#digitalid

1 July was the deadline for Mexicans to register all of the estimated 158 million mobile phone pay-as-you-go SIM cards using their personal biometrics as identification.  Non-compliance meant the SIM card would be disconnected and unusable.

But the Mexican government's policy was defeated by millions of ordinary people who didn’t comply. There was no organised protest, no court cases. Millions just quietly carried on with their lives, Jane Murdoch writes.

By simply not complying, ordinary Mexicans forced one of the most ambitious biometric registration programmes in the world to retreat. At least for now.

Mexico Just Told 127 Million People: Scan Your Face, Or Lose Your Phone; Then, Quietly, They Backed Down

By Jane Murdoch, 1 July 2026

Governments rarely announce that they’re building a surveillance system.

They announce that they’re keeping you safe. They announce that they’re stopping criminals. They announce that it’s just a phone registration, or a traffic filter, or an age check, or a digital ID, and that if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

Mexico said all of those things. And then 127 million people quietly said no.

This is what happened.

Table of Contents

- Here’s What They Announced - And To Be Fair, The Mexican Government Has A Point - Here’s The Part Most People Don’t Know - Six Months In, Here’s What Actually Happened - And Then, The Government Backed Down - But There’s Something Else On The Horizon - Who This Really Affects - Why This Matters Wherever You Live - Sources - About the Author Here’s What They Announced

On 1 July 2026 (today), every mobile phone in Mexico that wasn’t linked to a real, named person whose identity the Mexican government could verify was due to be switched off.

Not some phones.  Every pay-as-you-go phone.  An estimated 158 million active mobile lines.  In a country of around 130 million people.

To keep their phone working, Mexican phone users had to register it using their CURP (Clave Única de Registro de Población) - pronounced “kurp” (Spanish for Unique Population Registry Code). Think of it a bit like a National Insurance number, but used for even more things, tax, healthcare, school enrolment, driving licences, benefits. It’s been around since 1996. Most Mexicans have one from birth. Without it, navigating daily life in Mexico is genuinely difficult. But the 2026 law takes this somewhere new. Registration doesn’t just require a CURP number. It requires biometric data.

Biometric data is physical information that is unique to you and you alone, and I want to explain this carefully, because many people think of it as just a fancy photo or moving your head in front of a screen. It’s much more than that.

Think of it this way. Your fingerprint. The precise shape of your face. The pattern of the iris in your eye, the coloured ring around your pupil (this is as unique as a fingerprint and just as permanent). These aren’t things you chose. They’re simply part of you. What makes biometric data fundamentally different from any other kind of personal information is this: If your password is stolen, you change your password. If your bank card details are stolen, you cancel the card and get a new one. But if your fingerprints, your facial map or your iris pattern are stolen or misused, you cannot change them. Not ever. They are permanent. Once that data exists somewhere, it exists forever.

Mexico is asking for a photograph, fingerprint scans and iris scans, all linked to each person’s CURP code and stored by their individual phone company.

The law also created something called a ‘Unified Identity Platform’, managed by Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior (the closest equivalent to our Home Office, the department responsible for domestic security, identity and internal affairs) and a Digital Transformation Agency. This platform connects the biometric CURP with the healthcare system, too.  In other words, the same system that knows their phone number will also know their medical history.

This isn’t quite the same as a single, unified digital ID (the kind that has been much discussed but not yet introduced in the UK). It’s something a little quieter, but in some ways more significant. A government identity number that is slowly becoming compulsory for more and more parts of everyday life in Mexico, a phone, tax affairs, social security, healthcare. Not all at once. Piece by piece, until life in Mexico without it becomes almost impossible.

And To Be Fair, The Mexican Government Has A Point

I always want to give you both sides. So, let’s start with the case for this, because it’s a genuine one.

Mexico has a serious, well-documented problem with extortion and kidnapping carried out by criminals using anonymous, untraceable phones. Before this law, anyone could walk into a petrol station, buy a SIM card, the small chip that connects a phone to a network, put it in a phone and make calls without giving anyone their name. Criminals and organised gangs used this to carry out kidnappings, extortion and fraud without being traceable, and this is well documented in Mexico.

The Mexican government’s official position, from their own press release:

“For the safety of all, every telephone number must be registered in the name of one person, in order to eliminate the anonymity that has allowed crime such as fraud or extortion.”

The Last American Vagabond, citing the official CRT press release, 25 June 2026

The Mexican government also points out that requiring ID to buy a SIM card is already common around the world; they claim 166 countries already do it. Independent research from the GSMA* puts the number somewhere between 90 and 157, depending on the year of the research.

