IAIN DAVIS
William Hague (Baron Hague of Richmond), the former Tory leader and cabinet minister, is a close associate of Tony Blair, the former UK Labour prime minister. Hague, allegedly Blair’s historical parliamentary opponent, asserts that he and Blair have a post-parliamentary remit for “setting the world to rights.” No longer supposed adversaries, Hague likens his friendship with Blair to “two old guys on a park bench.”
In 2023, Hague co-authored a report with Blair titled “A New National Purpose: Innovation Can Power the Future of Britain.” While neither he nor Blair conducted any of the research nor wrote the report, they both put their names on it, claimed authorship, and so it is theirs.
William and Tony said the UK needs a “foundational AI-era infrastructure,” that should, in large part, be based upon:
A secure, privacy-preserving digital ID for citizens that allows them to quickly interact with government services, while also providing the state with the ability to better target support.
It is this notion of the state better targeting support that we need to be mindful of. What does “support” mean? How will this targeting be achieved, who will it target, on what basis and why?
The paper was published by the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) which is a UK policy think tanks funded almost entirely by the US multinational technology corporation Oracle. The TBI is Oracle’s leading UK PR-front and lobby group and Hague and Blair are Oracle’s UK representatives. Co-founder, oligarch, and executive chairman of Oracle, Larry Ellison, not only finances the TBI he also backs the technology research institute at Oxford University where, coincidentally, William Hague was recently appointed Chancellor.
Speaking at the 2025 World Government Summit—a UAE convened platform where the likes of OPEC, Google, Microsoft, the UN, and Oracle claim they have the authority to “shape the future of government”—Larry Ellison said:
[T]his next generation of AI will reason so much faster, discover insights so much faster, whether it’s on being able to diagnose cancer in early stages, or design therapies, custom design vaccines for those cancers, custom-made for your genomics and your specific tumour antigens.
AI cannot reason and there is no sign of it developing that cognitive ability any time soon. This claim was just part of Ellison’s AI sales-pitch. Nevertheless, Ellison is very clear: the AI monitored digital ID-based future he envisages includes AI having access to all of our health data, down to our individual genomes.
Ellison continued to explain how AI will be fed with our most personal, private data:
The first thing a country needs to do is to unify all of their data so it can be consumed and used by the AI model. [. . .] The NHS in the UK, has an incredible amount of population data, but it’s fragmented.
This fragmentation problem arises because different databases—even those within a single organisation like the NHS—use different formats to store their respective data sets and cannot easily form a single “unified” database. The fragmentation problem can be overcome by rendering the data “interoperable.”
Oracle GoldenGate can achieve interoperability by scraping data from any source and converting it into a standardised, machine readable and exchangeable format. Thus data from different systems can be stored on a single blockchain—or other Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) ledger (database)—by making all data from all connected data sources interoperable.
IBM, the world’s largest industrial research organisation, defines “interoperability”:
Interoperability is a standards-based approach to enabling different IT systems to exchange data and share functionality with minimal end user intervention. Interoperable systems play an increasingly vital role in healthcare, government, commerce and public safety. Interoperability provides an efficient and effective way for diverse information technology (IT) systems in these areas to connect, communicate and share essential data.
The UK government has decided that all of our data, stored by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), and the Home Office, should be controlled and accessible using Oracle Fusion Cloud applications and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) data storage. Oracle GoldenGate can then be used to extract and unify that data by rendering it interoperable:
Oracle GoldenGate replicates data from the Oracle Autonomous Database instance back to on-premise or to another cloud database or platform.
Oracle isn’t the only private sector company with access to our public sector data. IBM and Deloitte are also UK government and Oracle implementation “partners.”
Interoperability enables the filling of vast “unified” data lakes called unified ledgers. Using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)—most likely blockchain—digital ID is the key that unlocks the unified ledgers’ mass surveillance and control capabilities. That is to say, unified ledgers are not much use unless we agree to adopt digital ID. Once we do, AI can then be deployed to isolate our individual data stream.
