The applause for Burnham scrapping Starmer’s digital ID arrived before anyone checked what survived it

The applause for Burnham scrapping Starmer’s digital ID arrived before anyone checked what survived it

Rhoda Wilson

Before he walked into Number 10, Andy Burnham announced plans to scrap Keir Starmer’s controversial digital ID scheme as one of his first acts as Prime Minister.  Many have applauded him – but their applause was misguided.

This isn’t a time to celebrate a perceived end to digital ID. There’s still a big fight ahead. Under this new agenda, the machinery keeps growing no matter who holds the keys. Burnham, Britain’s new keyholder, has spent two decades asking for exactly this machinery, and he now has it, Cam Wakefield explains.

Andy Burnham Scrapped Digital ID. His Internet Plans Say Otherwise

By Cam Wakefield, as published by Reclaim the Net on 20 July 2026

The new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is in Downing Street, and he has spent twenty years telling you exactly what he wants to do to the internet. He won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June 2026. He then collected the backing of roughly 349 Labour MPs, more than 85 per cent of the parliamentary party. By the time he walked through the black door, the job had been settled for weeks.

His first big announcement was the one privacy campaigners had been hoping for. Starmer’s digital ID scheme for all adults is dead, scrapped before Burnham had finished unpacking, the money moved to the cost of living. The applause came quickly. Perhaps it should not have.

This is a read on a government barely a day old. On speech and privacy, the early signals point one way, and it is not the way that loosens the state’s grip. He is not about to tear up the settlement he inherits from Keir Starmer. The open question is how much further he carries it.

Burnham arrives with a long record on all this. He is one of the few senior British politicians with a documented, two-decade appetite for putting the government closer to what you can see, say and read online.

His first ministerial job, at the Home Office in 2005 and 2006, was pushing Tony Blair’s Identity Cards Bill through Parliament. He told the BBC that compulsory national ID cards would be a major breakthrough. Twenty years later, asked about it again, he was unembarrassed about the principle: “I’m not kind of arguing against the principle. I was very pro, actually, I thought there was a real clear case for it.”

Two decades of hindsight, and the case is still clear to him. What that case rests on is a claim about the relationship between a person and the state, and it is the same claim underneath every age check and identity gate now being built. The Identity Cards Act reached the statute book on 30 March 2006 and was repealed on 21 January 2011.

Then came 2008, and Culture Secretary Burnham produced a plan that looks like a blueprint for everything running today. The organising idea was that online content should meet the same regulatory standards as television. He wanted taste and decency rules applied to the web, cinema-style age certificates and warning signs on anything featuring sex, violence or strong language, alerts bolted onto viral content, and ISP-level “child-safe” packages.

Then 2016, and the episode that should be read before anyone celebrates this week. As Shadow Home Secretary, Burnham went after the Investigatory Powers Bill. He said Britain needed a new law in this area, then listed what was wrong with the one in front of him: thin privacy safeguards, surveillance powers that went too far, thresholds set too low, weak oversight, definitions loose enough to justify almost any intrusion. Labour abstained in March 2016. The government made amendments. In June, Burnham and Labour voted for it, and the Snoopers’ Charter received Royal Assent that November.

The Act remains one of the most expansive surveillance laws in any democracy, and it exists because the opposition of the day decided its objections had been satisfied. That is the pattern worth holding onto. Burnham objects to how a power is packaged, wins changes to the packaging, and votes the power into the statute book. Ten years later, the objections are a footnote and the Act is still there.

The recent statements finish the picture. During an April 2025 Times interview, he talked warmly about regulating social media for teenagers, saying that if it is not a ban it needs to be something.

By January 2026, he agreed with much of what Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was saying about children and social media and welcomed a cross-party mood for bolder action. Earlier this month, days after winning Makerfield and while the leadership was already effectively his, he confirmed the current government’s online age verification scheme keeps running and imposes election purdah rules online.

That is twenty years pointing the same way.

Expect the Online Safety Act to survive Burnham intact, because the pressure on him runs toward strengthening it. A coalition of charities, campaign groups and academics wrote to him before he reached No 10, asking him to toughen the law.

Their specific wish is to drag it past illegal content and into “legal but harmful” territory, the exact area the Act was careful to leave alone. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee wants the same, arguing the Act is too weak on “misinformation” and that platforms should answer for how they amplify lawful content people dislike. 2024’s Southport unrest is the case they keep reaching for.

That “legal but harmful” line is where the state stops chasing crime and starts refereeing opinion. The government gets to write the definition of harmful, and then the government gets to enforce it.

A change of direction was always likelier on digital ID than on the Online Safety Act, and today proved the point.

The enforcement machine that has already pushed platforms into restricting British users has been inherited whole and will probably be widened, while ministers keep insisting that none of this touches free speech.

More...