(*A note on the GSMA (Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association), the international trade body that represents mobile phone network operators worldwide, with members in more than 220 countries. When the GSMA publishes research, it carries real authority because it represents the industry itself. And the GSMA statistics indicate that the Mexican government’s figure is on the high end.)

But the more important point is this: most of those countries simply ask for a name and a photo ID. What the Mexican government is asking for goes significantly further: facial scans, fingerprints and iris patterns, all stored by phone companies and linked to a government identity platform. Very few countries in the world currently require that level of biometric data just to own a phone. And the GSMA’s own research confirms there is no clear evidence that even basic SIM card registration has reduced crime anywhere it has been introduced. None.

Here’s The Part Most People Don’t Know

This is actually Mexico’s third attempt at this. The first two failed.

2008: The First Attempt

Mexico launched a phone registry called RENAUT, asking everyone to register their phone number with their national ID code. According to multiple verified sources, including CBS News, the database was hacked and the data sold on the black market, allegedly by or through corrupt government officials, though this was never proven in court, for as little as $500. Instead of helping catch criminals, it became what one source called “a shopping list for extortionists” who now had verified names and addresses linked to phone numbers. RENAUT was abandoned by 2012.

2021: The Second Attempt

Mexico tried again, this time asking for biometric data too, fingerprints and facial recognition, under a programme called PANAUT. Civil rights organisations, including R3D (the Network in Defence of Digital Rights), challenged it in court. On 25 April 2022, Mexico’s Supreme Court - the highest court in the country - ruled the law unconstitutional, finding it wasn’t proportionate given the scale of what was being asked of ordinary people and raising serious concerns about the government permanently holding everyone’s most sensitive physical data.

2026: The Third Attempt, Now

Rather than accept the answer, told no by the courts (on behalf of the people), the Mexican government redesigned the system. The Supreme Court had objected to one centralised government database. So, the 2026 system routes verification through individual phone companies instead checked against a system run by a different government agency. The outcome for ordinary people is the same. The legal structure is different.

Legal firm Hogan Lovells, which published a detailed briefing on the new guidelines, confirmed:

“The CRT has insisted that there will be no centralised database managed by the government. Each operator will be responsible for safeguarding its customers’ information and may only share it with authorities through a court order.”

Whether this genuinely addresses the Supreme Court’s concerns, or whether it simply moves the same data to a different shelf, is a question only the courts can ultimately answer.

Six Months In, Here’s What Actually Happened

The system went live on 9 January 2026. On that very first day, an independent cybersecurity journalist discovered that Telcel (Mexico’s biggest mobile network) had a serious problem with its registration system.

When people went online to register their phone, everything appeared to be working normally. But behind the scenes, anyone who simply typed in a phone number could access the complete personal details of whoever owned that line (their name, date of birth, national ID number, tax reference and email address). No password. No verification. Just a phone number. Security experts who examined what happened said personal data was left publicly accessible for up to 36 hours before anyone fixed it.

To be clear, the biometric data itself, the fingerprints and iris scans, was not exposed. But the personal information being submitted as part of the registration was. And the government didn’t tell anyone. No announcement, no apology, no breach notification. The only reason the public found out was because an independent journalist published what he had found.

The system was supposed to make people safer. This is what some of them said about the experience.

“They say it’s for security, but security for who? I mean, we’re always vulnerable. Our data is exposed everywhere.”—Mexico City resident, Azteca Noticias

One man who had “done everything right,” registered early, complied fully, told the same channel what happened next: “Ever since I linked it, I’ve been getting messages saying I made a deposit into some illegal account, telling me it’s my bank when, well, banks don’t text you like that. And honestly, I feel like they’re stealing your information even faster.”

The system was supposed to reduce crime. For him, it appears to have increased it.

By late May, journalists found phones already registered in other people’s names being sold openly on the streets of Mexico City, for the price of a pizza, about £8, which rather neatly answers the question of whether this stops criminals from having untraceable phones. It doesn’t. It just means they pay the price of a pizza for the privilege.

Meanwhile, R3D - the Network in Defence of Digital Rights - filed legal challenges against the law, arguing it creates “an unprecedented system of surveillance and social control,” giving authorities access to data about where people go, who they meet and what they do every day. Their spokesperson, José Flores, put it plainly:

“We as citizens have the right to be sceptical, and the government has an obligation to explain as fully as possible what the benefits are and what security measures are being taken to safeguard our personal information.”

