Digital ID

Rupert Lowe Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable I feel sitting on the Government side of the Chamber, but I could not find a spare seat anywhere else, which is a testament to the fact that this subject is contested extremely passionately and that arguably it needs to be debated in the Chamber.

Digital ID is the biggest step towards a surveillance state that this country has faced in my lifetime. If any Government want access to every detail of our lives, they are the ones who should be feared. We live in a country where the state cannot even run a basic IT system without losing data or leaking personal details. Digital ID will not last a week before a mountain of sensitive personal data is left at a bus stop in Kent again.

I do not trust any Government. I certainly do not trust this Government. Let us remember: once the Government get a new power, they never give it back. It expands and evolves. Digital ID will not stop at proving who we are. It will creep into travel, banking, housing, benefits and even voting. Today, it is voluntary; tomorrow, it will be required for security reasons. The day after that, we will not be able to access basic services without it—all for our own good, remember.

Britain is supposed to be a country in which the Government serve the people, not the other way around. It is a country built on privacy, liberty and trust. British people just want the Government to leave them alone and get out of their lives—to build a business, raise a family and live in peace. Digital ID treats every citizen as a suspect. It assumes that the state has the right to look over our shoulders. We defend against it by severely limiting the power of the state, not radically expanding it. Abolishing jury trials, cancelling elections, implementing facial recognition—and now this. This incoming dystopian future must be resisted.

I will be holding my own protest against this creeping move towards George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. I will simply not comply. I will not be downloading a digital ID and I urge other MPs to commit to doing the same. The solution is obvious: I will just have to reinvest in a Nokia—I preferred the simplicity of that anyway. The sound people of Great Yarmouth do not want digital ID.

Oral Answers to Questions

Rupert Lowe Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As my hon. Friend knows, my No. 1 priority is growth, so I am very glad to see his upper lip—he is obviously championing that himself. I send my best wishes to everyone growing a moustache this Movember. It is right to highlight that men are hit harder by a range of conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. That is why our men’s health strategy will set out actions to improve the health of all men in England.

[Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Ind)]

Q14. Every week we hear of a brutal murder, rape or stabbing, far too often perpetrated by someone who should not be in our country to begin with. Does the Prime Minister agree that, for cases in which the guilt is so undeniable, the crime so monstrous and the evil so irredeemable, the reintroduction of the death penalty for both foreign and domestic criminals should be put to the British people in a legally binding referendum?

[The Prime Minister]

Any attack is to be condemned. It is absolutely right, and we are determined to ensure, that there is a criminal justice response in relation to attacks, however they are carried out and whoever they are carried out by. But reintroducing the death penalty is not the answer to this. It did not work when it was in place. It led to the death of people who, it turned out, were in fact innocent. What we must do, as we are doing, is improve the criminal justice response in this country.