From Accidentally Ending Up in Communist Spy Files to Wanting Everyone Else’s Details on File - The Keir Starmer Story

In 1986, a 23-year-old Keir Starmer had just finished his law degree and went off to Czechoslovakia for a couple of weeks. He joined an international work camp helping to restore a memorial in Lidice - the village the Nazis destroyed in 1942.

Classic idealistic young man stuff. Wanting to do something good, commemorate victims of actual fascism, spend time with people from other countries. A bit naïve maybe, but sympathetic. The kind of thing a lot of young left-leaning students did back then.

The Czechoslovak secret police (StB) did what they always did with foreigners moving around behind the Iron Curtain: they logged him. His name, date of birth, passport number and home address ended up in their files. No drama, no recruitment, just standard procedure. No biggie.

~~~

Fast forward nearly forty years. The same Keir Starmer is now Prime Minister of Britain where the state increasingly seems to believe that everyone else should also be logged, checked, verified, age-assured, risk-assessed and politely prevented from typing until the system is satisfied.

The old secret police had folders.

Modern Britain has portals.

In 2023 alone, police in England and Wales made over 12,000 arrests under communications laws for “grossly offensive”, obscene or distressing messages. That’s already more than 30 people a day being dragged into the system for what they typed. Newer figures covering 2024 and 2025 push the total past 16,000 arrests across dozens of forces. Not convictions. Just people detained, questioned and processed for speech-related offences. Freedom of expression is now heavily dependent on your postcode.

This is only half the story. The other half is verification.

Under the Online Safety Act regime, Britain is normalising an internet where basic adult participation increasingly requires proving who you are. Not just on porn sites. On games. On consoles. On chat.

Xbox has already started requiring age verification for adult accounts to keep voice chat, messaging and game invites. PlayStation is following from June 2026 - adult accounts without verification can still play, but communication features start getting restricted.

From spring 2027, under-16s are due to be blocked from large parts of social media, while 16- and 17-year-olds will have livestreaming and stranger chat switched off by default.

A grown adult can vote, pay tax, get divorced, raise children and operate heavy machinery, but if he wants to use voice chat in a game, Britain would like him to upload ID or do a facial age scan first.

A young man once had his details casually recorded by a communist secret police because he went abroad to restore a memorial.

Decades later, that same man leads a government under which Britain is building a much thicker web of identity checks, speech monitoring and digital checkpoints. The StB had paper files. Britain has facial scans, console restrictions, thousands of communications arrests and permanent digital ID consultations.

At least the communists had the decency to look sinister while doing it.

What happened to the guy?