One detail from R3D’s challenge that’s easy to overlook: soldiers, intelligence officers and law enforcement officials all have personal phones too. If their identity, home address and workplace are now linked to a registered phone number held in a company database, that creates its own risks in a country where organised crime has a well-documented history of infiltrating official institutions.

And Then, The Government Backed Down

By late May 2026, Carlos Slim - the Mexican billionaire, one of the wealthiest people on the planet and chairman of América Móvil, the parent company of Telcel - publicly called for the process to be reconsidered. The registration process, he said at his annual press conference on 26 May, was “very complicated” and should be “reestudiada” (restudied). When the country’s most powerful businessman and the majority of its population are saying the same thing, something has clearly gone wrong.

The deadline was 1 July 2026 (today). For months, Mexico’s Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the CRT (Comisión Reguladora de Telecomunicaciones), the government body responsible for regulating Mexico’s phone and internet industry, had insisted the deadline was non-negotiable.

By late June, approximately only 49.5 million of an estimated 158 million active lines had been registered, around 31%.

Millions of ordinary people simply hadn’t complied. Not through organised protest. Not through court cases. Just by quietly carrying on with their lives.

On Thursday, 25 June, just days before today’s deadline , the CRT announced an extension. Importantly, contract phone users (people who pay a monthly bill) no longer need to register at all. Only pay-as-you-go lines still need to comply. The new staggered deadline for those lines runs from August to December 2026, based on the last digit of the phone number.

The government blinked. Millions of ordinary people, not by marching or organising, just by carrying on with their lives, forced one of the most ambitious biometric registration programmes in the world to retreat. At least for now.

But There’s Something Else On The Horizon

While all of this has been happening, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a plan to end cash payments at petrol stations and toll roads, making digital payment compulsory.

“Our goal is that this year we make it mandatory to pay for gasoline and toll booths digitally,” President Sheinbaum said in a speech in March 2026.

This means payment by bank card, mobile payment app, or digital wallet, methods that require a bank account.

This matters because roughly half of Mexican adults do not have a bank account.  For them, a cash ban isn’t an inconvenience.  It’s an exclusion.

I mention this because it’s part of the same direction of travel. A phone linked to your identity. Healthcare linked to your identity. And now purchases linked to your identity, too. Each step, individually, sounds reasonable. Together, they paint a picture worth paying attention to.

Who This Really Affects

Those who rely most heavily on anonymous phones include journalists, domestic violence survivors and ordinary people seeking safety. For someone fleeing an abusive partner, an anonymous phone isn’t a loophole. It’s a lifeline. It’s how you ask for help without that call being traceable to someone who shouldn’t see it.

Before I close, I want to say something about the word “activist,” because I think it deserves a moment.

In some people’s minds, an “activist” is a troublemaker. Someone who makes noise. Someone who should probably just get on with things. But in practice, an activist is simply someone who speaks publicly about something they believe matters.  A parent campaigning for safer roads near a school. A journalist investigating corruption. A person documenting the impact of a planning decision on their community. Many people who would never call themselves activists are, by any reasonable definition, exactly that.

The right to speak, to organise and to hold power to account is one of the things that distinguishes a democracy from something else. When surveillance systems make that harder, when people can’t make an anonymous call, send a private message or meet someone without their movements being logged, that right quietly shrinks.

This isn’t theoretical for me. It’s something I think about every time I read about systems that remove anonymity in the name of safety. Because sometimes those two things, safety and anonymity, aren’t opposites. Sometimes anonymity is the safety.

Why This Matters Wherever You Live

I’m not writing this to tell you Mexico is right or wrong. I genuinely think there’s a real problem the Mexican government is trying to solve, and a real cost to the way they’re trying to solve it.

What I want you to notice is the shape of the story.

A government identifies a real problem.  It proposes a solution that requires every phone user, not just those suspected of any wrongdoing, but every single person, to permanently hand over their most personal physical data.  That data gets breached almost immediately.  A black-market workaround appears within months, for the price of a pizza (about £8).  And the people the system actually inconveniences most aren’t the criminals (who simply buy a pre-registered SIM from someone on the street).  They’re ordinary people, journalists, domestic violence survivors and anyone who simply needs to remain safe and values the privacy that makes that possible.  And then, because enough ordinary people simply didn’t go along with it, the deadline moved.

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.

He floated making YouTube and Facebook delete offensive material within a set time once alerted, and changing libel law so suing an online publisher got easier. He even wanted to sound out the incoming Obama administration about international rules for English-language websites. Age gating, takedown clocks, regulator muscle aimed at platforms, it is all sitting there in 2008, waiting for the technology to catch up.