The most crucial component of Digital ID for our would-be controllers is our biometric data—face, fingerprints, irises. Once gathered, our biometric data can be set as a digital token representing our “digital twin.” The US multinational management consultancy McKinsey & Company explains the value of our digital twin to them:
[A] digital twin is a virtual replica of a [. . .] person, or process that can be used to simulate its behavior to better understand how it works in real life. Digital twins are linked to real data sources from the environment, which means that the twin updates in real time to reflect the [life of the] original version. [. . .] When interconnected within one system, digital twins can create [an] environment that replicates and connects [the person to] every aspect of an organization [or their activity within the public-private state].
Middleware, like Oracle’s GoldenGate or Palantir’s Gotham, provides the necessary interoperability merging all “real data sources from the environment” together in “real time” on the unified ledger. AI can then use your digital ID-enabled digital twin to zone in only on the data within the unified ledger that relates to you. By recognising your biometric digital ID token, AI can locate your data in the otherwise indecipherable data lake.
If we agree to digital ID we are not just accepting unified ledgers that store all our health data. Numerous lakes will be filled with data from every public and private source.
This will include our personal financial data and records, monitoring every transaction we make in real time; every time we are observed by facial and number plate recognition cameras, the transmitted data will enable our movements to be tracked in real time; all comments we make on social media, harvested by the likes of X and Meta, and our browser and app use data, from companies like Google and Microsoft, will record our interests, likes, dislikes, and opinions in real time; every public and private sector service we use, complete with the data recorded during all of those public and private interactions, can also be unified and the whole data lake interrogated by AI to reveal all about us, in real time, to those with the approved access permissions. Our lives, via our digital twin, will be managed by third party applications—in real time.
McKinsey emphasises how their public and private sector clients can use our digital twin as a modelling tool to improve marketing strategies and make efficiency savings. But the global public-private partnership, of which McKinsey is a partner member, wants to use the technology not just to monitor everything we do or predict our behaviour for commercial purposes, but to control our behaviour and our lives.
In a digital ID world, the real time nature of the data gathering means that every time we engage with a service or make a purchase our risk signal, incorporating our behavioural signal, can be assessed by AI and our digital twin updated accordingly. In that moment of social interaction, a remote third party decision can be made to either modify—apply additional conditions—or allow, or deny the transaction or service delivery request.
Larry Ellison certainly recognises the immense social engineering potential. In an address to his investors in September 2024, Ellison discussed the implications of Oracle’s AI system capabilities once it is linked to digital ID enabled facial recognition cameras:
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we [Oracle and its partner network] are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.
The UK government, an Oracle partner, certainly never misses an opportunity to claim faux justifications for more AI facial recognition surveillance, biometric entry systems and enhanced digital controls.
Following the Manchester Arena bombing, the government used the reported terrorist attack to pass the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025. This will require enhanced CCTV surveillance of concert halls, shopping centres and other venues, such as supermarkets, where more than 800 people are likely to attend. Similarly, following the recent Huntingdon train stabbing, the immediate response by MP’s and government ministers was to call for more facial recognition cameras on our transport network.
As highlighted by Ellison, this is not for our “safety” but rather to control our behaviour. Once programmable digital currency (PDC) is introduced, the digital behavioural control system will be draconian.
In 2022, again at the World Government Summit, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Chatham House stalwart, the economist and tech entrepreneur Pippa Malmgren discussed the global implementation of PDCs:
What underpins a world order is always the financial system. We are on the brink of a dramatic change where we are about to [. . .] abandon the traditional system of money and accounting and introduce a new one. And the new one is what we call blockchain [unified ledger]. It means digital. It means having an almost perfect record of every single transaction that happens in the economy, which will give us far greater clarity over what’s going on.
Programmable digital currencies, such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins, and deposit tokens can be programmed by attaching so-called “smart contracts” to any transaction. This affords those with programming permission the ability to control of everything we earn, what, where, when, and with whom we transact and our access to every public and private sector service we need to use. If we agree to use digital ID in sufficient numbers, it is self-evident that PDCs will be introduced in short succession.
Digital ID linked to digital wallets containing our PDCs will introduce third party surveillance and control to all of our social and economic activity, in real time.
