who tried and failed to bring in mandatory ID when he was prime minister in the noughties. So I think it’s a bit of both where he genuinely does want to bring these in, but he seems to think it’ll help him win favour with right wing voters.
More likely ID cards are (and have always been) the only surefire way to make his country less attractive to illegal immigrants, and rampant illegal immigration has become the defining issue in the country’s politics. Whether we like it or not, the Anglosphere’s generally lax controls on identity are a major pull factor in irregular migration.
“Papers please” was once a meme about authoritarian governments but now it’s a bipartisan consensus? Fuck that. Why does high levels of irregular migration justify giving up basic protections from tyranny? The “solution” is so much worse than any problem it could seek to solve.
That’s what I once thought but I’ve changed my mind. Concern about porous borders is not a right-wing media invention, it’s about values, it’s deeply held, and until governments get a hold of the problem they’re going to fall one by one to idiotic populists. And populist governments will be far worse for our privacy among much else.
To me it does have the appearance of a right-wing media invention. I live in a city with many immigrants and the only problems that exist as a result are caused by immigration enforcement.
Right-wing populism (or fascism, if it devolves that far) is obviously a problem but why do you think these people will go away if you capitulate to their harmful demands?
If this is driven by the right, why is Starmer capitulating to them? Or is that just an act and he supports it too?
He’s been chasing the far-right for the past year under the belief that he can win those voters back by adopting their political positions but it’s not working. I think he thinks this makes him look tough on immigration, but ID cards are a really unpopular policy in the UK and it will not go down well at all with the public.
For some reason ID cards have been an obsession of successive Labour prime ministers, and this policy was pushed by a thinktank led by Tony Blair, who tried and failed to bring in mandatory ID when he was prime minister in the noughties. So I think it’s a bit of both where he genuinely does want to bring these in, but he seems to think it’ll help him win favour with right wing voters.
More likely ID cards are (and have always been) the only surefire way to make his country less attractive to illegal immigrants, and rampant illegal immigration has become the defining issue in the country’s politics. Whether we like it or not, the Anglosphere’s generally lax controls on identity are a major pull factor in irregular migration.
“Papers please” was once a meme about authoritarian governments but now it’s a bipartisan consensus? Fuck that. Why does high levels of irregular migration justify giving up basic protections from tyranny? The “solution” is so much worse than any problem it could seek to solve.
That’s what I once thought but I’ve changed my mind. Concern about porous borders is not a right-wing media invention, it’s about values, it’s deeply held, and until governments get a hold of the problem they’re going to fall one by one to idiotic populists. And populist governments will be far worse for our privacy among much else.
To me it does have the appearance of a right-wing media invention. I live in a city with many immigrants and the only problems that exist as a result are caused by immigration enforcement.
Right-wing populism (or fascism, if it devolves that far) is obviously a problem but why do you think these people will go away if you capitulate to their harmful demands?
Because, as I said, the demands are not so much theirs as those of the people who vote for them.