The plans died, and the body that killed them was Ofcom, which called them undesirable and unworkable online. This was back when the speech regulator was more level-headed. The regulator that told Burnham in 2008 that broadcast rules could not be stretched over the internet is the regulator now enforcing the Online Safety Act. The intellectual weight at Ofcom has obviously severely declined.

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.

The purdah idea has a name attached to it. Lucy Powell has argued that social media platforms should face something close to the rules that restrict broadcasters during election campaigns. Powell was elected deputy leader by the membership, which means Burnham cannot remove her, and she is close to him. The same government is separately pushing to lock legacy media outlets into people’s feeds. Put those together and the shape is familiar: the state deciding which voices get carried during an election and which get turned down.

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.

Here is where the flattering headline about Burnham falls apart on contact. He confirmed before taking office that Starmer’s digital ID programme for all adults is being scrapped, with the money redirected to the cost of living and the whole thing badged as a reset of priorities.

The Office for Budget Responsibility had costed the programme at £1.8 ($2.42) billion over three years, a figure Downing Street rejected without offering one of its own.

Read on its own, that sounds like a victory for anyone who values privacy.

That reading collapses for two reasons. The objection was never to identity infrastructure as a principle. Asked in September 2025 whether he backed Starmer’s digital ID plans, Burnham said “not now,” and the reason he gave was tactical.

He pointed back to 2005 to 2010, warning of an opportunity cost situation where something consumes a huge amount of time and does not come through, exactly as the last ID card scheme consumed a lot of airtime and never materialised. That is a complaint about political return on investment, not a commitment to civil liberties.

This is the same man who sold compulsory ID cards as a major breakthrough and who still says the case for them was clear.

Mandatory right-to-work checks had already been softened to voluntary before he arrived, which makes the announcement partly a decision to stop paying for something that had already lost its purpose.

And killing a work-linked BritCard sits a very long way from opposing ID to use the internet. Burnham’s team confirmed he intends to press ahead with plans to demand everyone pass digital ID checks to post on social media. His spokesperson said he is “committed to keeping kids safe online, and has been vocal in his support of age restrictions for kids using social media.”

Follow that logic. A government can drop the digital ID card, bank the applause, build the far more consequential thing, an identity gate between you and your ability to speak online, and sell the swap as a retreat.

There is no way to enforce a ban on under-16s without checking the age of everyone else, and no way to check age at that scale without checking identity. The card you were not going to carry becomes the login you cannot avoid.

Age checks and social media IDs hand more of your privacy away than a right-to-work card ever would, because they bolt your name to what you say rather than to where you work.

So, take the win, but count it properly. What was scrapped is a £1.8 billion database. What was kept is the part that touches speech. The infrastructure of the digital ID scheme is still being built, and none of it ever depended on the card.

GOV.UK One Login isn’t going away. Digital driving licenses are coming, and they’ll be used to grant access to social media. Police are getting access to driving license records with facial recognition. Mandatory Companies House identity verification stays. The NHS Logins and the Single Patient Record are coming.

Assemble that list and you have a national identity system. It is arriving one service at a time instead of in one bill, which is precisely why it never gets a launch announcement to celebrate or a cancellation to campaign against.

Then there is the hire. On 16 July, Burnham appointed Matthew McGregor as his head of political strategy in No 10, and the appointment tells you something concrete, provided you do not oversell it.

Start with the facts. McGregor was Director of Campaigns and Communications at Hope Not Hate and remained a listed director there until 29 April 2022, then ran 38 Degrees as chief executive until this month.

Hope Not Hate is not a neutral party in the fight over online speech. The organisation has argued, out loud and often, that deplatforming works and platforms should be pressured into removing content. It has endorsed deplatforming as a tactic in its own material, which says tech companies had to be shamed into changing their moderation policies and then shamed again into enforcing them, and that the pressure to remove content comes from governments, journalists, researchers and campaigners.

Install a former campaign director from that outfit at the heart of political strategy, and you learn how the people around the prime minister see the world. Content removal and pressure on platforms are treated as good governance rather than a danger to speech.

One detail is hard to read as anything other than what it looks like. Within a day of the appointment being reported, McGregor deleted his X account.

Here are the honest caveats, because the case gets stronger when it stops reaching. McGregor’s own public record is campaigns, communications and, lately, tax, not content policy. His job was messaging.

There is no evidence in front of me that he personally ran online-censorship campaigns, and the clearest examples of Hope Not Hate pushing for removals came after he had left. But what it says is that Burnham has drawn his inner strategy team from the campaigning world, Hope Not Hate, which treats organised pressure to delete online speech as legitimate and effective. The people who see deplatforming as a feature now sit closer to power than the people who see it as a fault.

