The most entertaining fake news I’ve ever seen did the rounds last week, claiming – rather boldly – that King Charles had defied Keir Starmer and refused to sign his compulsory Digital ID legislation.
According to the AI-generated hilarity, the King looked the Prime Minister in the eye and said six historic words, ‘I cannot, in good conscience, approve this.’
Yes, that is seven words.
Starmer blushed.
‘What happened to monarchs who forgot their place!’ Starmer then stormed out.
There were plenty of other wild details thrown in for dramatic effect and all of this was intercut onto YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok videos under ‘BREAKING’ banners with ‘Westminster erupts in chaos!’ flashing on the screen. Others called it a ‘constitutional earthquake’.
The idea that King Charles would risk his crown to defend the privacy rights of the British people would be so remarkable we might have to rebrand ‘fake news’ to ‘hope news’.
Perhaps that is why it was viewed half a million times and shared so widely. People desperately wanted to believe their monarch might defend them against elected tyranny.
Alas… It was all just a bit of revenue-raising click-bait fun.
The King is more likely to be found tending his garden than having serious conversations about civil liberty in the halls of Parliament.
What actually happened was that Rupert Lowe circulated a letter addressed to Keir Starmer opposing Digital ID signed by a huge number of his fellow MPs.
The letter reads:
‘We are writing to register our profound and passionate opposition to your reported plans for a compulsory, UK-wide Digital Identity scheme. Such a policy would represent an unprecedented level of state control over British citizens. This is a fundamental change to the relationship between the individual and the state. It’s dangerous, intrusive, and deeply un-British. It risks building the foundations of a surveillance state – one that will inevitably expand in scope over time.
‘We urge you to abandon these plans immediately. At the very least, you must commit to bringing any proposal before Parliament for full scrutiny and a free vote – and to fully consulting the public before attempting to impose such a drastic measure on a reluctant country.
‘The British people do not want this, and the permanent shift in the balance of power between government and governed. We will oppose it at every stage.’
Keir Starmer faced even more opposition than listed on the document, with the full force of Reform and the bulk of the Tories making it impossible for him to continue pressing the issue, much like Albanese and his omnibus bill.
UK Labour received angry letters, petitions with millions of signatures, hostile interviews, public rallies, and then he nearly drowned under online criticism.
Nobody believed the line about compulsory Digital IDs magically stopping illegal migrants stealing jobs off Brits, and if the quality of Starmer’s press answers were anything to go by, neither did he.
The Opposition Leader even accused him of ‘blowing around like a plastic bag in the wind’. As political attacks go, it’s nothing to write home to Churchill about, but it’s better than nothing.
Anyway, it’s not the victory people think it is, with Starmer’s government promising biometric passports by 2029. Will that stop illegal migrants dropping their identification documents in the English Channel? Nope.
Even worse, the Tories have been caught by the same mind virus as our Coalition and are now pressuring the government to ban Under 16s from social media this week.
People are too exhausted from fighting Digital ID to go back on the streets and do the same for the Under 16 bill. It is a war of attrition against the peasantry where the people have to commit huge amounts of energy and resources while the government machines calmly churn out policy.
The conservatives should be helping to, I don’t know, ‘conserve’ privacy, or something, but they are often worse than Labour.
I have never seen this level of self-destruction in the global conservative movement. When it comes to their new toy, the Under 16 bill, do they understand that social media is where children are de-radicalised from the Woke education system? A system which conservative governments helped to pad-out with climate change, trans ideology, a love of collectivism, and devotion to foreign aid…?
Why are kids gluing themselves to the street and crying in agony because they think they’re going to die in ten years?
Social media didn’t do that. The government did when it set out to use children against parents as a way to push through policy.
And who made it too dangerous for children to play outside on the streets like they used to when the UK (and Australia, for that matter) was a high-trust, well-integrated, moral, and largely cohesive society? That would be the government again, when they thought power could be secured through the creation of a dependent welfare class.
Attacking social media is what the left want, and for some reason both the Tories and our Australian conservatives are too blinkered to see beyond the shallow propaganda.
When did the government care about your children? When they were locking them out of school for the best part of a year, causing life-long emotional, social, and learning difficulties? Or when they forced them to be part of the Covid vaccine trials when they had less chance of being harmed by the virus than the common cold…
The government certainly had a good go at turning children into good little state snitches.
These governments have dumbed down the education of our children to make teacher unions feel better about declining standards. They encourage children to indenture themselves to the university sector while importing foreigners to take their jobs before they graduate. They are creating the societal conditions where these kids won’t be able to find a home or afford children of their own.
And still people believe that the government cares so deeply about children that they are banning social media while ignoring that social media is how children communicate with each other in an increasingly dangerous and lonely world.
The failures of the UK government are the failures of Australian Parliament.
As far as I can tell, the Tories, Labour, Labor, and Coalition are all copying notes off each other and then dressing this plagiarism up as unity.
Others say the entity the writing the policy notes is the United Nations or the World Economic Forum. There is some truth in that. They have become unofficial think-tanks.
Our politicians stopped having original ideas a long time ago and instead look to a higher power for inspiration, in this case, global bureaucracies infested with corporate leaders trying to see how much public money they can capture with promises to solve problems that only exist because of the previous solution.
Let’s remember, Digital ID is not a political policy, it is a serious business proposal for ongoing contracts that, once established, will be very difficult to stop.
How much money is being made by these technological pursuits, of which there are many? How many tech lobbyists lurk around the cafes in the halls of power, trying to ensnare political leaders with the next election distraction?
Very few of these technological advancements start in the mind of a politician. Almost all are planted there by someone with a product ready to go. Whether it comes second-hand from a bureaucracy or directly in the coffee-line, it’s still a worry.
Even banning social media for those under 16 might seem like an attack against technology when it is actually encouraging social media companies to do something previously forbidden under privacy laws … collecting biometric data.
The most valuable data in the world is biometric data and for a generation the advice has been to never give it out unless you absolutely have to. Now here we have parliaments full of ministers who have never used social media encouraging the entire population, including teenagers, to hand over high-quality government ID or biometric imprints of their faces to Silicon Valley. And this is for ‘safety’? Really? Do people believe this? Do ministers believe it? (They might…)
All I am saying is that while Starmer was put back in his box over Digital ID, he’s not about to be stopped from erecting the scaffolding of social destruction. Nor is the Australian government.
Every single day is a battle to protect freedom.
