I remember the first time I slipped out of a photo.
A cheap flash went off in a Dalston basement and somehow I wasn’t there — just a smear of light, a shoulder, a ghost.
For a second, it felt like liberation.
To be unseen was power.
Now the British government wants to end that possibility.
They call it the Digital Identity Programme, but everyone’s already nicknaming it the BritCard. A tidy app that proves who you are, where you’re from, and what you’re allowed to do — work, rent, vote, exist. They say it’ll make life simpler: no more paperwork, less fraud, more “security.”
But simplicity is the most seductive lie in politics.
The proposed BritCard ties biometric data fingerprints, facial recognition, and verified credentials into a single digital identity. By 2029, it’ll be mandatory for the right-to-work checks that every employer must run. Everything else, they insist, is “voluntary.”
That word does heavy lifting.
Voluntary like CCTV.
Voluntary like terms and conditions nobody reads.
You’ll need it because everyone else has it, because the system will quietly close its doors to those who don’t. That’s not choice. That’s coercion with better UX design.
When the scheme leaked into headlines, the internet did what it does best: it imagined the worst. Memes, conspiracies, half-truths.
Suddenly, the name Euan Blair, son of Tony Blair, started circulating as the man supposedly “running” the digital-ID rollout.
Spoiler – He wasn’t.
His company, Multiverse, publicly denied involvement. The government confirmed it. But the rumour stuck anyway, because it felt possible.
Why wouldn’t we believe it? Tony Blair was the prime minister who first tried to launch a national ID card in 2006, a project scrapped four years later amid fears of surveillance creep. Now his son runs an education-tech firm specialising in digital credentials and data skills. The optics are almost erotic: legacy power trying to slip back in through a new digital hole.
The confusion reveals something essential not about Euan Blair, but about trust.
We no longer trust that data stays where we put it, that power knows when to stop touching us.
An ID card sounds bureaucratic. But what it really governs is the body.
Every biometric scan is a moment of consent the state takes for granted: your fingerprint, your face, your gait pattern. Once digitised, you can’t revoke them. You become legible to the machine, stripped of mystery.
The state tells you it’s for your safety. But safety is just control in a nicer font.
Ask sex workers whose online identities were erased by “safety” algorithms. Ask migrants whose “proof” of existence gets lost in databases. Ask anyone who’s ever been doxxed how it feels when visibility turns to exposure.
Anonymity isn’t criminal; it’s erotic. It’s the right to choose when and how you’re seen.
To strip that away is to outlaw seduction itself.
There’s a peculiar arousal in bureaucracy, the thrill of being catalogued, filed, known. Governments and corporations share that fetish. They call it efficiency, but it’s voyeurism at scale.
What the BritCard really sells is intimacy: a promise that the system knows you. It’s the same intimacy your phone promises, your algorithmic feed, your porn recommendations. “Personalisation” is surveillance with a lube job.
And like any bad dom, the state insists it’s for your own good.
We’ve seen this before. India’s Aadhaar programme linked over a billion people’s fingerprints and iris scans to welfare access then leaked citizen data by the millions. Estonia’s celebrated e-ID system suffered hacks. Every promise of perfect digital control becomes an invitation to breach it.
Britain’s new plan claims to learn from those mistakes. But it’s the same desire wearing a different suit: the fantasy of total knowledge.
Refusing the BritCard won’t stop the database. But resistance is sometimes symbolic, the small rebellion of staying partially unreadable.
Maybe that means lobbying for decentralised identity tech. Maybe it means paying cash when you can. Maybe it’s as simple as masking your webcam and remembering that the right to disappear is holy.
Desire needs darkness. Pleasure needs privacy. Without shadow, nothing shines.
They say the new IDs will make Britain modern. Maybe.
But modernity has always been obsessed with the body. Counting it, classifying it, owning it.
The question isn’t whether Euan Blair’s company is running the scheme.
The question is why we believed he could be.
Because power looks hereditary. Because data smells like dynasty. Because we’ve been taught that someone, somewhere, always gets to keep the keys to your body.
I remember that flash in the basement, the photo where I wasn’t there.
Maybe freedom isn’t a card at all. Maybe it’s the right not to appear.
