Identity cards are now back in vogue – they are the political idea that never went away

Boris Johnson once opposed the idea, arguing they would give the state too much power, but now it's different, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson was always against ID cards – but seemingly no longer (EPA)

You’ve got to laugh sometimes. One by one, the eternal verities of Blairism reassert themselves. Everything the New Labour government did that prompted howls of rage from its opponents has been quietly brought back in the years since.

My favourites so far have been Nick Clegg’s conversion to the idea that taxpayer-funded political advisers were actually essential to the functioning of democracy, not a contradiction of it; David Cameron’s reinvention of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit as the Implementation Unit; and now the return of digital ID cards.

“I think it’s bonkers,” David Davis told the BBC. He felt so strongly about the subject in 2008 that he resigned as shadow home secretary to fight a by-election in his own seat against the shadow of sinister forces who wanted to put us all on a state database. As he said, the first thing the Conservative-led government did in 2010 was to cancel the identity card scheme.

Boris Johnson was another prominent Conservative who thought it was a terrible idea. In 2004, the then-MP for Henley and Daily Telegraph columnist wrote: “If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card… I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.”

And yet here we are, entering the second year of a Johnson government and two of his junior ministers have announced plans to “enable the use of digital identity across the UK”. Marvellous.

Matt Warman, digital infrastructure minister, and Julia Lopez, cabinet office minister, have set out all the advantages of giving people an easy way to verify their identity online. “Increasingly people are required to prove their identity to access services, whether it is to buy age-restricted items on and offline or make it easier to register at a new GP surgery,” the ministers say.

Of course, it is not actually a physical ID card, so the prime minister won’t literally have to eat his words. Tony Blair’s government had moved away from an actual card by the end. The card itself was downgraded to an optional extra, with the real policy being a national database.

As Davis said today, his opposition wasn’t “because of the piece of plastic”; he objected “because of the huge databases that it implied would exist, within government – the sort of database that would have made the Stasi happy”.

The sensitive question is not even about the existence of state databases. Different parts of the state store a vast amount of digital information about us; the tricky problems are to what extent different government agencies can use information collected for one purpose for another. At its simplest, the question is whether, if we have proved who we are for income tax purposes, for example, we can then use that digital identity to register at a GP.

Opinion polls suggest that the idea is popular. But Davis thought it crossed a line of principle, by giving the state too much power – power which could be misused by authoritarian politicians in the future. Johnson thought it crossed the line too. But the difference is that Davis believes now what he believed then, whereas Johnson was just writing a column caricaturing, for comic effect, the deep conservative beliefs that many of his party held.

Now he has a government to run, and, like Blair before him, has discovered that simple checks to confirm people’s identities would ease a surprisingly wide range of the country’s problems.