The UK’s Looming Technocratic Enslavement, Sebastian Morello

The UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is introducing a new form of slavery. Perhaps we ought not to be surprised. After all, in the Politics, Aristotle famously argued that whilst people differed on the details of what was permissible regarding the practice of slavery, it could not be held that slavery was not itself a part of nature. Whether slavery was perpetuated by necessity, or by a consequence of war, or because any given community would always have members who just couldn't oversee their own affairs, slavery would always be a part of human life. It might be undetectable for a while, but slavery would always return to the surface of society sooner or later. According to Aristotle, it's simply normal to see certain human beings in certain circumstances as "tools" or "instruments" of use, and for society and its leaders to see them as such.

Two millennia later, the counter-revolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre agreed that slavery was, contra the progressives of his time, indeed natural to human societies. He held that slavery had largely been vanquished not because it was unnatural but because, with the permeation of nature by grace, human nature had been transformed. Slavery had ebbed, he thought, because Christ had changed our hearts. Thus, when Immanuel Kant claimed that the moral law required us to see others as ends and never as means only, he wasn't really telling us what the moral law dictated at all, but articulating what grace had done to the societies it had touched. From a Maistrean perspective, Kant was, like so many Enlightenment enthusiasts, simply stealing the things of God and labelling them the things of man.

What's important for our purposes is that, for Joseph de Maistre, with the secularisation of the West, a new form of slavery would return, one far more terrible than any hitherto known to history. It would be a slavery of almost all by the few, a chaotic mass of appetite-driven zombies held in invisible manacles by a faceless minority utilising every new technology to tighten the chains evermore. Maistre's vision of the return of a new slavery would take many decades to unfold, but now the technology is here, and that Savoyard crank we once thought only a reactionary polemicist will be read again as a prophet.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced, "You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID." He claims that this is Labour's solution to this government's, and its predecessor's, failure to control the country's borders. But twenty years ago, Tony Blair attempted to bring in digital ID and failed to do so. There were two problems at that time; firstly, the technology wasn't there yet: we didn't all have small computers in our pockets listening to our every word; secondly, that was pre the COVID compliance test.

Now we've all undergone the COVID compliance test, and consequently it's been well demonstrated that, as a people, we can be lied to, deliberately traumatised, required to spy on each other, injected with experimental chemicals, and in response to such a campaign of political terror, we'll applaud the sky in thanksgiving for the — sorry, our — NHS and its legislatorial engineers. They now know that we're ripe for enslavement.

When Blair attempted to bring in digital ID, we did not have a serious border problem; it wasn't about illegal immigration then, and it isn't about illegal immigration now. It's about enslavement of the citizenry. Blair has not forgotten about his initial attempt to introduce digital ID. He says that digital IDs are "inevitable." But over the years, Blair has called many things "inevitable." He said that long-term peace in the Middle East was inevitable following U.S. and UK intervention in Iraq. He said the end of the Taliban in Afghanistan following a British invasion was inevitable. He said it was inevitable that Britain's future would be one of ongoing EU integration. He said that COVID would inevitably be overcome by "vaccines" because they prevented transmission (which they didn't) and prevented infection (which they didn't), and if you didn't agree with him then you were an "idiot."

Tony Blair is a man who has the most extraordinary record of being wrong about almost everything. And yet, he deems himself the right person not only to lecture us on what to do, but, with his new Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (whose logo, I mention in passing, looks suspiciously like a stylised swastika), to advise governments around the world. The hubris of the man is breathtaking. Any person with even a drop of self-awareness, with such a record of being wrong, would climb into a hole and never be heard of again.

So why do we keep hearing from Blair? Well, just because he's always wrong, that doesn't mean he's unsuccessful. He successfully deconstructed the UK's constitution, he wrecked secondary education and the university system, and he eroded our ancient common law by importing swathes of European statute law. He almost wholly destroyed Britain's countryside communities by his incessant attacks on rural life. He established a new activist culture centred on diversity and equality that eventually came to fruition in the capture of nearly all private and public institutions by "woke." Truly, Blair has been one of the most successful politicians of the modern age, in the sense that a parasite is successful when it kills its host.

Blair's puppet, Starmer, now claims that all UK citizens will have digital ID by the time his term ends in 2029, without which they won't be permitted to work. This is supposedly part of his "getting tough on immigration" policy, in a pitiful attempt to win back voters from Reform. But this will of course only alienate such voters further, given that those tempted to vote for Reform will not be the sort of people who want more State in their lives.

