Labour Together - a UK political think-tank set up after the 2015 election to “renew and unify” the Labour Party and to do policy work and campaigning. It traces roots to 2015 (launched as Common Good Labour then renamed) and is run by former party staffers, pollsters and campaigners; it’s publicly framed as an ideas hub that helped modernise Labour’s messaging.
On the surface it’s a think-tank. Realistically it’s a small, high-impact policy and personnel pipeline: polling, message testing, campaign tech and talent-placement into the party. In practice that means it’s where ideas are stress-tested and future staff are grown. Want a quick policy shift in government that looks “grassroots”? Seed it here, leak it strategically, then watch it climb into civil service briefings and ministerial speeches. The danger: concentrated messaging + opaque donor links = party policy steered offstage by few hands. Recent reporting on undeclared donations shows how quickly influence can be hidden in plain sight.
Let me be clear: I believe BritCard could be a red herring. I do not buy the story that some suits dreamed up a new “solution” to migration overnight — that is theatre. Even if ministers scrap BritCard, do not celebrate: mission creep began years ago with One Login and the GOV.UK Wallet, and the infrastructure that matters is already being bolted in. Read the documents, think critically, and remember why we start with One Login — because the machine is already running.
BritCard looks like the headline act, but it may be distraction theatre. The real build-out has been quietly happening for years with One Login and the GOV.UK Wallet. Scrap the card, and the architecture still stands. Keep your eye on the gate — One Login — because that’s where the fight actually begins.
Labour Together “BritCard” Proposal
What this document says:
Labour Together’s “BritCard” paper is selling a mandatory, government-issued digital identity: “a verifiable digital credential downloaded onto a user’s smartphone” pitched as a fix for illegal migration and Windrush-style failures. It explicitly recommends making the credential “mandatory, universal and free of charge” and tying it into right-to-work/right-to-rent checks, HMRC/Companies House cross-checks, and a relaunched “BritCard app”.
What it really means:
This is not an efficiency project. It’s a blueprint to fold identity, surveillance and enforcement into a single, auditable civic layer. Give everyone one canonical credential and suddenly the state (plus any authorised private verifiers) can see when, where and how people are checked; who worked, who rented, who didn’t. That turns enforcement from random “raids” into data-driven targeting: cross-matching verifier logs with PAYE and landlord registers means employers, landlords and entire populations can be scored, flagged and prioritized for action. The tech framing (wallets, verifiable credentials, One Login) is the sugar; the enforcement architecture is the pill.
Key levers hidden in plain sight:
Universal + Mandatory = power. If the card is compulsory for new hires and new tenancies, non-holders become second-class residents or targets for sanction. The paper openly says the credential would be “made compulsory” after rollout.
Built-in audit trail = targeting. Every check “creates a record shared with the Home Office” — that’s metadata the state uses to spot gaps between declared employees (PAYE) and checks carried out. Enforcement becomes surgical.
Federation as cover. They recommend a federated architecture and encryption language to soothe privacy fears, but then propose Home Office access to the canonical sources (HMPO, UKVI). Technical labels (zero-knowledge proofs, wallets) provide plausible deniability while enabling scale.
Receipts:
“a mandatory national digital identity” — the authors don’t hide the compulsion.
“the act of requesting the check would also create a record shared with the Home Office.” — audit trail, baked in.
“BritCard would make it possible to require more frequent checks so that visa overstayers would be caught” — enforcement by design.
Ominous implications:
Normalising routine identity checks across work, housing and services normalises third-party verification and allows mission creep: from migration enforcement to welfare access, policing, employment eligibility and beyond.
“Test-and-learn” + phased rollout = incremental lock-in. Once millions are onboarded, reversing scope or surveillance is politically harder.
Private sector verifiers and wallets (Apple/Google mentioned) mean corporate access points into state ID infrastructure.
Tone check: authors, allies and agenda...
This comes from a Labour-aligned think-tank with authors who have ties to the Tony Blair network and tech policy circles; the document references the Tony Blair Institute’s numbers and frames digital ID as a growth/efficiency play as well as an enforcement tool.
Don't be fooled; BritCard is sold as a response to illegal migration, but it's the perfect cover for a centralised, auditable ID layer. A globalist technical stack (Agenda 2030 style) that doesn't stop with the Tony Blair Institute either…