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No to Digital ID.

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Thank You for an Incredible 2025 – Let’s Junk This Dystopian Nightmare in 2026!

As we close out 2025, the No to Digital ID campaign wants to extend our deepest thanks to every single one of you.

Launched right here on this blog just months ago, your contributions, retweets, shares, and invaluable insights have powered everything we’ve achieved this year. Without your unwavering support, we wouldn’t be where we are today – stronger, louder, and closer than ever to victory.

Our Key Achievements This Year

Thanks to you and thousands like you, we’ve hit remarkable milestones in our fight against Digital ID:

  • 40,000 followers on X (@NoToDigitalID)
  • 100,000 leaflets delivered across the country
  • Endorsements from leaders of UK parties (except Labour!) and several US Senators

We’ve interviewed Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Robert Jenrick. Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott have publicly backed us. Even US Senators are now quoting our campaign in Congress.

We’ve put up billboards across London and Edinburgh and reached towns the Westminster bubble forgot.

We are the only truly non-partisan campaign in Britain right now — and with your help, we are winning.

The government may try one final push, but together we have the momentum to stop Digital ID once and for all in 2026.

Let’s Finish the Job in the New Year

We now have a genuine chance to kill this dystopian nightmare for good — your continued support makes all the difference.

We know it’s the holiday season and times are tough, but even a small contribution will help us hit the ground running in January.

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No staff, no salaries — we’re all volunteers.

Independent writing. No permission asked.

I’ve spent the last 18 years writing frankly, freely and without apology — a practice that’s becoming rarer in Britain. As far back as 2016 more than 3,300 people were detained or questioned over online posts, and recent coverage shows thousands more arrests under the Communications Act and Malicious Communications Act. Thoughtcrime is no longer fiction; it’s becoming policy. Even very recently, Lucy Connolly was sentenced after a post calling for mass deportations — her case has become a flashpoint in the debate over where free speech ends and criminality begins. (Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, The Guardian)

If my work has helped you make sense of the madness, or offered straight talk in a culture of cowardice, please consider donating. £2, £10, £25,000 — whatever it’s worth to you — helps me keep doing what the censors and bureaucrats would rather I didn’t: think independently and write without asking permission.

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To understand The English

Or, Britons, to taste:

The Zetland estates were acquired in the 18th century by Sir Lawrence Dundas, scion of a long-established Scots family, who became the chief merchant-adventurer of his day. Having made a fortune supplying bread and forage to allied troops in Germany during the Seven Years’ War, he bought swathes of land in Sligo, Roscommon, Fife, Stirlingshire, Clackmannanshire, Orkney, Shetland, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire, where Aske Hall, near Richmond, remains the family seat.
…
Dubbed “the Nabob of the North”, Dundas became among the country’s largest landowners, but despite his best endeavours he never obtained a peerage – he was a mere baronet by the time he died in 1781.

His son, though, was made Baron Dundas in 1794, his grandson rose to Earl of Zetland (an ancient variant of Shetland), and the 3rd earl became a marquess in 1892.

Spivvy lad* becomes vastly wealthy.

But he does not become a Lord, ho no, merely a Bt. The son becomes a Lord, the grandson an Earl and the gg grandson a Marquess having been a government minister and all that.

You’re not a real nob until the money has matured, see?

*You do not make a fortune out of military logistics without being spivvy.

This is very worrying indeed

John Naughton talks of AI swarms and the like:

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So they’ve recreated standard lefty journalism then.

But I think that train’s left the station. Fooled once, twice etc. We all know the public information sources are polluted. Thus a change in who produces them is unlikely to shift that belief.

Not sure I read this right but

Just to be careful about it. Allegedly a software executive got the clap from a bird organised for him by a disgraced financier. Which could, you know, explain the ex-wife’s rage etc.

Ah, a development. The story is – hotly denied – that the s/ware guy then tried to slip his wife antibiotics without her knowledge in order to…..hotly, hotly, denied.