In reality, Labour wants digital ID for the same reason Labour wanted it 20 years ago: control of those who are here legally. They want to be able to monitor you more effectively, to make sure you're not thinking the wrong thoughts, vocalising the wrong opinions, eating the wrong foods, or going beyond your carbon footprint allowance. They have created the problem of uncontrolled immigration, permitted that problem to grow, and then brought in a 'solution' that won't address the issue but will certainly give them everything else they want.

As the adventurer turned social critic Neil Oliver put it over at GB News:

What is happening here with digital ID is effectively that you are being replaced with an avatar of yourself. If you imagine one of those pieces that you move about on a Monopoly board, that sort of represents you on the board. Well, they have you in that digital ID and they can decide whether or not you get to move on the board, and your hands are effectively tied behind your back. Anybody that submits to this, anybody that accepts a digital ID is slapping handcuffs around their own wrists. It's the end of freedom. It's the end of choice. It's the worst possible decision that any free-living, freedom-loving person could possibly make. … Their arguments don't stack up. Nothing. None of the reasons that they've put forward for doing this make any kind of sense. The very idea that this is going to tackle the people arriving by boats on the shores of the British Isles is absolute nonsense. It was never supposed to do that. The appetite, the desire, to bring forward the digital ID was there years ago, and it was understood by the people who wanted to bring it forward that the British people would not accept it. So, problems had to be fomented to make people desperate, to make people accept this as a solution. Hence the opening up of the borders and the mass immigration onto these shores that has stoked division, has stoked fear. And the hope has been that people would accept the digital ID as the solution to the problem. But it's entirely bogus. All people have to do is not comply and this thing falls flat on its face. And I am convinced that that's what is going to happen.

Whilst Oliver does not use the word, he's describing a conspiracy by the government against those it governs. A problem has been contrived, for which a solution that only gives the government greater control is now on offer.

This, in fact, is the way of all revolutionary politics: the government creates problems and then proposes itself as the only body that can solve them, which enables it to accrue ever greater power and continue the process of intensifying centralisation and control. Such a methodology is especially important when the government has lost the affection of those it governs, which this Labour government most certainly has. In such cases, the government cannot rely on the interior loyalty of the citizenry to conserve social cohesion and political loyalty, and so it must utilise the exterior means of law and legislation—and increasingly, sophisticated technologies—to maintain control over an apparently rapidly fragmenting social web. (The 'raising of the colours' phenomenon across Britain, of placing Union Jacks and St. Georges along streets and roads, is an indication that interior loyalty still persists, but it's a loyalty to nation and country, of which people increasingly deem their government the enemy.)

Those who lived under Communism in Eastern Europe know this problem well: when a government cannot depend upon the affections of the people, it depends upon the fear of the people, which it fosters with coercion, which in turn gradually means indirect control through bugging and other forms of social infiltration. In 2025, that means people disappearing for the wrong social media posts or for attending the wrong demonstrations. It is not hard to imagine how digital ID will massively accelerate what I am describing.

I hope it's now obvious why I began with a short musing on the perennial problem of slavery. It really is perennial. Slavery as a social mechanism is always on the horizon, and it's not obvious in the age in which we live how it will now be kept at bay. A new slavery, one for which we are completely unprepared, is coming. And indeed, a new slavery, a universal slavery, is exactly what Joseph de Maistre predicted would take hold of those nations that fully embraced the age of apostasy and materialism which he was content to call "the modern age."

Such a meta-view of what is taking hold of one of the world's last constitutionally Christian kingdoms is far from inappropriate. It's difficult not to see the Biblical aspect to all of this. The 13th chapter of the Book of the Apocalypse describes the collapse of the Christian nations in the following way:

Then I saw another beast which rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed. It works great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of men; and by the signs which it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast, it deceives those who dwell on earth, bidding them make an image for the beast which was wounded by the sword and yet lived; and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six.

Behold, the first beast, wounded by Lord's sword (Apocalypse 19:15), is Satan, and the second beast who arises from the earth is the modern apostate State. Utilising new technologies, the State can work "great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth." The Evil One speaks through the modern State, and is in turn worshipped through it. The State is, to use Thomas Hobbes' words, a "mortal god," through which the "god of this world" expands his rule (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Increasingly, those who will not worship the first beast, of which the second beast is an earthly realisation, are persecuted. We are only a short time away from the new age of the martyrs: it causes "those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." Having accrued all power to itself, this mortal god dictates who is to be rich and who is to be poor, to be free and to be a slave, and without its mark no one may buy or sell. We have before us the choice to be the free followers of the Lamb, knowing that persecution will almost certainly come with that choice, or to be the slaves of the Beast: You will not work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID.

Do not comply. Resist. Resist. Resist.