Sky Views: Why manifesto pledge for digital state should worry you

Sky Views: Why manifesto pledge for digital state should worry you

By Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent

Traditionally, during a general election campaign, the Conservatives champion a smaller state, Labour a larger one.

For the digital realm, though, it's the opposite.

Labour seems laid-back and laissez-faire about technology, not mentioning it much in their manifesto.

The Tories, though, want to create a large and powerful digital state. It's an ambitious, thought-through plan - and a worrying one.


It all seems perfectly sensible, to begin with.

Their 'digital charter', in their manifesto, includes proposals for people "to have one single, common and safe way of verifying themselves to all parts of government" by 2020.

Great! No more faffing around with different ID numbers for different government departments, or waiting on letters through the post.

The manifesto continues: "We will also make this platform more widely available, so that people can safely verify their identity to access non-government services such as banking."

Which also sounds reasonable. Until you realise that they're talking about a government-created ID program (called Verify) to control access to commercial websites.

Non-government services may include boring, vital things like banking. But they could be extended to any category, from newspapers to social networks.

Maybe that's a leap. Manifestos are of course wish lists. But if you combine this particular wish with existing, recently passed legislation, the state would be handed a huge amount of digital control over all of us.

It's another piece of recent legislation. In the dying days of April, the Digital Economy Act was rushed into law ahead of the General Election.

One of its less clever ideas was the state-level blocking of pornographic websites that don't verify the age of users. They'd be added to a blacklist and would never arrive on our shores.

'Verify' would be the obvious mechanism for this verification process. Sign up to that, the government will say, and you can operate in the UK.

Who cares? It's just a problem for one-handed typists, you might object. Onanism is a filthy habit in any case.

Manifestos are of course wish lists. But if you combine this particular wish with existing, recently-passed legislation, the state would be handed a huge amount of digital control over all of us.

But the Conservative manifesto makes clear its desire to extend its reach into all industries - chat forums, app stores, content sites and especially social networks.

"We will make clear the responsibility of platforms to enable the reporting of inappropriate, bullying, harmful or illegal content, with take-down on a comply-or-explain basis."

Illegal, sure. But how is the government defining 'inappropriate' here? And why are they intervening as censor?

And the manifesto goes further. It proposes a new data protection law, to allow "safe, flexible and dynamic use of data".

Again, sounds great. But hang on: what's wrong with the old law - so inflexible, so undynamic?

Perhaps it's that it doesn't allow people's information to be shared without their explicit consent.

Coincidentally, the Digital Economy Act also included plans for government to share your data across different departments. So the Department of Work and Pensions can give your records to HMRC, say, and vice versa.

And your data, demanded by the government, might also be shared with private companies - anyone "providing services to a public authority". The promised public safeguards have yet to be made, um, public.

Combine that with the Investigatory Powers Act, or so-called Snoopers' Charter, only made law last November. Thanks to the IPA, government now has the power to access your entire internet history over the last year, without a warrant.

More data, happy days.

The Conservatives want to regulate the internet more, which isn't a bad idea itself.

But they want to put government right in the middle of it, mediating our access to sites and apps, and internet companies' access to us.

The cliche labels of police state or nanny state don't quite fit this: it's nastier than nanny, not quite as totalitarian as police.

It might end up more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where the malevolent Nurse Ratched - "Big Nurse", as she's called - controls everything on the psychiatric ward. She knows everything and dispenses her drugs. We're her docile, bullied patients.

The Conservative manifesto represents a dramatic shift in the relationship between individual and government, as it's mediated online.

That's rather a big question, as fundamental as the familiar arguments over the size of the offline state.

But as the ballot approaches, it's not one we're asking. The Big Nurse state knows best.

Sky Views is a new series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every weekday morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Katie Stallard: A dark day for gay rights in Indonesia