Well, yes, sorta

Thursday’s arrests of Lemon and Georgia Fort, an independent journalist – like the recent raid on Hannah Natanson, the Washington Post reporter – demonstrate the administration’s lawless crusade against routine journalism. In normal times the expectation is that even when a journalist’s conduct might technically fit the legal elements of a crime – jaywalking to get footage of a protest, for example – prosecutors will exercise their discretion and judgment to not apply the law in a manner that chills the free press.

That is, journalists are above the law. But it’s above some laws, not all of them. And it’s a privilege, not a right, to be above those they are.

I’ve not bothered to find out what Lemon’s alleged to have done nor why that’s different or not different. Why would I bother? For my working assumption is that as his reputation deflates to it’s proper position there’s been a specific attempt to gain a new one. After all, the NGO network of speeches on how I were oppressed is a perfectly profitable one even if not quite as fun as being a lauded reporter.

Just some details

More than 200 people were killed this week in a collapse at the Rubaya coltan mine in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Lumumba Kambere Muyisa, a spokesperson for the rebel-appointed governor of the province where the mine is located, told Reuters on Friday.

Rubaya produces about 15% of the world’s coltan, which is processed into tantalum – a heat-resistant metal that is in high demand by makers of mobile phones, computers, aerospace components and gas turbines. The site, where local people dig manually for a few dollars a day, has been under the control of the M23 rebel group since 2024.

It’s not “a mine”. It’s a whole wide area where people are digging holes with shovels by hand. It’s thus not one specific collapse, it’s a number of collapses over the area.

15% of world production? Could be, could be – if we include the whole wider area as well. The BBC seems to think different:

The swathe of golden scarred earth they mine is found in the sprawling, lush Masisi Hills of North Kivu province – around 60km (37 miles) north-west of the city of Goma – and holds 15% of the world’s coltan supply and half of the DR Congo’s total deposits.

Not that I’d really trust that. No one’s surveyed Congo with any accuracy, not since tantalum became a popular and useful metal at least. No one knows what the deposits are that is.

As to what’s really going on here this is shit poor people making a few $ a day. This is what mining is like in the absence of capital – and capitalists.

Wonder if I can guess the reasoning here?

From a PR email:

Paris – At a time when the climate crisis has never been more urgent, the French Senate yesterday adopted a bill to revive oil and gas extraction in French overseas territories, in an unprecedented move to dismantle a cornerstone of French climate policy. The proposal tramples on the legacy of the landmark 2017 Hulot Law, which prohibits the granting of new licenses for the exploration of oil and gas and mandates a complete end to all oil and gas extraction on French soil, including overseas territories, by 2040.

At odds with scientific evidence and the opinion of the International Court of Justice on the obligations of States with regard to climate change, this decision is an insult to frontline communities who bear the brunt of climate impacts. At a time when every tenth of a degree counts, the bill severely undermines the credibility of France’s climate leadership.

Fanny Petitbon, 350.org France Country Manager said:

“France is shattering its international credibility.

Yeah, like Frogs are credible, right?

But, anyway, why?

French Guiana has significant, largely untapped offshore oil potential within the Guyana-Suriname Basin, with estimates suggesting over 15 billion barrels of undiscovered resources. Despite this, environmental regulations, including a French ban on new exploration/production licenses, and previous project cancellations have stalled development, leaving the territory without active production while neighboring nations boom.

Oh, right.

Glorious, seriously

So Spud gives us an overview of the pensions system:

These were once common. They were normal in big business as well as in government, but business, as I will note in a moment, has now retreated from them. They are now almost only found in the state sector:  the NHS, teachers, local government, and the civil service, plus the armed forces, all enjoy pensions of this sort.   Now, these are generally safe. They’re not entirely risk-free, and if you have a defined benefit pension from a private sector employer, that is definitely not risk-free because, of course, the employer could go bust and there might be funds owing to the pension fund at the time that they did so, and that can prejudice future payments as some people have found for their costs, albeit the government has set up a fund to try and help people in that situation. But the point is, this overall is a great pension arrangement, but fewer and fewer people are enjoying it.

