ID cards are the perfect policy for Starmer's reheated Blairism

‘The Global Progress Action Summit’ is exactly the sort of event Keir Starmer loves. It’s a sort of Blairite seance, where all the ghouls of a dead liberal order are summoned and live again to spend 24 hours doing their favourite thing: bloviating. It’s a pretty cast-iron rule that an organisation with two words for physical movement in its title will in fact be an impotent talking shop.

It was to this appalling gathering that Sir Keir – a man who famously prefers Davos to Westminster – had trotted to announce the introduction of ID cards. This little piggy had gone wee wee wee all the way to his spiritual home; a soulless conference centre, to unveil a policy he’d long been gagging for. ID cards are Tony Blair’s unfinished business, and so it is only appropriate that Starmer’s government