I have spent the last five weeks trying to write about the UK Digital ID, and every time I sat down to finish, I found another thread. Another connection. Another name that linked back to the same technocratic megalomaniacs I keep writing about in America. At some point I had to accept that this was not a story about Britain at all, or at least not only about Britain; it was the same story I have been telling for months now, just with different accents. The machinery is identical, like the same word written in different fonts, or in this case, the same name:
Larry Ellison. (I am once again asking the techno-fascism genre to introduce a new antagonist.)
To bring you up to date: in January of this year, nearly three million British citizens signed a petition opposing mandatory digital ID, making it one of the largest petition responses in the country’s history, and the government folded, or at least it seemed that way. Keir Starmer announced that digital ID would now be optional, the newspapers declared victory, democracy had worked, and everyone could go back to their lives feeling good about the system.
I wish I could leave it there, but I have been reporting on surveillance technology for long enough to recognize this feeling, the sick quiet that settles in when you realize the celebration is premature, when you understand that the thing everyone is cheering about is not the thing that matters. The government said digital ID would be optional, but what they did not say, what they tucked into the machinery of the announcement like a razor blade in an apple, was that digital verification for employment would remain mandatory.
You simply use private companies now, such as Yoti, iProov, and Post Office EasyID, the infrastructure that already exists, the £2.1 billion market that was humming along before Keir Starmer ever opened his mouth about any of this. The GOV.UK Wallet is still coming, the National Data Library is still being built with over £100 million in funding and a three-phase rollout already underway, and the so-called Sovereign Cloud, which sounds reassuringly British until you remember that Oracle controls the infrastructure, Oracle employees administer the systems, and Oracle is an American company subject to the US CLOUD Act — which means the US government can demand access to data stored by American companies even if that data sits on foreign soil. Nobody voted on any of that, and nobody was asked.
To understand what is happening in Britain, you have to understand what did not happen in America twenty-four years ago.
America Says No
September 11th, 2001. Nearly three thousand dead, towers collapsed, the Pentagon in flames, a field in Pennsylvania. America had never felt anything like it, and that fear crossed the Atlantic. The UK showed up. Tony Blair stood next to George Bush and said “shoulder to shoulder,” and he meant it, and people mocked him for it later, called him Bush’s poodle, but in that moment Britain had America’s back. Everyone was scared together, all asking the same question: how do we make sure this never happens again? That is when certain people see opportunity.
Not even two weeks later, the buildings still smoldering and families still burying their dead, a man named Larry Ellison stepped forward with a solution. Larry Ellison is an eighty-two-year-old surveillance systems megalomaniac who founded Oracle, the company that builds the databases running governments, banks, and hospitals, the company that got its start doing contract work for the CIA, which is where the name Oracle comes from. He is the second richest man in the world, his best friend is Elon Musk, and after Trump lost in 2020, Ellison was behind the scenes pushing to overturn the election and championing the fraud claims. His friends, his actual friends, call him a rampant Zionist, though I would say he is less interested in the religion than in the surveillance capabilities of the Israeli state; he is the largest individual funder of the IDF. After Tiananmen Square, he helped the Chinese government build out their surveillance infrastructure. Everything he does, everything, is for his own benefit.
Ellison went on the radio and pitched it: national ID cards for every American, biometrics, fingerprints, iris scans, facial recognition, one big database, and Oracle would provide the software free of charge. How generous and civic-minded, what a gift to a grieving nation.
While Ellison worked Washington, the UK was paying attention. Two days after the attacks, Home Secretary David Blunkett mentioned ID cards on BBC Radio, though it was soft, about immigration and benefits, with no biometrics and no master database. Tony Blair said nothing publicly. Britain was watching America, waiting to see which way it would jump.
America said no, and here is the wild part: everyone agreed. The ACLU joined forces with the Cato Institute, liberals with libertarian conservatives, people who agree on nothing. Privacy advocates and gun rights groups, left and right and center, all looked at Larry Ellison’s free gift and recognized it for what it was. The arguments were simple: the hijackers used their real names and real documents, so a national database would not have stopped anything, and Ellison’s profit motive was obvious. Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002 with language explicitly prohibiting a national identification system. Banned, by law.
