The miners and the LGBTQ+ community found common cause through shared oppression. The farmers, the doctors, the nurses, the bereaved — they all organise on the open internet. This is not a tech issue. It is a freedom issue. And freedom has always required people in the street. 25 April.

The final part of a four-part series. Part 1 traced who built the open web and who is now enclosing it. Part 2 examined what anonymous access gave people that nothing else could. Part 3 made the technical case: Digital ID is US-controlled infrastructure with British branding, and age verification has already failed in precisely the ways critics predicted. This part asks what we do about it — and tells you where to be on 25th April.

Here is the news that the government would prefer you not to take encouragement from.

The public has pushed back, and it has worked.

2.9M Petition signatures against mandatory Digital ID — one of the largest in parliamentary history[1]
13th Major U-turn by this Labour government — the mandatory element was dropped in January 2026[2]
£1.8B Estimated cost of the scheme — with the government refusing to confirm or deny the figure[3]

The government announced Digital ID in September 2025, framing it as mandatory for right-to-work checks. Within weeks, 2.9 million people had signed a petition opposing it. By January 2026, the mandatory element had been quietly dropped.[4] Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo called the scheme "intrusive, expensive and unnecessary," stating that "the case for the government now dropping digital IDs entirely is overwhelming."[5]

The climbdown on compulsion is not a victory. The government retains the ambition. The consultation is open until 5 May 2026. The infrastructure is being built. A battle won is not a war ended.

A Cross-Partisan Coalition — And Why That Matters

When conservatives, socialists, nationalists, liberals, and civil libertarians are standing in the same trench, you are not watching a partisan political dispute. You are watching a population recognise a threat to something fundamental, regardless of everything else that divides them.

Opposition on Record

  • Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch — party would oppose mandatory ID cards
  • Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — "an affront to our civil liberties"
  • Liberal Democrats (Ed Davey) — fighting it "tooth and nail"
  • Reform UK (Nigel Farage) — "firmly opposed"
  • SNP First Minister John Swinney — "people should go about their daily lives without such infringements"
  • Sinn Féin First Minister Michelle O'Neill — "an attack on the rights of Irish citizens" and the Good Friday Agreement
  • Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey — "infrastructure that can follow us, link our most sensitive information"

The Together Declaration — a grassroots movement with hundreds of thousands of supporters — has forced the climbdown on compulsion and continues to campaign for the project to be scrapped entirely, replaced with a Digital Bill of Rights. On this specific fight, they are right.[6] Big Brother Watch has maintained one of the most rigorous campaigns against the surveillance creep Digital ID represents.[7] The Liberal Democrats have committed to fighting it at every legislative stage.[8]

A Labour Government That Has Lost Its Way

There is a particular dishonesty in this moment that deserves naming.

A Labour Prime Minister is striking doctors. He has presided over thirteen major U-turns in less than two years. He introduced a Digital ID scheme framed around immigration enforcement — a Conservative framing adopted wholesale — and then abandoned its mandatory element when the public reacted with fury. He governs not from principle but from the path of least political resistance, discovering each position only when the alternative becomes untenable.

The party that built the NHS on the principle that care should be available to all, without condition, without a card to prove your right to it, is now designing the infrastructure that would require exactly such a card. Bevan would not recognise it. Most of the people who voted Labour in 2024 would not recognise it either.

We Have Been Here Before

In 1984, a group of LGBTQ+ activists in London drove to Wales.

Not because the mining communities had welcomed them. Not because those communities were sympathetic to gay rights — many were not. They drove because they recognised something on the television that people watching from a comfortable distance had not yet named. The same instruments. The same strategy. Police using powers beyond their legal remit. Communities being delegitimised before being suppressed. The state protecting itself by criminalising the people it found inconvenient.

The LGBTQ+ community had spent years learning — at considerable personal cost — exactly how power operates when it decides a community needs to be contained. Illegal raids on their pubs. Entrapment. Prosecution for acts between consenting adults. An establishment that looked the other way at abuse while prosecuting survival. They had learned it so thoroughly that when they watched it being applied to Welsh miners — different community, same playbook — they recognised it immediately.

So they drove to Wales. They brought what they had: money raised in clubs and pubs, the hard-won knowledge of how to organise when the institutions are against you, and the understanding that solidarity offered without conditions is the only kind worth anything.

