Fool's Gold Card

Two thirds? Is that it? The gold standard will have been attained when everyone in the age range was inside the system one way or another. Apprentices and trainees should enjoy the same benefits as their peers in further and higher education, and vice versa. Higher education should be fully funded all the way to doctoral level, with lifelong access. And the training and other standards for the private sector to match should be set by national and municipal public ownership.

But if we had digital ID, then you would need it to take up a university place or a gold standard apprenticeship, or even to apply, just as you would need it to access NHS Online, and thus your embryos with no biological mother. The people behind digital ID have banned Owen Jones, Rivkah Brown and Matthew Torbitt from the Labour Party Conference on grounds of "safeguarding", the ostensibly deniable way of painting "nonce" on someone's front door. All three should sue.

The Left is very much under attack. As George Galloway tweets: "After Saturday's encounter with the Terrorism Act, on Tuesday the Israeli government has published my photographs with a target circle round my head in an absurd but deadly smear against Greta Thunberg and the flotilla bound for Gaza. A British Palestinian man, Zaher Birawi, who has worked freely in and around Parliament for decades, is fingered as Greta's Hamas handler and mastermind of the flotilla. But his pictures which Israel has published globally are actually pictures of me. For the record: I have nothing to do with Hamas or the flotilla. I have not seen or spoken to Mr Birawi in more than a decade."

This is the work of the same Shabana Mahmood who wants people, all of whom would have lived in the United Kingdom for at least 10 years, to earn indefinite leave to remain by performing both paid and voluntary work to her satisfaction. Two out of five Universal Credit claimants are in work, even though there should be no such thing as in-work poverty, the mere existence of which proves that the economic system needs to be replaced. At the very least, no one with a full-time job should be poor. But many of them are, and they are disproportionately immigrants. Mahmood would kick them out: your colleagues and your neighbours, your partners and your parents, your public service workers and your friends. And she wants your digital ID.