To give an example: In February 2025, the head of the Russian State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, Anatoly Aksakov, considered what the Russian state might program into its PDC. He told the news outlet Rossiyskaya Gazeta:
Payments in the digital ruble can be linked to smart contracts, where the transfer or remuneration to the contractor is regulated by a computer program, not a person. [. . .] We are now focusing on using the digital ruble to control the targeted spending of the [fiscal] budget. [. . .] Should we convert maternity capital or child benefit into the digital ruble and make it so that they cannot be spent on alcohol and cigarettes? In my opinion this is a justified measure and such restrictions are necessary.
This level of behavioral control is what Blair and Hague were alluding to when they said digital ID will enable the state to “better target support.”
PDCs are being tested and prepared by pretty much every nation state and by nearly every central and major commercial bank. In some countries, such as China and Russia, the CBDC model is favoured. In others, such as the US, stablecoins are preferred. In the UK, the current focus is on developing deposit tokens—a digital representation of the money in your bank account—and stablecoins. It all boils down to the same thing: programmable digital currency (PDC).
As noted by the central banks of central banks, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), digital ID is the essential precursor to the envisaged PDC control system.
Identification at some level is [. . .] central in the design of CBDCs [one model of PDC]. This calls for a CBDC that is account-based and ultimately tied to a digital identity. [. . .] A digital identity scheme, which could combine information from a variety of sources to circumvent the need for paper-based documentation, will thus play an important role in such an account-based design.
Once we have accepted digital ID, PDCs can be introduced and interoperability enabling systems, like Oracle GoldenGate, can then monitor everything we do by hoovering up data from a very wide “variety of sources.”
The BIS continued:
By drawing on information from national registries and from other public and private sources, such as education certificates, tax and benefits records, property registries etc, a digital ID serves to establish individual identities online. It opens up access to a range of digital services, for example when opening a transaction account or online shopping.
Of course, just as our digital ID-enabled PDCs can be programmed to “open[ ] up access” to services, so it can be used to impose additional conditions, restrictions or to deny access to goods and services. This means our individual behaviour can be centrally managed and controlled using AI algorithms. In effect, we will become programmable.
It is hard to overestimate the scale of the digital revolution our governments, their private sector partners, such as Palantir, and oligarchs like Larry Ellison are intending to enforce on us. Our relationship with the authorities who claim the right to rule us will be radically transformed. On the entire population scale, nothing we have ever experienced before comes close to the degree of enslavement governments and their multinational corporate partners will be able to exert over us with digital ID.
Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Prime Minister, has been put in charge of overseeing the rollout of digital ID in the UK. He recently said the whole point of digital ID is to “build a new state and shut down the legacy state.” That “new state” is a Technocratic Dark State. We are on the precipice, and if we accept digital ID we will have leaped from it blindly.
The UK government recently announced Britcard and claimed it was digital ID. The evident purpose of the resultant BritCard debate is to mislead the masses.
BritCard fundamentally misrepresents digital ID, as if it were a single government issued app. Our digital ID is actually created when we submit our biometric data to the interoperable system. The UK Government’s One Login is the digital ID gateway set to gather our biometric data to form the basis of our real digital ID.
Our digital ID token will then be stored in the GOV.UK wallet. All the indications are that GOV.UK is a unified ledger.
The UK government has been exploring the idea of using Distributed Ledger Technology—DLTs such as blockchain—for some time. In 2016, it published “Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain” in which it declared:
[DLT] could prove to have the capacity to deliver a new kind of trust to a wide range of services. As we have seen open data revolutionise the citizen’s relationship with the state, so may the visibility in these technologies reform our financial markets, supply chains, consumer and business-to-business services, and publicly-held registers. [. . .] The UK is in a unique position to explore those challenges and help maximise the benefits to our public services and our economy. [. . .] It is vital that [government] work together with the private sector [. . .] to unlock the full potential of this technology [DLT].
