Labour MPs have told Sir Keir Starmer to perform U-turns on even more of his unpopular policies after he dropped plans to make Digital ID compulsory.
Backbenchers said the Prime Minister should next abandon proposals to curtail jury trials, cancel local elections and restrict protests.
And a minister he sacked last year urged him to honour the promise he made outside No 10 after winning the election to ‘tread more lightly’ on people’s lives.
They spoke out amid anger from many in Labour that they are being made to defend unpopular Government policies that ministers then go on to ditch, including mandatory Digital ID for right-to-work checks as well as the family farms tax and business rates hikes for pubs.
Even some Cabinet ministers are now said to believe that it is better for them to ‘scrape the barnacles off the boat’ instead of sticking with plans that voters dislike, although Health Secretary Wes Streeting said that the Government should adopt the NHS maxim of trying to ‘get it right first time’.
In a Commons urgent question called by the Tories on Digital ID on Thursday, a string of Labour MPs welcomed the watering down of the policy so that it will no longer be mandatory for people proving they have the right to work in the UK.
But some went further, with Emma Lewell blasting: ‘This is a mess.’
Sir Keir Starmer, pictured on a visit to Scotland, has been encouraged to perform more U-turns
Labour MP Emma Lewell, pictured in the Commons in 2025, branded Digital ID a ‘mess’
She went on: ‘Increasing surveillance, Department for Work and Pensions powers to snoop on bank accounts, the removal of trials by jury, postponing elections and clamping down on peaceful protest—the public are starting to become very angry about these encroachments on our fundamental freedoms and creeping state control. It is all inherently un-British.’
She urged the minister responsible for Digital ID, Josh Simons, to ‘convey to whoever is behind this farce that they are doing this Government no favours at all’.
Scottish Labour MP Brian Leishman said that popular policies introduced by the Government, including raising the minimum wage and abolishing the two-child benefit cap, have all been ‘rooted in Labour values’.
He went on: ‘Eroding civil liberties, as seen in the proposals for jury trials and for Digital ID, is not in keeping with Labour party values, and nor is it necessary or, indeed, popular. Will the Minister feed my thoughts back to the leadership at Cabinet level?’
Chris Hinchliff said it was ‘always clear’ that the public would reject mandatory Digital ID and asked: ‘Will the minister convey the lessons learned from this decision to his colleagues across Government, and persuade them to drop proposals to erode the right to a jury trial and restrict the right to protest against animal testing?’
On social media Karl Turner, who has led the internal backlash against the Government’s plan to limit jury trials, stepped up his attacks on the Cabinet and Downing Street advisers.
He wrote on Twitter that Sir Keir and his ‘henchmen’ are sending ‘good people’ in the Parliamentary Labour Party out to ‘defend the indefensible only to end up looking stupid when they inevitably have to back pedal on policy’.
And left-winger Nadia Whittome urged her colleagues: ‘Don’t be marched up the hill in the first place. It’s our job as backbench MPs to raise the alarm on bad policy.’
Meanwhile the think-tank founded by former Labour PM Sir Tony Blair has warned that Britain’s ‘model of government is no longer capable of delivering’.
New Labour stalwarts Lord Blunkett and Lord Reid wrote in a new paper, which will be seen as a thinly-veiled criticism of Sir Keir’s administration, that ‘progressive politics is at its strongest when it knows not only what it wants to change, but why and how; when it offers a coherent theory of change and reform’.
