As Labour leader, Tony Blair liked to pose as a moderate but in truth he was a dangerous revolutionary whose decade in Downing Street transformed our country for the worse. His premiership saw our borders eroded, our heritage trashed, our institutions politicised, our nationhood weakened and our solidarity broken.

Yet almost 20 years after he fell from power, Blair could be on the verge of achieving another significant triumph. He might be loathed by much of the public but he remains a dominant figure within the Labour party, as reflected in the large number of Blairite politicians and officials in the top ranks of Sir Keir Starmer’s government.

This influence means No.10 is now highly receptive to one of Blair’s most cherished policies – the introduction of compulsory identity cards for all British citizens. When in office, he advocated the scheme with his usual messianic fervour, presenting it as a weapon against terrorism and a tool to improve the accountability of public services.

Such was his enthusiasm that he even pushed legislation through Parliament in 2006 that established a National Identity Register to oversee the roll-out of ID cards. But after his departure in 2007, the momentum was lost.

Under Gordon Brown, the project never moved beyond the pilot stage before being scrapped by the Tory-led coalition. Yet Blair has never wavered in his attachment to this cause, which he now argues is a digital solution to the problem of illegal immigration.

Sir Keir has latched on to the idea in the hope it will give new purpose to his beleaguered government and arrest his plunge in the polls. Today, on the eve of Labour’s annual conference, Starmer will announce the launch of his digital ID cards, which every citizen will have to carry. But if he really believes the policy will revive his fortunes, he’s seriously deluded.

When voters begin to understand the implications of this measure, with its enormous costs, threats to freedom and loss of privacy, there will be a groundswell of public opposition not seen in Britain since the Poll Tax riots in 1990.

On every level, the scheme is wrong-headed. For a start, in the face of Ministerial impotence and cowardice, it’s absurd to pretend ID cards will do anything to tackle illegal immigration.

That problem is caused, not by the absence of documentation, but by the reluctance to deport illegal immigrants, or withdraw from the lunatic European Human Rights Convention or stop using the Border Force as a glorified ferry service or crack down on benefits claims from new arrivals.

What we need is robust action to restore the integrity of our borders. But if ID cards become a reality, what we’ll get instead is an expansion of the state’s power on a scale never before seen in peacetime, backed up by a sinister bureaucracy that will run the national identity register.

In a democracy, the rulers should be answerable to the people. But in the Orwellian world that Blair and Starmer want to create, the relationship is inverted, with the public becoming answerable to the rulers, a process made all the more chilling by modern technology that can track all our movements and social interactions.

Equipped with this giant engine of oppression, the authorities could start to adopt the “Social Credit” model of autocratic China, whose citizens are routinely monitored for their compliance with official orthodoxy.

A few years ago, such a prediction about Britain would have sounded absurd. But in the land of Magna Carta the flag of freedom is now flying low, as revealed by the total of 12,200 arrests in 2023 for online comments.

Nor will we gain any more security through this destruction of our liberties. The huge national database, containing a wealth of personal information on every one of us, will be a honeypot for sophisticated cyber criminals at a time when the state and major corporations are proving poor guardians of our data.

Through digital ID, the Labour government is in effect planning to punish law-abiding for its own failures on immigration and crime. The dream of Blair will be a nightmare for the rest of us.