So what are they getting instead? Well, because businesses realised how expensive defined benefit pensions were, they basically walked away from them.

They walked away because of tax changes – the end of the pension credit for example – and the insistence by Brown that – for regulatory reasons, of course of course – they invest in Gilts at those lovely 1% interest rates.

You know, peopple change their behaviour if tax changes?

Ouch

Junot came to public attention in 2008 when his business partner, René-Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, with whom he founded the hedge fund Access International Advisors, was identified as having invested 95 per cent of its assets with the crooked financier Bernie Madoff.

Fine and fair enough

Older women disappear from presenting roles across the BBC while older men are regarded as “gaining gravitas and wisdom”, according to an internal review of the broadcaster’s record on representation.

A “noticeable mismatch” in the number of staff and freelance male and female presenters over the age of 60 was uncovered by the review.

It heard evidence that while older men are seen as becoming imbued with greater authority, older women had to either keep looking younger or develop “idiosyncratic personas”.

While women outnumbered men in terms of presenters under 50, men “significantly outnumbered” women among the over-50s – with 237 women to 394 men.

Pretty young totty gets a leg up (fnarr, fnarr) in getting a presenter’s job. When those looks, that lusciousness, fade, that advantage goes away. Shrug.

So, if we require sexual equality here the totty has to stop getting the leg up, right?

This is very fun indeed

But while Gap’s public profile says the app is encrypted and does not share its data with third parties, Iranian digital rights experts say their investigations contradict those claims.

A report from FilterWatch, an organisation monitoring Iran’s internet censorship, has accused Gap Messenger of being among the “main actors and entities that participate in the Iranian government’s internet control and suppression efforts”.

So, yoiu’re running an app inside a country with rules about such apps. You obey the law of that country, obviously. Even more so if it’s a local app, not some foreign one.

This is what everyone shrieks X, Facebook and all the rest must do, right? Such insistences upon the law don’t work if we try to confine it to only those we consider nice, obviously.

Well, hmm, and……

Donald Trump on Thursday sued the US treasury department and Internal Revenue Service for $10bn over the disclosure of his tax returns to the media in 2019 and 2020.

In a complaint filed in Miami federal court, Trump, his adult sons, and his namesake company said the agencies failed to take “mandatory precautions” to prevent former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn from leaking their tax returns to “leftist media outlets”, including the New York Times and ProPublica.

$10b eh? Well, uf you go on to claim that that’s what lost him a tight election then consequential damages…..

This is not archaic

This is in fact brand new:

Supporters of assisted dying will seek to force through the bill using an archaic parliamentary procedure if it continues to be blocked by the Lords.

The high stakes move – described by some backers as the “nuclear option” – would be the first time the 1911 Parliament Act has been invoked for a private member’s bill.

See? First-time – it’s new.

Just what is it about killing Granny that’s so damned urgent?

They are distinctly ageing models after all

In the clearest sign yet that Tesla is pivoting away from its electric car business, CEO Elon Musk announced on Wednesday’s investor call that the company would discontinue production of its Model X SUV and Model S full-size sedan.

“It’s time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end,” Musk said. “We expect to wind down S and X production next quarter.”

The model S and X factory in Fremont, California would be converted to produce Tesla’s upcoming Optimus robot, Musk said.

Further, given the wave of Chinese competition who would really want to spend the necessary (say, $billion?) on a wholly new platform? That is, make something else instead…..

Oh, right

I have three thoughts. First, I am not surprised. When you focus on growth in GDP as your primary goal without any concern for whether what creates that growth is of real value rather than simply being capable of being counted, whilst being indifferent to the distribution of the gains, those already vulnerable are bound to suffer as a consequence precisely because your primary focus will always exclude them in a neoliberal economic system designed to focus advantage on a few and not on society as a whole.

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 Say NO to Digital ID

In September we launched the No to Digital ID Campaign. (@NoToDigitalID). We're now at 40,000 followers. Now were asking for financial help. Lets junk this dystopian nightmare in 2026. Lets start January running. 

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