The GOV.UK wallet is a “publicly-held register” of our digital ID credentials. As Darren Jones observed, for nearly a decade the UK government has recognised that its use of DLT technology will “revolutionise the citizen’s relationship with the state.” For example, in 2016 it proposed using digital ID and a DLT to make state benefits and access to services conditional, thus better delivering its desired “policy outcomes”:
Digital identities could be confirmed through distributed ledgers running on securely-encoded devices — or even through software on a mobile device — which would allow end-users to receive benefits [welfare payments] directly. [. . .] Through the innovative application of such technologies [DLTs], it would be possible [. . .] to set rules at both the recipient and merchant ends of welfare transactions. This may present the opportunity for ministers to consider options for achieving better policy outcomes [. . .] by agreeing or setting rules around the use of benefits.
In particular, just as the Russian government proposes today, back in 2016 the UK government was eager to exploit DLTs to implement “smart contract” programmability:
[T]he basic block chain approach can be modified to incorporate rules, smart contracts, digital signatures and an array of other new tools. Distributed ledger technologies have the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land registries, [and] assure the supply chain of goods.
Returning to 2025, the UK government has already launched its pilot of the Digital Gilt Instrument (DIGIT). This will see tokenised government bonds issued on a blockchain (DLT). While the government has chosen not to disclose the precise technical specifications of the GOV.UK wallet, it is safe to assume that it is a permissioned unified ledger, almost certainly a blockchain.
The so-called BritCard is a distraction designed to bamboozle the public into imagining that if they defeat the BritCard rollout they can avoid digital ID. This is a lamentable deceit because digital ID is an entire digital infrastructure and a global policy initiative in which the UK government is merely an enabling partner. Electing a different political party won’t alter this policy trajectory one iota. The accompanying propaganda—the BritCard launch being an example—that is designed to mislead us into accepting digital ID, is dizzying.
William Hague—representing Oracle and Larry Ellison—wrote a propaganda article titled “Arguments Against Digital ID Are Paper Thin.” The Times published it three days prior to the UK government announcing “mandatory” digital ID in the UK with its absurd BritCard announcement. In the piece, saying “Sir Keir Starmer is rumoured to be preparing to unveil a digital ID scheme shortly,” Hague wrote:
The prime minister should now [. . .] announce a full, mandatory, digital ID scheme. But to avoid creating yet another disaster of policy and communication, he needs to reassure the critics [. . .] and make it part of an ambitious plan, both to stop illegal immigration and to transform the relationship we all have with a creaking and inefficient state.
Clearly, despite couching it in terms of vague rumours, the former Tory leader and Conservative Lord was fully briefed on the Labour government’s digital ID policy launch schedule. Hague claimed he wrote the piece to supposedly address the objections made by digital ID “critics.”
Let’s consider what those critical objections actually are.
- Digital ID is a prerequisite to programmable digital currency (PDC).
- Digital ID introduces third party control into practically every aspect of our lives.
- By creating single access points—One Login—to unified ledgers containing all out personal data (GOV.UK ??), cyber security is poor and all our data is vulnerable to misuse by governments, multinational corporations and cyber criminals.
- The creation of our digital twin, existing on the unified ledger, means every interaction we have with any public or private services, and every transaction we make can be surveilled, tracked and ultimately controlled by third parties we cannot influence.
- Our biometric digital ID will mean our physical movements can be tracked in real time on the expanding national and international network of AI facial and number plate recognition cameras. Combined with the gathering of real time transaction data, the social surveillance and control system will be all encompassing.
- Every social interactions linked to our digital ID, such as comments we make on social media or the people we meet in public, will update our digital twin’s behavioural “risk signal” depending on an AI programmed evaluation of the risk assessment criteria. This is a behavioural control system.
- Once digital ID is linked to PDCs, every transaction and access to all public and private services can be permitted or denied, in real time, as determined by our behavioural risk signal. Punishment for whatever is judged to be a misdeed or non-compliant will be extrajudicial and enforced by a select few with access and programming permissions.
- Digital ID is the basis for a technological dictatorship: a public-private biometric surveillance and control state.
Though William Hague called the arguments against digital ID “paper thin,” he carefully avoided virtually any mention of those genuine criticisms. He didn’t even mention them, let alone address them. Like BritCard, the evident purpose of his propaganda was to mislead the public.