The communities that received them were not immediately comfortable. That is part of the story, and an important part. Solidarity is not the same as agreement. It does not require you to share every value of the person standing beside you. It requires only that you recognise a common threat, and choose not to face it alone.

The payoff — documented at the end of the film Pride — is one of the most quietly devastating moments in recent British political storytelling.[9] The miners came to the Labour conference. Their union bloc voted for gay rights. Not because they had become different people. Because solidarity received honestly tends to become solidarity returned. The community that had been helped understood they had received something real, freely given, by people who had every reason to keep what they knew to themselves. They honoured it.

That is what this fight is.

The farmers who blocked roads with tractors organised on the open internet. The junior doctors who ran the longest strike in NHS history coordinated on the open internet. The disability campaigners, the bereaved families seeking public inquiries, the communities challenging planning decisions and the slow demolition of public services — all of them depend, for their ability to find each other and act together, on an internet that does not require them to identify themselves before they can use it.

Digital ID is not an engineer's issue. It is not a civil liberties abstraction for people with time to read about surveillance policy. It is the proposal to put a tollgate and an identity register on the mechanism through which every one of those communities organises. It is the proposal to make the coordination of peaceful opposition to power conditional on the prior approval of power.

It is easy to write this off as an internet geek problem. That is exactly what was said about the miners' strike by people in London who thought it was a Welsh problem. That is exactly what the LGBTQ+ community chose not to do.

We have a shared history of struggle. The eight-hour working day. Sick pay. Paid holidays. The right to organise. The right to vote. The right to exist openly in a society that had criminalised your existence. Every one of those victories was fought for by people who were told they were asking for too much, by institutions that preferred them unorganised and unheard. Every victory required the ability to communicate, to find common cause with people who did not obviously share your problem — but who recognised, when someone showed them, that power operates the same way on everyone it wants to suppress.

If we lose the ability to communicate freely and privately, we lose the capacity of future generations to maintain the freedoms our predecessors bled for. This fight is owed to the past. It is owed to the future. And it is owed to every community that is fighting right now — in this moment — a government that has forgotten who it serves, and that needs the open internet to win.

The internet was not built to serve governments. It was built by people who gave it away so that everyone could use it, to say what they needed to say, to find who they needed to find, to organise around what mattered to them — without asking permission from the people who would prefer they stayed quiet.

That is why you should be in the street on 25th April.

Not because you are an internet person.

Because you are a person.

Stand Up. Show Up. Be Counted.

Rally Against Digital ID

Saturday 25 April 2026 — 2pm to 5pm London  ·  Edinburgh  ·  Cardiff  ·  Belfast Register & Get Details One day. Four nations. One message.  ·  togetherdeclaration.org

Take Action — Further Resources

The people who built the web stayed up late and changed the world. The LGBTQ+ activists drove to Wales and changed it again. The least we can do is show up on a Saturday afternoon to defend what both of them gave us.

References and Sources

  1. Wikipedia: UK Digital ID — "A petition against mandatory digital ID cards reached 2.9 million signatures as of 23 October 2025." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Digital_ID
  2. Euro Weekly News (2026). UK Government U-turns on Digital ID Scheme — "the 13th significant U-turn since Labour entered government." euroweeklynews.com, 14 January 2026.
  3. The Register (2026). UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work — "the scheme which might have cost as much as £1.8 billion." theregister.com, 14 January 2026.
  4. House of Commons Library (2026). Digital ID in the UK — Research Briefing CBP-10369. "The mandatory element of the scheme was dropped following a political and public backlash." commonslibrary.parliament.uk
  5. The Register (2026). Op. cit. — quoting Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo: "intrusive, expensive and unnecessary."
  6. Together Declaration (2026). No to Digital ID — Yes to a Digital Bill of Rights. togetherdeclaration.org
  7. Big Brother Watch (2026). No2DigitalID Campaign. bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campaigns/no2digitalid/
  8. Liberal Democrats (2026). No to Digital ID. libdems.org.uk/nodigitalid
  9. Warwick, M. & Cole, J. (2014). Pride. BBC Films / Pathé. The events depicted — Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, 1984–85 — are documented historical record. The film's closing sequence, showing the mining communities returning solidarity at the 1985 Labour Party conference, is based on documented events.