Sir Keir Starmer is “lying to Britons” if he “believes digital ID cards are going to work”, James Price has claimed.
Speaking to GB News, the Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies claimed that the move would create “more bureaucracy and more difficulty for normal people”.
The Prime Minister is expected to confirm the move in today, in a bid to tackle the illegal migration crisis and those working in the underground economy.
The digital identification, nicknamed the “Brit Card”, will be able to verify an individual’s right to live and work in the UK.
Keir Starmer has been accused of ‘lying to Britons’ and ‘pretending digital ID will work’
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PA / GB NEWS
Delivering his verdict on the plans, Mr Price told GB News: “‘Why is Starmer doing this is’ a question that we could probably ask every day of the year, given that he’s obviously solved all of the nation’s problems already and can go and take on this massive, chunky challenge right now.
“When we look at the pandemic, for example, some of the systems that did stand up pretty well, things like Universal Credit where there had been modernisation efforts and you could kind of retroactively engineer some of the benefit systems to send money to people and all these other programs, and that’s just a function that technology is capable of making public services better.”
He added: “But the crime that this is now purporting to stop, illegal immigration, the clue is in the name is already, it’s illegal.
“And so what you actually need to do is just have a better enforcement mechanism of all these things already.
“If people want to go and get a new job, they’ve got to show their National Insurance number, they’ve got to show a valid form of where they’re living and all these things already.
“And of course, if you’re a criminal, you’re going to ignore the law anyway, by definition.”
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A petition against the use of digital ID smashed the 500,000 signature mark
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Highlighting that the underground economy “already exists” in Britain, Mr Price declared a new form of ID “won’t matter”.
He explained: “The shadow economy already exists. The worst bit, of course is the underlying legal architecture that prevents people from being deported in the first place.
“So some bloke rocks up on a small boat and throws his papers into the ocean and says, right, look after me.
“And then he goes to try and get a job or something and they say ‘you haven’t got a Brit card, have you?’ It doesn’t matter.
“You won’t be able to deport him because the ECHR will give him the right to a family life, the Human Rights Act will protect him from doing all of this.
“You’re going to have a council give him a house and give him some money anyway, and they don’t care about the card system as it is, so all it ends up doing is making more bureaucracy and more difficulty for normal people.”
Mr Price told GB News that the Government must ‘get to grips with the underlying legal system’ instead
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GB NEWS
Questioned by host Anne Diamond if the concept “could work” if implemented, Mr Price staunchly disagreed: “No it won’t work, and if you believe it will, I’ve got a small boat to sell you.
“It is not until we get to grips with this underlying legal system, the fact that someone like Dominic Cummings has said if the Prime Minister actually did try right now to direct the Navy to stop these boats, which you could do very easily, the cabinet secretary, the head of the civil service, might well say that’s illegal and try and get the police to arrest the Prime Minister.”
He concluded: “So unless you deal with all of this stuff, which means stripping out lots of existing laws, stripping out the ECHR and all these things, it doesn’t matter if you’re making people carry around a different bit of paper or a different spreadsheet and a Government database somewhere, it’s not going to work.
“And I think that he’s lying to people if he’s pretending that it will.”