Like, the UK economy is stagnant, there is a cost-of-living crisis, and Labour needs to present the public with an alternative to Farage. And the answer is... digital ID cards?
Focusing so strongly on immigration and related issues only strengthens Farage. It does nothing to convince the die-hard Reform people and alienates your own voters. We're already seeing Labour split to a new party (well, assuming it doesn't implode in classic left-wing infighting). It's lose-lose.
Labour won 2/3rd of MPs with just 1/3rd of the vote, the biggest gap between MPs and vote share in modern history by quite a margin. In many ways they "lost" last year's election because that's a very underwhelming result after running against a deeply unpopular government that's been in government for almost 15 years. They've been on a thin ice since day one.
All of this is such an obvious mistake that I truly don't understand what Starmer is even thinking.
I feel like there are two things... one, do Reform voters even understand that Digital ID is a response to immigration? It's not clear to me that they even do.
Two, obviously immigration is not the issue. As I understand, Starmer is going to attempt to mount a serious counter-narrative to Farage. I really hope that his answer will not be "look, we hate immigrants too!" They tried that a few months ago, didn't they? The whole "island of strangers" Enoch Powell thing. I hope that that was as bad as it gets.