Instead, Hague gave concocted responses to fictitious “arguments against digital ID.” He insisted, without reason, that objections to digital ID were reflections of party political loyalties, as if a global societal threat of the magnitude of digital ID is a UK party political issue. He even used the fact that UK MPs have been increasingly willing to push for digital ID as a supposedly plausible justification for the public to accept it.
His arguments for digital ID were spurious. For example, he said digital ID would limit illegal immigration. Hague didn’t explain why undocumented people, or those who exploit the undocumented, would care whether the documents they don’t possess and don’t have any realistic prospect of obtaining, are digital or not.
William Hague suggested the UK should emulate Estonia’s model of digital ID. This is cause for further concern not, as Hague asserted, reason for optimism. Hague claimed, as a result of Estonia’s digital government, “[l]evels of trust, in government and each other, have gone steadily up.” Again, there was no apparent basis for his claim.
While the Estonian public has broadly supported its move to the “100 percent e-state”—a radical new concept Hague forgot to mention—the transition has been accompanied by a marked decline in public “trust” of Estonian political institutions. The Estonian model Hague favours has effectively seen state bureaucracy “go dark” in Estonia. With decisions about everything from tax returns to continued employment adjudicated by AI, Estonia’s population has become increasingly disenfranchised.
Estonia’s twenty five year experiment with digital ID has seen the country plagued by dangerous cyber security vulnerabilities. In 2007 a mass cyber-attack saw both public and private sector institutions go down, cutting citizens off from vital support services. By 2017, the situation had not improved. More than half of the population was exposed to identity theft. In 2023, Estonia suffered nearly 500 separate cyber attacks on its vaunted digital ID-based infrastructure. In 2024, the situation deteriorated further as Estonia suffered its largest ever cyber-attack, though the government said this was no problem. Yet, at the same time, the Estonian government continues to fine its private sector digital ID partners, who contribute to the government’s interoperable system, for serious and highly sensitive data breaches.
The Estonian government has used its digital control grid to censor online information. Whatever information the Estonian state and its international partners don’t officially approve of, it arbitrarily designates “disinformation” and censors it. Krista Mulenok, Secretary General of the Estonian Atlantic Treaty Association (EATA), proudly told journalists:
On the disinformation front, Estonia has made it a national security issue. [. . .] The country’s systems are built to address threats in real time, making it one of the most responsive and resilient nations when it comes to digital security. [. . .] Estonia’s whole-of-society approach encourages collaboration between the government, private sector, media outlets, and civil society. This includes partnerships with social media platforms and tech companies to identify and block harmful content.
Estonia’s appears to be the kind of anti-democratic, insecure, high risk, socially debilitating, and oppressive digital ID system Hague is promoting. He’s not alone. The Labour government also admires and wishes to implement the Estonian digital ID model in the UK.
William Hague apparently made false claims about what the British people think about the prospect of digital ID. Like many other stooges for the oligarchy, Hague pointed towards opinion polls, presumably cherry picking the results that supported his position and ignoring those that don’t.
He wrote:
British voters are now overwhelmingly in favour of universal digital ID. In the past year, surveys by More in Common found 53 per cent in favour and 19 per cent against; 54 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters were in favour, as were 59 per cent of Reform supporters and 68 per cent of Conservatives.
Either Hague was referencing a private More in Common poll or he was making it up. In its most recently published September 2025 polling research, More in Common asked if the public supported the introduction of “digital ID cards.” This is not even what the BritCard is supposed to be—a smartphone app—let alone what real digital ID actually is.
Nevertheless, according to More in Common, thoroughly contradicting Hague’s claims, across the board—all adult age groups, covering nearly all political party affiliations—support for a “digital ID card” was around 30% and opposition was consistently higher at around 45% with the remainder undecided. The outliers were Green Party voters, among whom 50% were in support.
All of those polled were voters which, given that approximately 48% of the British did not vote in the last general election, leaves the polling fairly meaningless in any event. So where Hague found this alleged public support for digital ID in the UK is anyone’s guess. Did Hague simply add the undecided to those in favour of digital ID? His reported polling numbers seem inexplicable otherwise.