So, the signal from Burnham is not reassuring. He believes in regulating speech, he has the paper trail to prove it and he inherits an enforcement machine he shows no interest in dismantling while people lean on him to extend it into lawful speech.

His one privacy credential dissolves the moment you look at it, a scrapped ID card, while the more speech-relevant version, ID and age checks to post, goes ahead.

From May 2005 to May 2006, Andy Burnham was a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Home Office in Tony Blair’s government.

At that time, he pushed for digital IDs to be imposed on the population.  On the campaign trail, he said that it was not the right time for Starmer to introduce digital IDs.  Now, he’s saying that methods to ban under-16s need to be “urgently” put in place.

Any method used to ban under-16s from online content is the first step in imposing digital IDs.

In May, before the by-election in Makerfield, The Register reported:

The Greater Manchester mayor told a session at the UK's Labour party conference in Manchester last autumn that he opposed digital ID given the problems the previous Labour government he had served in had experienced with ID cards.

“I think there’s a risk of an opportunity cost situation here, where something can consume a huge amount of time and actually doesn’t come through,” he said.  “And that will be the lesson about 2005 to 2010 Parliament; it consumed a lot of air time and it didn’t actually materialise.”

ID cards did actually materialise – with 13,200 produced before the scheme was scrapped. In fact, the Home Office used Manchester as a testing ground for the scheme. Burnham helped to sell it when he was a Home Office minister in 2005-6, telling the BBC that compulsory national ID cards would be “a major breakthrough” in tackling identity fraud.

… former MP Josh Simons stood down to provide Burnham with the chance of returning to Parliament and then challenging Starmer as Labour leader and UK prime minister.

Until February, Simons was the minister responsible for Starmer’s digital ID plans. He resigned after his decision to commission a probe into journalists who had written critical articles about the think tank he ran, Labour Together. 

Digital ID is also opposed by other parties, including Reform, so dropping it would remove a point of difference and could tempt some voters back to Labour. On the other hand many Labour MPs like the policy.

Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer, The Register, 22 May 2026

The title of the Register’s article indicates that Burnham will not introduce digital IDs.  The Telegraph’s article titled ‘Burnham rejects digital ID cards in latest split with Starmer’ gives the same impression.  However, the articles’ titles are misleading. As The Telegraph wrote, “the Mayor of Greater Manchester said he did not think it was the right time for the Prime Minister to introduce the digital IDs.”  This is not a rejection of digital IDs.

Read: Burnham: Digital ID would be ‘waste of time’, The Telegraph, 29 September 2025

Regardless of what Burnham did or didn’t say, or what impression he gave, we must recall that Burnham said this at a Labour Party conference during a time when rumours were swirling that he had his eye on becoming the Labour Party leader, and so the next Prime Minister, and was using the conference to secretly build support for his plan from attendees: 

The figure of Andy Burnham is looming large over Liverpool as Labour MPs prepare to gather in Merseyside this weekend for their annual party conference.

“Rather than dismiss speculation that he wants to replace Keir Starmer, the Mayor of Greater Manchester's pre-conference interventions have fuelled claims that he wants to swap the northwest of England for Westminster.

Speaking on the Political Currency podcast this week, former Labour Cabinet minister Ed Balls said Burnham "is going out to build up and provoke massive speculation."

Andy Burnham Casts A Shadow Over Labour Party Conference, Politics Home, 26 September 2025

It’s commonplace for politicians to lie to the public. Burnham is one of those politicians who will say anything to gain support and votes, while acting out the opposite.  What Burnham says on the campaign trail to win votes and what Burnham does when he’s in office are two different things.

And then there’s the doublespeak and/or Globalese that propagandists employ.

Andy Burnham has committed to enforcing a strict social media ban for users under the age of 16, under the guise of “online safety.”  And he wants “urgency” in its delivery. “He knows this ban is a critical first step to keeping kids safe online,” a spokeswoman for Burnham told The Mirror.

Banning under-16s is not, nor has it ever been, about online safety or “keeping kids safe online.” Whatever method any government uses to ban or restrict under-16’s access to any online content is a critical first step toward a digital ID for everyone.  In short, what is commonly referred to as age verification is Globalese for digital ID.

Related: New Zealand: Any method to ban under-16s from social media will drift into digital IDs for everyone

Big Brother Watch currently has an email campaign to stop the Labour Party’s plans to introduce digital IDs.  In the video below, they explain why we should email Burnham and tell him why we do not want a society controlled by digital IDs.