UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
view the rest of the comments
Maybe he does really think this is a way to appeal to those who want controls on immigration, but without doing something too tough, which would alienate his MPs.
I think he's probably making a mistake though. This digital ID policy seems to be very unpopular, with both the left and the right. The petition that opposes digital ID now has 1.7 million signatures, and it will probably get a few more.
Hanlon's Razor, sure, but I don't buy it. He isn't stupid.
Just like the Online Safety Act, it isn't going to do much for its stated purpose, but it's going to be very effective for helping the government find and stop people organising protests.
I think I've heard on the radio, and on shows like Newsnight, commentators saying that Starmer might not be very politically astute. So maybe he does genuinely think that digital ID is a reasonable solution to reduce illegal immigration, and maybe he just doesn't realise how much the public opposes digital ID.
To put it another way, I don't think Starmer is stupid. Maybe his political intuition isn't the best though. I get the impression that he genuinely wants to improve Labour's fortunes and he's trying to pick some sort of middle path between the vocal left and the vocal right. I'm not sure digital ID will be a vote-winning path though.