Steady as she goes

+‘It didn’t cross his desk’ is becoming a bit of a catch phrase at the Crown Prosecution Service, in relation to high profile cases which Starmer ‘didn’t know anything about’ during his time as Director of Public Prosecutions. Mohamed Al-Fayed joins Jimmy Savile et al as yet another well connected individual who remained at large to continue their predatory behaviour. It is said that there wasn’t enough evidence to secure a conviction. The same may be said about Julian Assange, but Starmer (of course) took a different approach to that case. Now I wonder how many times something will not ‘cross his desk’ as PM. Perhaps he will emulate Tony Blair’s sofa approach to government so that it will always be literally but narrowly true that ‘it didn’t cross his desk.’ The words ‘pole,’ ‘barge’ and ‘toss’ come to mind. Yet again.
 
+Robert Jenrick MP, a Tory leadership hopeful and former immigration minister is doing his best to stir up fear (and loathing) about the small boat people crossing the Channel. It seems a lot of them are coming with ill-intent. Echoing Trumpist lines he said:

‘These are people our security services identified as known quantities, threats to our communities, with links to Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. And they waltzed right in.’ In addition to the terror suspects, Mr Jenrick claimed that around 1,000 migrants who arrived in small boats in 2022 and 2023 have been linked to criminality. ‘They all go on to watchlists of varying levels, but how can we expect our police officers and security services, already dealing with threats from home, to take on dozens or hundreds more cases? It’s an impossible task. And while they do a fantastic job, it’s inevitable some will slip through the net.’ (Evening Standard 22/9/24)

What ‘net’ is that I wonder? If these people can slip through the net, isn’t it time the net’s mesh size was reduced? Might this not be a challenge for Labour’s new border control Tsar, Martin Hewitt, CBE QPM? I think so. And what that means in practice will surely appeal to the authoritarian Keir Starmer. It may be an opportunity to re-investigate how to sell ID cards to a sceptical, if not suspicious public. It’s not as if things haven’t changed a lot since the 2000s when Tony Blair was keen to see ID cards introduced as the Global War On Terror was kicking off after 9/11. What’s changed most of course is the technology. Now as the tech revolution speeds up exponentially with artificial intelligence, so Blair’s enthusiasm for it spills over. His Institute for Global Change (TBI) is promoting AI as the saviour of the UK economy. He doesn’t want us to get left behind. This means introducing a new, user friendly form of ID—digital ID. This will envelop us all in a warm embrace, providing seamless access to all kinds of benefits. It could for example ameliorate the impact of another pandemic, as this snatch of TBI original digital ID-speak makes clear (sort of)-
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Of course your credential—which becomes your life—should only be revealed to the proper authority. Otherwise it’s access denied and you’ll be frozen out like when on an internet search you come up to a dead end 404 message. I don’t know to what extent Blair has influence over Starmer, there has after all been a little bit of semantic distancing going on. But when you look at the TBI website you can see that its intent is not merely to be a worthy one-of-the crowd think tank. It has no need to list its clients. It is unimaginable that it will not have considerable influence over the direction of this new government’s thinking, not least since it claims that its prognosis is that AI and its multiple applications will answer all of Rachel Reeves’ fiscal nightmares, almost within one term.

We hear less of the downsides. The Post Office Horizon project started when Blair was in office. Various NHS computerisation projects went nowhere. The roll-out of Universal Benefit left plenty of people starving. Perhaps AI will be called upon to heal itself as it goes on. And with digital ID will come greater state surveillance (Surveillance State by Josh Chin and Liza Linn, St Martin’s Press, New York 2022 is a good introduction to where this is all headed).

Perhaps Robert Jenrick can now sleep easy in his bed. The mesh of the net is certainly going to get tighter. Men with long black beards will be profiled to say the very least.

+Clearly I’m not at Labour Party conference this year. I’ll cope. Instead I can vicariously enjoy the event with my conference issue of the New Statesman, which is twice as thick as normal (no sarcasm intended). This is because, perhaps unintentionally the Staggers has provided an excellent guide to what’s really going on at conference this year through an abundance of advertorials, i.e. paid-for opinion pieces. One or two of these are provided by good causes, but the majority come from corporate outfits. Energy companies feature prominently, with building and finance (Blackrock, The City) getting a look in. We can be pretty sure that many of the outfits promoting their wares in the magazine are going all out in plush hotels in Liverpool to host receptions and dinners with invite-only lists of Labour’s new ministerial elite. The truly influential types probably don’t even bother with the New Statesman but will nevertheless infest the private dining facilities to make loving overtures to newby ministers waiting sweatily to be flattered. An enterprising journalist should be going round all the hotels each evening to look at the hotel reception guides to see which room is hosting which lobbying bash. And perhaps accidentally wandering into one or two. I’m sure they’d be made welcome.  

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