And Ellison backed off, so the idea died, at least in America.
The United Kingdom is built differently, and this is not an insult, merely an observation. Parliament passes something and it applies everywhere: one system, one government, one door to knock on if you want inside. America has fifty doors and fifty bureaucracies that refuse to speak to each other, an inefficient nightmare that also functions, accidentally, as a firewall. You cannot build a centralized surveillance apparatus when there is no center, but Britain has a center. The EU used to provide some protection through data rules and privacy regulations, but underneath, the structure was always centralized. And unlike America, the UK never said absolutely not, never banned it, never closed the door. America shut Ellison out. The UK left the door open. And Larry Ellison, as it turns out, is a patient man.
Across the Atlantic
A lot happened in 2003. On February 5th, two things occurred at the same time. In New York, Colin Powell stood before the United Nations Security Council presenting the case for invading Iraq, holding up a vial of what he claimed was anthrax, showing satellite photos, pointing to diagrams of mobile weapons labs, telling the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Every network was broadcasting it live, every newspaper would run it on the front page, and the entire planet was watching Colin Powell. While that was happening, the same day, Oracle quietly signed a three-year agreement with the UK Office of Government Commerce, a government-wide deal to replace all legacy systems across UK public sector organizations, the foundation for Oracle to embed itself in every department, every agency, every system in the British government, at the same pricing they give the US government, a relationship that goes back twenty-five years to the CIA. Nobody writes headlines about database contracts when the Secretary of State is waving around fake anthrax. The next day, February 6th, the plagiarism scandal broke; Blair’s intelligence dossier had been copied from a graduate student’s thesis, typos and all. Six weeks later, on March 20th, the US and UK invaded Iraq.
On June 23rd, 2003, Larry Ellison visited 10 Downing Street and met with Tony Blair, the first time the two of them were seen together publicly. Nobody has a transcript of what was discussed. The official story is that Ellison was there to donate computers to schools, which is what the tech industry calls land and expand: show up with something small, get your foot in the door, then grow. On September 29th, three months after that meeting, Blair publicly endorsed ID cards for the first time in his career; before this, not a word, and in 1995 he had called a similar proposal a waste of money. Eight years of silence, one meeting with Ellison, and three months later ID cards were his new priority. On November 11th, Home Secretary David Blunkett announced biometric ID cards with fingerprints, iris scans, facial recognition, and a centralized database: the exact system Ellison had pitched to America, the exact system Congress had banned.
And while all of this was happening, Oracle kept moving. In December 2003, £5 billion in NHS contracts were awarded, with Oracle providing the databases. In January 2004, the NHS signed a £100 million licensing deal with Oracle. In May 2004, the Home Office migrated to Oracle systems. All while Iraq dominated every headline, Parliament debating war crimes, media covering casualties, nobody watching IT procurement. By 2006, Oracle was running ten of fifteen major government departments, seventy percent of NHS trusts, and systems at the DWP, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office, and the Treasury. On March 30th, 2006, the Identity Cards Act passed, and Blair and Ellison got their win.
But Blair was already damaged goods. Iraq had destroyed him. Bush’s poodle. The man who lied about weapons of mass destruction. In May 2007, he was forced to resign, disgraced. The new government tried to continue the ID card rollout, and it was a disaster, slow and deeply unpopular. In 2010, a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition came to power, both parties having campaigned against ID cards, and they scrapped the whole thing. The Identity Cards Act was repealed, the National Identity Register was destroyed, and only 13,200 cards had ever been issued, after over £5 billion spent. The cards were out, but Oracle’s infrastructure stayed.
I keep returning to this image: Tony Blair on a yacht off Sardinia in 2009, his political career over, Iraq having destroyed him, called a war criminal, a liar, a poodle, disgraced and diminished. And yet there he is, looking relaxed, looking comfortable, looking like a man whose fortunes have not actually declined at all. The yacht belongs to Larry Ellison. The political project had failed, but the infrastructure remained and the friendship endured, and Tony Blair, it turns out, had nowhere to go but the future.
