Is Tony Blair still Prime Minister? Nobody told me.
DAVID FLEMING
The Curtain Drops
For months, Britain has been battered with enflaming immigration headlines, the “grassroots” hoisting of flags in the streets, and endless noise about borders from all sides. We were told this was the defining crisis of the nation. But it was theatre. While the country argued about migrants, the real machinery was being assembled behind the curtain.
On 24 September 2025, the Tony Blair Institute published a report titled “Time for Digital ID: A New Consensus for a State That Works.” Two days later, on 26 September, Keir Starmer announced compulsory Digital ID for workers and renters.
That is not coincidence. That is choreography.
So who really runs Britain? Starmer, who reads the lines? Or Blair, who writes the script? Is Tony Blair still Prime Minister? Nobody told me.
Blair’s First Attempt
This isn’t Blair’s first run at identity control. In 2006, under New Labour, the Identity Cards Act passed into law. It was supposed to usher in biometric ID cards linked to a national database — fingerprints, scans, personal records all in one place.
The public rebelled. Civil liberties campaigners warned of mission creep. Costs spiralled. When the Coalition took office in 2010, the scheme was scrapped. By 2011, the cards were dead.
Or so we thought.
Blair had learned an important lesson: don’t push identity head-on. Build the ecosystem first. Lay down the rails. Introduce the technologies that depend on identity without naming it. Then wait for the right moment to reintroduce the capstone.
The Long Game
Over the next two decades, Blair’s Institute changed tactics. The goal never changed — to embed technocracy with digital identity at its core — but the method did.
Instead of “ID cards,” Blair pushed the infrastructures that would make ID inevitable:
- Digital government platforms — single sign-on systems, data-sharing frameworks.
- AI for governance — algorithms to detect fraud, manage risk, and allocate services, all requiring authenticated data.
- Climate accountability — the April 2025 TBI report “The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change” declared that Net Zero was failing and demanded new systems of measurement, traceability, and attribution. Those systems cannot function without identity anchors.
Notice the pattern. Blair didn’t talk about ID. He talked about “smart regulation,” “climate reset,” “digital government.” But every strand depended on knowing exactly who you are, where you live, what you consume. Identity was always the hidden keystone.
The Reveal
By September 2025, the waiting was over. TBI’s Time for Digital ID paper said it plainly:
- Digital ID must be treated as core infrastructure.
- Create a Digital ID Delivery Unit under the Prime Minister.
- Integrate OneLogin across government.
- Start with right-to-work and right-to-rent checks.
- Issue verified digital logins to every adult, with fallback QR codes or kiosks.
- Develop a super-app as the citizen’s “front door” to the state.
And then, two days later, Starmer announced it. Almost word-for-word.
The choreography could not be clearer. Blair’s Institute writes the plan. Starmer delivers it.
Two Announcements in One Week
If anyone doubts that Starmer is just the delivery boy, look at the news cycle.
On 24 September, Blair’s Institute calls for Digital ID. On 26 September, Starmer unveils it. And in that very same week, Starmer also announced the UK would formally recognise Palestine as a state.
Within hours, reports surfaced that Blair was being lined up for a leadership role there. (How could Blair lead an unrecognised country? That had to be fixed in advance.) I have no doubt that a Blair run Palestinian state would be a beacon of how technocracy should work.
Two announcements, one week — both enabling Blair to execute long-term goals. Identity control at home. A new platform abroad.
Starmer looks like a Prime Minister. But the fingerprints are Blair’s. The choreography is Blair’s. The goals are Blair’s.
The Playbook
Blair has been working to this design for 25 years. The steps are always the same:
First, seed the infrastructure — push AI, digital government, climate traceability.
Second, amplify a crisis — immigration panic, border chaos, public outrage.
Third, introduce ID through a narrow gate — “we’re only checking workers and renters.”
Fourth, normalise and expand — extend to benefits, healthcare, taxation, voting.
Fifth, embed irreversibly — once systems depend on ID, opting out is impossible.
