The Highwire with Del Bigtree - UK’S DIGITAL ID DYSTOPIA

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announces a nationwide digital ID mandate for employment. Combined with facial recognition and speech crackdowns, it signals a rising surveillance state. Del explores how citizens are pushing back.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

If you're a member of the United Kingdom, just a couple days ago, you may have woke up, open up your computer, turned on your TV, and your prime minister told you this. Take a look. Today, I am announcing this government will make a new free of charge digital ID mandatory for the right to work by the end of this parliament. Let me spell that out. You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. it's as simple as that because decent, pragmatic, fair-minded people,

they want us to tackle the issues that they see around them. And of course, the truth is we won't solve our problems if we don't also take on the root causes. For too many years, it's been too easy for people to come here, slip into the shadow economy,

and remain here illegally. Because, frankly, We've been squeamish about saying things that are clearly true. It's not just that it's not compassionate left-wing politics to rely on labor that exploits foreign workers and undercuts fair wages, but the simple fact that every nation needs to have control over its borders. We do need to know who is in our country. God, it is really a trip, Jeffrey, watching this just from the vantage point. We have. We have our own issues here in America. We talk about them all the time. But to watch, let's open our borders wide. Let's get just surrounded by foreigners that are, you know, assaulting women on the street. Nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Our own government keeps you from being able to talk about it. We're censoring you. We're throwing you in jail for even complaining about it. But we really care about you and your jobs, which is why we need to take away your rights and get this digital idea to protect you from those foreigners that are coming in and taking over your jobs. I mean, it's

crazy the headspin to watch this from, you know, a distance. I mean, talk about double speak. It's 1984. The amount of hypocrisy and gaslighting in just one speech, I couldn't believe it. So just like you said, unchecked migration has been going on for at least a decade increasing, and the government has done nothing about it. In fact, they've accelerated it. They've basically turned a blind eye to the crime. And so you see Starmer come up there and try to grandstand on this, and say we need digital IDs for everybody. Notice this was outside of parliament, so there's no democratic process allowed,

no MPs were allowed to speak on this. It was never put to a vote by the people. He just announced it. And why did he do that? Well, because in the UK, there's a long history of digital IDs trying to be pushed through, and they tried it in 2009, 15 years ago,

and it was almost immediately stopped by members of parliament and the public because they were saying that, we have to dismantle this, because this is beginning of Australia. state. Well, what happened in the last 15 years from then until now? Well, we have, so again, this digital ID, people out there thinking that maybe the first time they see this, well, it's just a card, right? It's going to bring us into the modern day, the modern era of digital media.

Well, digital ID. So think about your banking, your transactions, your carbon footprint, your online posts, your health biometrics. Every facet of your life can be tracked and surveilled and it all starts with this digital ID. So why is it being pushed now? Well, because maybe in 2021, the UK was one of the hardest countries to push the digital vaccine passport in order to actually live your life. In order to go out, go to a restaurant, get groceries, anything. You needed to do that. And much of the public was forced into taking this. So you have Starmer come out there with a purposefully, purposefully inflammatory comment saying, you can't work without this. Guess what? So why did he do that? Well, we still don't know, we can guess. He's now the most

unpopular prime minister in the history of the country. This is a poll. So perhaps maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall he's going to be out of there and they're just trying to push there as many agendas as they can before they get out of there. But the public unsurprisingly has rejected this in real time and mass. Here is a petition at UK.gov and you're seeing here approaching almost three million signatures. And this is just after about a week. So, you know, really almost 4% of the entire UK population at this point is rejecting this in this petition. And this is a wider conversation. So there's eight other countries that have digital IDs right now. This is starting to fast roll. And you can see here by this article, it shows this that digital IDs were really something that were only

previously existed during wartime, just to give you an idea maybe where we're at right now. So those countries, according to this article, Estonia, Singapore, India, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands and Nigeria. They all have some form of digital ID and they all use it in different ways. But the really interesting thing here is the UK as a test ground for this because the UK has several moving pieces that are really not, really not pro-human, really not pro-liberty. Moving into place and the digital ID is the last piece of this. And so what do I mean by that? Well, we have during the same week that Kier Starmour comes out and says this, we have their minister of police comes out and says, Also, this conversation, they're paving the way for a national facial recognition rollout.

This is alongside of the digital ID. So they're calling it live time facial recognition, LFR technology, and it connects cameras to watch lists containing photos of suspects, wanted for a range of offenses. As an individual walks past the camera, their facial measurements are scanned for a positive match against the database, it alerts the officers, and they basically arrest the person. So you have that. They're going up. These cameras are going up all over, all through the streets. And the UK police haven't really been pro-liberty and pro-free speech lately.

You remember just this past year, you have the UK Police Commissioner, he came out, and he threatened to extradite in jail US citizens over online posts. He said, we'll come after you. And why are they doing that? Well, it seems like in their country, they already have it down pat on how to do this.

They're already arresting 30 people per day for online messages. They're coming to their houses at night. They're interrogating and they're knocking on their door. These are police officers. And so you have lifetime facial recognition. You have a police force that is going after people's speech and thoughts in real time. And you have a digital ID.

All three of those things combine to start to look like China. And this is China in 2019. See if you can see any parallels. Take a look. The government here says it is trying to purify society by rewarding those who are trustworthy and punishing those who who are not. So like the credit score that most Americans get for how they handle their finances, Chinese citizens are now getting social credit scores based on everything from whether they pay their taxes on time to how they cross the street.

When Leo Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he's on the list of untrustworthy people. Leo was a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere. I can't buy property. My child can't go to private school, he says. You feel you're being controlled by the list all the time. And the list is now getting longer, as every Chinese citizen is being assigned a social credit score, a fluctuating rating based on a range of behaviors. China's growing network of surveillance cameras makes all of this possible.

The country already has an estimated 176 million cameras, and it plans to have more than six. hundred million installed by 2020. It can recognize more than 4,000 vehicles. Shiu Li is the CEO of Sense Time, one of China's most successful artificial intelligence companies. It has created smart cameras for the government that can help catch criminals, but also track average citizens. I mean, I'm going to just say it as I always do, Jeffrey.

We should be careful that we don't just watch UK go, oh, that poor country. When I think deep down, we know we are literally just millimeters of way. from, you know, turning on a system that's already there to do exactly this in our country. So this is a really, really scary dystopian movie or novel that we're in the middle of as we speak. Absolutely. And we're not out of the woods. Larry Ellison's Oracle is really in China working kind of as a third party helping that and erecting that surveillance system. So it's a business for a lot of these companies. And we're not out of the woods here in the United States.