The Long Game
In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union, fifty-two percent to forty-eight. At the time everyone was talking about immigration and sovereignty and taking back control, and nobody was talking about data protection, but that was about to matter enormously. One of the biggest faces of the Leave campaign was Boris Johnson, messy blonde hair and bumbling charm, and in 2017, Larry Ellison relaunched his foundation with a new strategy around health, education, and conservation. To run it, he hired a British journalist named Matthew Symonds, co-founder of The Independent, twenty-two years at The Economist, the man who had written Ellison’s biography back in 2003, paying him over $600,000 a year. He also hired Richard Meredith, who had spent twenty-eight years in the British Diplomatic Service with senior positions in national security strategy, making him Deputy Executive Director at roughly the same salary. One man from British media, one from British government, both making more than half a million dollars a year to work for Larry Ellison.
Matthew Symonds also has a daughter named Carrie, and while that name might not mean anything on its own, Carrie Johnson, wife of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, certainly does. In 2018, when Ellison hired her father, Carrie was not yet Boris’s wife; Boris was married to someone else, and Carrie was his mistress. So to be clear about what was happening: Larry Ellison hired the father of the woman who was, at that moment, having a secret affair with Boris Johnson. In 2019, the affair went public, the tabloids exploded, Boris got a divorce, and during all of this Ellison moved his foundation headquarters to London. Boris became Prime Minister, Carrie moved into Downing Street, and in February 2020 they announced their engagement.
Also in 2020, with COVID spreading, Ellison called Donald Trump and offered to build a system to track COVID treatments, for free, naturally, and Trump said yes, and Oracle began building health databases and collecting data on American citizens. In September 2020, Ellison shut down the London foundation without warning, laid off Matthew Symonds and Richard Meredith, and closed the whole operation. He said it was to refocus on COVID response, which is an interesting explanation given that the foundation’s stated mission was already health.
What I find interesting is what came next. Ellison had spent two years pumping money into that foundation, building relationships with the Johnson family and the British foreign policy establishment, and his next big investment was not in COVID; it was in Tony Blair. $130 million to the Tony Blair Institute, then another $218 million pledged after that. The same Tony Blair he had met with in 2003, the one who became obsessed with biometric ID cards after a single meeting, the one photographed on Ellison’s yacht in 2009. And what does the Tony Blair Institute do? It advises governments around the world on digital ID systems and national data infrastructure. Tony Blair never truly left this story; he was just waiting in the wings.
According to people who worked at the Tony Blair Institute, it functions as a sales operation for Oracle. By 2023, joint retreats had become commonplace, TBI staff and Oracle executives meeting at TBI’s London headquarters, at Oracle’s headquarters in Austin, and at Ellison’s private properties. One former TBI staffer described it this way: it was hard to get across just how deeply connected the two organizations were, and the meetings were like they were part of the same organization. Some TBI staff were uncomfortable with this; they described having to push Oracle technology on countries even when they knew it was not in those countries’ best interest. One warned that the deals would trap governments in systems that are initially free but will start charging in future, free for now, the same pitch, twenty-four years later.
The Biological History of a Nation
The National Health Service has seventy-five years of patient records covering sixty-six million people, encompassing every diagnosis, every prescription, every surgery, every birth and death and everything between. This is not data; this is the biological history of a nation. In 2022, Oracle bought a company called Cerner for $28 billion. Cerner makes electronic patient record systems, the software hospitals use to track every patient interaction, and Cerner was already inside the NHS; hospitals across London, Sheffield, Milton Keynes, and East Lancashire were running on it, and by 2023, all twelve hospitals across North West London used Cerner. Oracle was not inside the NHS, but Cerner was, so Oracle bought Cerner, and just like that, Oracle had £361 million in NHS contracts and access to patient record systems across the country.
Larry Ellison explained, on the record, that the acquisition was meant to aggregate healthcare data at a national, or even global, level. National or even global; he just says it, at conferences, in front of world leaders, while Tony Blair stands beside him looking small beneath a giant screen. In February 2025, at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, in an auditorium full of premiers and ministers from around the world, Blair asked Ellison what governments should be doing about artificial intelligence, and Ellison just said it: “The first thing a country needs to do is unify all of their data so that it can be consumed and used by the AI model.” He said governments need to take all their healthcare data, diagnostic data, electronic health records, and genomic data and move it into a single unified data platform. Then he got specific: the NHS in the UK has an incredible amount of population data, he said, but the problem is that it is too fragmented. Two weeks later, TBI published a report calling for a National Data Library to unify government data, describing UK data as fragmented and unfit for purpose. The same word. In March 2025, Oracle announced it was investing £5 billion in UK cloud infrastructure, and Peter Kyle put out a statement saying this would accelerate AI ambitions.