William Hague is fully cognisant of the breathtaking extent to which digital ID will control our lives. From being required to use the internet, to accessing healthcare or paying our energy bills and accessing banking services, our digital ID will control it all. He alleged the British public are happy to accept this tyrannical system:
[The public] are also in favour of using [their digital IDs] to their full potential: for age verification, accessing government services including benefits and tax payments, registering to vote, using the NHS, setting up a bank account, applying for jobs, renting property, opening online accounts and signing up for utilities.
In truth, the propaganda pushed out by the government and corporate lobbyists like Hague is utterly disingenuous. Most people are yet to grasp what digital ID is and what it portends. If they believe the mainstream media, the politicians and well-oiled propagandists like Hague, the British people will have no chance of understanding what their biometric digital ID future holds. In this media environment of lies, misdirection and conspicuous omissions, it will be near impossible for the majority of the population to give their informed consent to digital ID.
We really start getting into the deep weeds of Hague’s propaganda when he touched upon the only genuine argument against digital ID that he dared to broach: its potential to be used as a tool of oppression. Again, Hague tried to irrationally confine these concerns to the Overton window of party politics:
Most colourfully of all, Nigel Farage has argued that digital ID “will be a tool of suppression”, with one source in his party asserting that high immigration in recent years has been a deliberate failure designed to justify digital ID and “thus a vast increase in state control of our lives”. To believe this you have to think that Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party and the Labour government have all been engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to make themselves highly unpopular as a way of getting an ID system introduced. If only they were capable of such co-ordination and efficiency.
There is no “elaborate conspiracy.” The policy trajectory is transparent and not at all complex. The evidence exposing the true nature of digital ID is staring everyone in the face, if they would only look, or perhaps if it was honestly reported.
From the UN to the World Government Summit, from the mouths of the chattering talking heads at the WEF to the policy research documents of the BIS, and from the evidently unhinged avarice publicly aired by oligarchs like Ellison, the intention to use digital ID to form a digital dictatorship is abundantly clear. It is not some unknowable secret, or “elaborate conspiracy,” as Hague tries to spin it.
Boris Johnson, the Trilateralist Keir Starmer, Tony Blair and William Hague are, at most, bit-players promoting a global public-private policy initiative over which they have virtually no influence. They are mere sales-reps for the global Establishment and little more.
Despite Hague’s efforts at distraction, that politicians’ from all parties are willing to risk unpopularity by going along with a global governance agenda is not surprising. Politicians are rewarded for their loyalty and career ending self-sacrifice with lucrative appointments once they have served their designated political role.
Hague wants his readers to remain oblivious of the real evidence that points towards the true nature of digital ID. He wants to hide the intentions of the multinational network that is pushing it. By falsely portraying the genuine and entirely reasonable concern that digital ID will usher in a “vast increase in state control of our lives” as nothing more than a political debate, Hague is spreading what the UN calls “disinformation.”
Shortly before the BritCard announcement Hague said that “a compulsory digital ID scheme” was “exactly the right move.” Following the angry public reaction to the BritCard launch, on 5th November, Hague posted on social media:
The reaction to Digital ID shows the government still hasn’t explained it clearly.
This is about security, not control.
BritCard is not digital ID. Hague is plainly among the propagandists who want everyone to think it is.
The word “compulsory” means to force compliance. The word “control” means to exert authority—i.e., to “force” someone to comply. If something is “compulsory” it is, by definition, about “control” not “security,” which is a word that implies safety from danger.
Hague so wedded to his propaganda narrative that he can’t even use his own native language correctly. Bluntly, William Hague’s digital ID propaganda is utterly duplicitous. It is no wonder that so much of it is nonsensical.
It is essential that we have an open and frank national debate about the true nature of digital ID. We cannot rely on the public-private state and its propagandists for truthful information. As individuals, we must take the responsibility to explore and consider the evidence and we must insist on full disclosure in response to any question we ask. If, as Hague claims, digital ID is not about control what does the state have to hide?
Most importantly, we cannot afford to comply with digital ID in the UK until this debate is concluded and the necessary safeguards are in place. At this stage, to comply is to voluntarily agree to your own slavery.
This article (William Hague’s Digital ID Propaganda) was created and published by Iain Davis and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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