Tony Blair: Bring in digital IDs to get tough on populism (www.thetimes.com)

Tony Blair has urged the UK government to adopt a universal digital ID system and rapidly roll out live facial recognition (LFR) and other AI tools across public services to tackle immigration, crime and benefit fraud — the issues he argues feed populist movements. Drawing on pilots and international examples (India, Estonia, Singapore), he cites concrete gains: digital ID as a “single source of truth” to prevent fraudulent benefit claims (he points to £10bn a year in fraud), LFR deployments that helped the Met arrest 578 suspects including 55 sexual offenders, and AI uses from NHS scanners to automated courtroom note-taking and tailored school lesson planning. Blair frames this as both efficiency and political strategy: a smaller, more effective state enabled by technology. For the AI/ML community this is a major potential scaling and deployment challenge. Implementing nationwide biometric ID, pervasive LFR and cross‑service data linking raises technical requirements around accuracy, latency, secure identity binding, interoperability and resilience to adversarial attacks. It also heightens risks of bias, false positives, mass surveillance and centralized attack surfaces, so robust validation, transparency, auditing, privacy-preserving techniques (e.g., differential privacy, federated learning), and clear legal/regulatory frameworks will be essential. The proposal is a call to translate prototypes into production-grade systems — and to pair engineering with governance to maintain public trust.