In July 2024, Labour had won the election and Keir Starmer became Prime Minister. Five days after the election, five days, Tony Blair was at the TBI conference telling everyone AI was the game-changer, and soon Starmer was giving speeches using the exact same words. Starmer had appointed Peter Kyle, a former adviser in Blair’s government, as Technology Secretary, and Kyle came into office calling for governments to show a sense of humility toward Big Tech companies. In May 2024, Kyle told his officials to work with TBI on the National Data Library project, literally emailing his team to say he was attaching the initial scoping work from TBI. Blair personally met with Kyle and told him there was no other solution to productivity, no other route to growth except AI, and recommended that Kyle get a briefing from the Ellison Institute of Technology. As in Larry Ellison.
On September 23rd, 2025, TBI published a report called “Time for Digital ID.” On September 25th, two days later, Keir Starmer announced mandatory digital ID: a GOV.UK Wallet app, biometric authentication, facial recognition, and mandatory Right to Work checks by 2029. The government’s own words were that you would not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you did not have a digital ID. Tom McTague, the political editor at UnHerd, observed that the government seemed to be about a year behind TBI, and he was right. That is not governing; that is copy-paste. There is no evidence Starmer is personally on Ellison’s payroll, and the money does not go into his pocket; it flows through TBI. But Ellison funds TBI, TBI writes the blueprints, Starmer implements them, and Oracle benefits. That is not corruption in the brown-envelope sense; it is structural capture. Starmer has outsourced his government’s thinking to a privately funded, Oracle-aligned organization and treats it like neutral expertise.
Brexit removed the guardrails. When Britain was inside the European Union, it had to follow GDPR, the strictest data protection rules in the world. In June 2021, the EU ruled that UK data protection was essentially equivalent, so data could keep flowing, but that came with a sunset clause: December 2025, with renewal contingent on the UK maintaining essential equivalence. And what had the UK been doing with its post-Brexit freedom? Loosening consent standards, pushing for implied consent where you used to need explicit consent to use someone’s health data, the kind of consent where you do not actually say yes. Creating national security exemptions so they can process health data for immigration enforcement without those pesky protections. Relaxing the rules on AI training to make it easier to feed NHS data into machine learning models. Limiting the right to be forgotten, making it harder for you to delete your own medical records. Restricting patients’ rights to access and control their own data. All while telling Brussels that nothing had really changed, that the UK remained essentially equivalent. The government was racing to get everything in place before anyone could stop them.
The backlash, when it came, was significant. Nearly three million people signed a petition opposing mandatory digital ID, polling showed support collapsing from around fifty percent to below a third, and then there was Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, ended decades of conflict, and one of its key provisions is that people in Northern Ireland can identify as British, Irish, or both, as they choose. So when Starmer announced a mandatory card with Britishness baked into its very design, Northern Ireland lost its mind. Michelle O’Neill, the First Minister and a Sinn Féin leader, called it ludicrous and an attack on the Good Friday Agreement and on the rights of Irish citizens. The DUP called it the wrong approach. The Ulster Unionist Party called it an excessive and ill-conceived initiative that compromises the fundamental right to privacy. The SDLP called for Northern Ireland to be exempt. The Alliance Party said they would oppose it at every step. Every single party, from Republican to Unionist, united against it, and when you have managed to get Sinn Féin and the DUP to agree on something, you have well and truly miscalculated.
The Raw Material
On January 13th, 2026, the government announced a U-turn, and the newspapers said the people had won. But here is what I cannot stop thinking about: the card was never the point, and the petition was never going to stop anything that mattered. Three million signatures got three million people to believe they had won something, and that belief is itself a kind of defeat. The database was always the point, and it has been the point since 2001, since Larry Ellison first saw opportunity in American grief and was told to leave. He spent twenty-four years building the alternative, hiring the Prime Minister’s father-in-law, pouring hundreds of millions into Tony Blair’s rehabilitation project, and buying his way into the NHS through a company called Cerner that most people have never heard of.