Finally, close the system — society becomes dependent on credentials; technocracy complete.
Blair failed when he tried to jump straight to identity in 2006. So he learned. He spent two decades building dependencies. Now, when Starmer delivers the plan, it feels almost inevitable.
Starmer the Implementer
What, then, is Starmer’s role? Not leader, but implementer.
Even Andy Burnham’s supposed “pressure” looks like theatre — a way to give Starmer cover, as if he were reluctantly pushed into Digital ID. But the policy doesn’t come from him. It comes from Blair.
And Blair is still above Starmer. Above Brown, too, who is still hawking his “New Britain” proposals like an ex-PM desperate for scraps. They are all clambering for influence. But Blair remains closer to the architects — the unnamed players behind the curtain.
Free-Flowing Anxiety
The public knows something is wrong. That’s why yesterday the petition against Digital ID sat at 70,000 signatures, and already today it has passed the 1,000,000 mark. That is not ordinary politics. That is a nation convulsing with free-flowing anxiety.
And the feeling is not irrational. People sense what is happening: the ground is being pulled from under them, their continuity is being made conditional on credentials. It is not “mass formation.” It is not delusion. It is a deep instinct — the Continuity Instinct — rebelling against Chronocide, the destruction of the natural chain of being human.
But anxiety without direction is chaos. It divides. It paralyses. It makes people easier to control. That is why we need a framework to channel it — to unify it.
That framework is Continuism. Continuism gives this moment meaning. It names the disease — Chronocide. It names the instinct — the Continuity Instinct. And it names the cure: attention, understanding, continuity.
- Attention: we must stop being distracted by the theatre of flags and panic.
- Understanding: we must see the long game, the playbook, the choreography.
- Continuity: we must refuse the idea that humanity needs permission to exist and we carry on without the controlling influence of technocrats or whoever else wishes to meddle with us.
Continuism resolves free-flowing anxiety into a single goal: protect human continuity against that which threatens it.
Closing
Blair left office in 2007. Or so we thought. Watch the sequence today: his Institute publishes the report, Starmer announces the policy, and the petition proves the public feels the dread. Add in Palestine recognition, and the choreography is obvious.
So let’s stop pretending. Let’s ask the real question: who runs Britain?
Because if you watched this week unfold, you could be forgiven for thinking Tony Blair (and his own masters) never left Downing Street.
And unless we unify our anxiety into Continuism, he never will.
This article (Britain’s Return to Blair Rule) was created and published by David Fleming and is republished here under “Fair Use”
See Related Article Below
Digital ID UK: Starmer’s Expanding Surveillance State
Britain’s digital ID push isn’t about streamlining paperwork. It’s about hardwiring state power into everyday life.
CHRISTINA MAAS
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer came into office promising competence and calm after years of alleged political chaos.
What has followed is a government that treats civil liberties as disposable.
Under his watch, police have leaned on broad public order powers to detain people over “offensive” tweets.
Critics argue that what counts as “offensive” now changes depending on the political mood, which means ordinary citizens find themselves guessing at what might trigger a knock on the door.
This is happening while mass facial recognition cameras are being installed in public places.
The pattern is clear: expand surveillance, narrow dissent, and then assure the public it is all in the name of safety and order.
Against that backdrop, a digital ID system looks less like modernization and more like the missing piece in an expanding control grid.
Once every adult is forced to plug into a centralized identity wallet to work, rent, or access services, the state’s ability to monitor and sanction becomes unprecedented.
Starmer’s Labour government is dusting off one of its oldest obsessions: the dream of tagging every citizen like a parcel at the post office.
The latest revival comes in the form of a proposal to create mandatory digital ID cards, already nicknamed the “Brit Card,” for every working adult in the country.
The sales pitch sounds noble enough: crack down on illegal work, cut fraud, plug loopholes. The real effect would be to make ordinary life a permanent identity check.
Officials want job applications, rental agreements, and other basic transactions to be filtered through a government database, accessed through an app.
