Is Tony Blair ever going to give up hope of foisting ID cards on us? As prime minister, he was defeated over the issue – his plans were eventually dropped by the incoming coalition in 2010. He tried again during the pandemic, trying to sell us the idea of vaccination passports.

And now he is at it again, this time with his old sparring partner William Hague. Together they have written a paper for Blair’s Institute for Global Change, called A New National Purpose: Innovation Can Power the Future of Britain, making the not-altogether-novel observation that computers can be jolly useful.

There is a very good reason why Britain abandoned ID cards after the war

Central to their thesis is that all citizens should be given a ‘digital ID’ which could then be used for all kinds of purposes. ‘In a world in which everything from vaccine status to aeroplane tickets and banking details are available on our personal devices,’ they write, ‘it is illogical that the same is not true of our individual public records. A well-designed digital ID system would allow citizens to prove not only who they are, but also their right to live and work in the UK, their age and ownership of a driving licence.’ It could also hold our educational records, they suggest, ‘and make it simple and easier to access benefits.’

It is far from illogical not to have centralised government records on every citizen. Indeed, there is a very good reason why Britain abandoned ID cards after the war and the public has always resisted their reintroduction: it is an over-bearing use of power by the state.

We have all seen what happens with surveillance powers: they are sold to us on the pretext that they will help solve serious crime – and they end up being used to issue industrial quantities of fines for minor infringements such as accidentally straying into a bus lane. We have seen how the Prevent programme strayed from its original purpose of tackling a specific problem, Islamic extremism, into trying to label people as potential right wing extremists on the grounds they enjoy Great British Railway Journeys. Do we really want a centralised database where all our habits can be analysed in the manner of China’s social credit system?

As for apparently making it easier to claim benefits, Blair seems not to have noticed that the government started forcing benefit claimants online over a decade ago with its ‘digital first’ strategy. The result is a system which makes it easier for some relatively well-off people to claim benefits – but far more difficult for the people who need them most. Hard though it might be for some to contemplate, there is still 16 per cent of the population who do not own a smartphone. Needless to say, this is a demographic in which the poor are very much over-represented.

Do we really need to carry our qualifications around on our phones wherever we go? I have never once been asked to produce them since I started university aged 19. A more pressing matter is the quality of higher education. Blair seems belatedly to realise that there are not enough people studying STEM subjects. But one of the reasons for that is Blair’s own mass expansion of higher education which focused on getting 50 per cent of school-leavers onto degree courses without bothering too much about the quality of those courses, or whether they were in subjects which would improve employability.

There are some public bodies, among them NHS hospitals and surgeries, where you wonder: what do they have against computerised records? But there is a certain history to that. Back in 2002, a government led by one Tony Blair launched a National Programme for IT which was supposed to digitise the records of every NHS patient and allow us to book appointments online, etc. It shouldn’t have been a problem: banks, for example, had succeeded in digitising our accounts years earlier. But it was poorly conceived and managed, and by the time it was abandoned a decade later it had cost the taxpayer a wasted £10 billion.

Blair and Hague are of a type frequently found in parliament: arts students who suddenly discover science and technology later in life, think it’s absolutely amazing and the answer to all our problems. They are the sort who don’t really having an understanding of what is possible, what is not possible, and who do not stop to ask: just because something can be done, is it necessarily desirable that it should be? On ID cards – digital or non-digital – the answer is generally no.