The government’s stated goal, in their own documents, is to monetize anonymized public health data. Oracle takes the biological history of Britain and trains artificial intelligence on it, diagnostic AI, drug discovery, predictive medicine, and they sell it globally, to pharmaceutical companies, to other countries, to whoever writes the check. And Britain, the country whose citizens generated all that data with their bodies? Maybe they get a discount.
I used to think of surveillance as something that happened to you, cameras on street corners, phones in pockets, the ambient hum of being watched, but that is not quite right. Surveillance is something that happens with you; your data is not observed but extracted, processed and packaged and sold. You are not the subject of surveillance but the raw material. The UK Digital ID is not a card but a key, one key that opens every door the government has on you, and increasingly, doors held by private companies as well, including employment checks, rental applications, and bank accounts, every transaction logged and stored and fed into systems you will never see and cannot appeal. And when they told you the card was optional, when they let you celebrate your victory, they were not lying. The card is optional, but the system is not.
There is a man in California who has been working on this for a quarter century. He is eighty-two years old, he is the second richest man in the world, and his best friend is Elon Musk. After Tiananmen Square, he helped the Chinese government build surveillance infrastructure. He is the largest individual funder of the Israeli Defense Forces, and when the 2020 election did not go his way, he worked behind the scenes to overturn it. He wanted to build a database of every American, and America said no, so he built it somewhere else.
The UK did not say no; the UK left the door open. And Larry Ellison, as it turns out, is a patient man. The coin has vanished, the audience is applauding, and somewhere, out of sight, a hand is reaching for your wallet.
Sources Cited
US Cloud Act - https://www.justice.gov/criminal/cloud-act-resources
Tony Blair Institute Report (published one day before Starmer’s announcement)-
Tony Blair Institute – Time for Digital ID: A New Consensus for a State That Works (Sep 24, 2025)
https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/time-for-digital-id-a-new-consensus-for-a-state-that-works
UK Government Digital ID Announcement-
GOV.UK – New digital ID scheme to be rolled out across UK (Sep 25, 2025)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-digital-id-scheme-to-be-rolled-out-across-uk
Larry Ellison 2001 National ID Proposal-
Cato Institute – National ID Cards: New Technologies, Same Bad Idea (Jun 16, 2022)
https://www.cato.org/techknowledge/national-id-cards-new-technologies-same-bad-ideaCNN – Ellison offers free software for national ID card (Sep 25, 2001)
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/09/25/ellison.software.idg/index.html
Tony Blair on Larry Ellison’s Yacht-
Yachting Monthly – Blair goes sailing on superyacht (Nov 2, 2014)
https://www.yachtingmonthly.com/news/blair-goes-sailing-on-superyacht-9736
Tony Blair Institute/Oracle Partnership-
Agência Pública – Inside Tony Blair’s Toxic Tech Lobbying Machine (Oct 23, 2025)
https://apublica.org/2025/10/inside-tony-blairs-toxic-tech-lobbying-machine/
Brexit & UK Data Protection-
TrustArc – Understanding the Two Major Adequacy Decisions in the UK (Dec 4, 2024)
https://trustarc.com/resource/adequacy-decisions-in-the-uk/
UK Monetizing Health Data-
Tech Monitor – DSIT Secretary reveals plans to monetise National Data Library (Mar 31, 2025)
https://www.techmonitor.ai/government-computing/national-data-library-monetise-public-health-data/
Oracle & Chinese Surveillance-
Georgetown CSET – How a Chinese Surveillance Broker Became Oracle’s “Partner of the Year” (Apr 22, 2021)
https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/how-a-chinese-surveillance-broker-became-oracles-partner-of-the-year/
Larry Ellison & Israeli Defense Forces-
Truthout – From AI to TikTok to TV, This Pro-Israel Billionaire Is Expanding Power in US (Oct 10, 2025)
https://truthout.org/articles/from-ai-to-tiktok-to-tv-this-pro-israel-billionaire-is-expanding-power-in-us/