This, the people are told, will finally stop the shadow economy of dodgy employers. If that logic sounds familiar, it is because it is the same rationale Labour used for its last ID card scheme in the 2000s, a project that ended up in the political landfill in 2010 after enough voters realized what was happening.
“Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK. It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure,” Starmer said in his announcement. “And it will also offer ordinary citizens countless benefits, like being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly – rather than hunting around for an old utility bill.”
Campaigners and data rights groups are not buying the rebrand.
For Liberty’s Gracie Bradley cut straight to the point: the new version “is likely to be even more intrusive, insecure and discriminatory” than the one the country already threw out a decade ago.
That does not bode well for a government trying to convince citizens this time will be different.
Rebecca Vincent of Big Brother Watch spelled out where this all leads: “While Downing Street is scrambling to be seen as doing something about illegal immigration, we are sleepwalking into a dystopian nightmare where the entire population will be forced through myriad digital checkpoints to go about our everyday lives.”
Her warning does not require much imagination. Britain has a spotty track record on protecting sensitive data.
A poll commissioned by Big Brother Watch found that nearly two-thirds of the public already think the government cannot be trusted to protect their data. That is before any giant centralized ID system is rolled out.
Privacy advocates see this as a recipe for disaster, arguing that hackers and snooping officials alike will treat the system as a buffet of personal information.
Former Cabinet Minister David Davis, one of the longest-serving critics of ID schemes, described the risks as existential. “The systems involved are profoundly dangerous to the privacy and fundamental freedoms of the British people,” he said, noting the government has not explained how or if it would compensate citizens after the inevitable breach.
Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, issued a blunt forecast of where the “Brit Card” could lead.
She warned it could extend across public services, “creating a domestic mass surveillance infrastructure that will likely sprawl from citizenship to benefits, tax, health, possibly even internet data and more.”
In other words, once the pipes are laid, the water does not stop at employment checks.
Labour, of course, has been here before. The last time it rolled out ID cards, in 2009, the experiment barely survived a year before being junked by the incoming Conservative-led coalition as an “erosion of civil liberties.”
Labour is leaning heavily on polling that allegedly suggests up to 80 percent of the public backs digital right-to-work credentials.
Starmer himself recently adopted that framing. Earlier this month, he claimed digital IDs could “play an important part” in tackling black market employment.
He is pushing the case again at the Global Progress Action Summit in London, noting that “we all carry a lot more digital ID now than we did 20 years ago.”
What complicates the sales pitch is Labour’s own history of skepticism. Both Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper previously raised concerns about ID systems and their potential for government overreach.
That past caution has not stopped the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, from becoming one of the loudest champions of the plan. She recently declared the system “essential” for enforcing migration and employment laws.
Labour-aligned think tanks are also providing cover. Labour Together released a report describing digital ID as a “new piece of civic infrastructure,” with the potential to become a routine part of life.
***
Tony Blair has reemerged as a central architect of Britain’s dystopian digital future.
Through his think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the former Prime Minister is pushing the nationwide digital ID system, pitching it as the backbone of a tech-enabled state.
With Keir Starmer now in office, Blair’s vision is no longer an abstract policy paper. It is edging into reality with a new host.
For Blair, digital ID is not about convenience. It is about rewriting how government functions and can be what he calls a “weapon against populism.”
He has argued that a leaner, cheaper, more automated state is possible if citizens are willing to give up parts of their privacy. “My view is that people are actually prepared to trade quite a lot,” he once said, suggesting that resistance will dissolve once faster services are dangled in front of the public.
This project is not limited to streamlining bureaucracy. His version of efficiency is a frictionless state that also monitors, verifies, and restricts in ways that would have been inconceivable before the digital era.
With Starmer’s government now developing a digital ID wallet and considering a national rollout, Blair’s agenda is closer to official policy than ever. Marketed as modernization, the plan points toward a permanent restructuring of the relationship between citizen and state, locking personal identity into a centralized system that future governments will be able to expand at will.
This article (Digital ID UK: Starmer’s Expanding Surveillance State) was created and published by Reclaim the Net and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Christina Maas
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