The two party system is over but Trevor Fisher argues digital ID cards and tacking to the right on immigration show Labour is failing to confront the Reform danger
The Labour conference sought to evade the Twentieth Century’s dominant shift away from the disintegration of the party system. While the rise of Reform UK dominated, this is not merely a replacement of the old two party system by a new one. Keir Starmer was mistaken in thinking verbal assaults on Nigel Farage would do (or banning Owen Jones the left wing journalist)– attacking individuals is a mistake. While Labour has to understand the Reform problem, which it does not do, the bigger issue is the emergence of a multi party system.
From the 1900 election, when 99% of a male upper class electorate voted Tory or Liberal (or Labour in two constituencies) to the 2005 election when the comparable figure was 95%, the long term picture was still a two and a half party system despite the shift to an extension of the franchise. But in 2010 10% of the vote went to minority parties – 920,000 to UKIP, 564,000 for the BNP and 491,000 for the SNP. 2015 saw 23% of the vote cast for parties other than the big three, including 3.86m for UKIP, 1.45M for the SNP and 1.15m for the Greens. 2017 saw a temporary return to Labour and Conservative, despite the 2016 Referendum, but 2019 and 2024 and the European elections – while the latter existed – underlined the weakness of the Tory and Labour Parties, though this has not been understood in Number 10.
It has to be understood that the Labour Party did not WIN the 2024 election and does not have a “mandate” – as the new General Secretary of the Fabian Society argued, though he was only saying what the front bench clearly thought. Others, wiser, including Neil Kinnock, talked of a lake a mile wide and two inches deep. The big winner was not Labour or the Liberals, with record numbers of MPs, but the Reform contingent of 4 (plus a victory in a by election in a formerly “safe” Labour seat, where Reform was aided by a suicidal attack by Tony Blair on the key Green policy, just what Reform needed to gain a seat by half a dozen votes and reinforce their genuine landslide ability). The upsurge of votes had already given Reform hundreds of council seats and over a dozen councils.
The result of the 2024 election, with 411 MPs elected for Labour, cemented for a time Keir Starmer’s belief that he had a ten-year time in power ahead of him and could do pretty much what he wanted to do. This has slowly been undermined as parliamentary opposition has chipped away at the support for austerity-like policies and the ability to maintain genuine opposition to Farage-like policies on immigration. While Starmer opposed the Reform policy – announced by Farage – of abolishing the right to stay for immigrants who had been given permission to settle, this was immediately contradicted by Labour spokespeople who seemed to propose the deadline for permanent settlement be extended from five years to ten, with increased difficulty of test requirements, for example, the ability to master spoken English. The right of students to visit the UK for study is also being touted, with the ability to bring families reduced, continuing the policy expansion of the Conservatives, who have increasingly reduced the right to stay despite the relative ease of ensuring that students, particularly those with families, do not overstay their welcome.
However, the most alarming case of a poorly thought-out and contradictory policy is that over digital ID cards.
Digital ID cards
The proposal to make mandatory Digital ID cards for the whole British population was resurrected primarily by the Blairite Tony Blair Institute, backed by the increasingly Blairite Labour Together faction of Morgan McSweeney. The original New Labour ID card system was created in 2006 by Gordon Brown, but after being a very expensive product for a limited number, there was no opposition to abandoning the scheme by the incoming Liberal-Tory coalition government. It is surprising that the idea has returned when the lesson of the first scheme is that a mandatory scheme has to have a broad consensus of support. The opposition of most party politicians – joined by Andy Burnham at the 2025 Conference – shows there is no such consensus.
It is impossible to see how it is affordable when the cost would be enormous, and this is not a government flush with cash. While Burnham had a poor conference, the lack of any reference to ID Cards in Starmer’s speech suggests that the idea is on the back burner. Why a rejigged reset of a failed policy of the Brown era is offered for a very different answer to a completely different issue, that of asylum seekers, says more about Starmer’s failure to think issues through than anything else.
While a simple opposition to the idea of digital ID cards is easy to adopt, it would not solve any of Labour’s problems. There is an increasingly toxic debate about proving identity for newly arrived citizens, which is currently being won by Reform. Ordering all citizens to have a card is unviable, while giving Reform the cutting edge in outbidding Labour on requirements that they will always appear tougher is stupid.
The sensible way forward, at low cost, is to make ID cards – non-digital and non-encumbered by a race to the bottom, involving requirements to be earned – a way for newly arrived and legally proven citizens to establish their right to live in the UK. That is a way to challenge the Reform UK stigmatisation agenda that newly qualified citizens have to play Russian roulette with two parties racing to the bottom to push migrants out on a limb. The Tory right scrapped ID cards in 2011, leaving a hole which both Reform and Labour are seeking to fill in. Non-digital ID cards can be firmly designed to prove identity, for example, including a fingerprint. The Labour government can extract itself from the Digital ID swamp by confining ID cards in practice to newly arrived citizens who have no other way to prove identity. Further, it would put Reform UK and those of similar views in an extremist ghetto by showing it aims to exclude the newly arrived citizen from settling in Britain.
The author wishes to thank David Cummings for the historical material in this piece.