Recently I suffered a broken wing mirror while away visiting friends. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me and from experience I thought finding a replacement might be a pain. Fortunately this time it was mostly intact, but the replacement still needed to be the right size and shape for my car. As well as supporting the various lights and gizmos to be found in a modern wing mirror.

But surprisingly it was an easy process. I put my number plate into various websites. Instantly they knew the make, model and year of my car and could tell me what replacement parts were in stock. Replacement ordered, dispatched, delivered and then fitted after a bit of jiggery-pokery. A simple process from end to end.

Systems are all linked together using your number plate, whether buying parts for your car, comparing insurance, checking when your MOT is due or paying your road-tax. It works well and we take it for granted. But not everything works this way.

How would this work if number plates don’t exist? Where there isn’t one unique ID number for your car. Where there is instead a multitude of different unique identifiers: one for your MOT, another for your insurance, another for your road-tax and so on.

When you tax your car, how would DVLA check whether it had a valid MOT?

The road-tax system would only know your road-tax vehicle ID, the MOT system would only know your MOT vehicle ID. The DVLA would need to build a way to match them up, based on storing copies of some of your car’s details in both systems. If enough details match, it can assume a specific car in one system is the same vehicle as a specific car in the other.

But what details to use, to narrow all the possible cars down to one? Make, model, year and colour would clearly not be unique enough. Dates of sale or previous MOT tests would certainly narrow it down. Adding the owner’s personal details, their name, address and date of birth, would probably narrow it down to one in most cases.

Complex IT systems cost money to build, they cost money to run, they cost money to maintain and update over time. Any automated matching service only works if both systems store the same data, and both copies are accurate. One record might have the wrong date for a previous MOT, a spelling mistake in the owner’s name or an out-of-date address. Then the automated system falls down.

This may be resolved by building yet another online service. Asking you to confirm even more of your car’s details, or your personal details. Yet more details that will have to be stored in the system so they can be checked against.

Almost always, some of these cases will have to be handled by a manual, clerical process. Teams of civil servants manning call centres, sending and receiving letters or processing paper forms. And like any manual process, it will create more errors along the way.

However, if no number plates existed it is not just one matching service that would be needed. Road-tax alone would need several more, to check insurance, SORN status and other things. Each with its own copies of common data to match on. And each with more civil servants manning more phones, sending and receiving more letters, creating more errors and ever more cost.

But the cost of all this complexity isn’t just in all the additional things that must be done. It would be in the additional things that are not done, the increased cost of change.

New ideas would need to overcome the inertia of changing complex existing systems, or prove that their benefits outweighed the considerable cost of building new ones. Any bright spark with such an idea, a way to make an existing service more effective or more efficient, would face a much tougher fight to get stuff done. Many would wonder whether the effort of the fight itself was worth it.

Thankfully, in a world of number plates, we avoid the bureaucratic nightmare of countless matching systems. For cars at least.

For people, the nightmare is real. Different parts of government have different ID numbers for an individual. Individuals have National Insurance numbers, NHS numbers, Driving Licence numbers, passport numbers, Unique Learner Numbers, Unique Taxpayer References and armed forces Service Numbers, among others. And these are just the ones we see on the outside; internal systems have their own separate person identifiers. Whenever data needs to be joined up, a matching service must be built. Multiple copies of personal data must be kept in multiple databases across multiple departments. Endless teams of civil servants must be hired to catch when people cannot be matched. Creating endless opportunities for error and endless cost.

We all feel the cost of this in our day-to-day lives. When you move house you need to update the government. You need to update each government service separately. Each of these services needs to build a way for you to update it. Inevitably you’ll miss one, or the update fails to go through. Almost anyone who has lived in a rented flat knows the pile of post that accumulates for long departed former tenants. These may be tax bills from HMRC, court summons or hospital test results. Personal data, leaking out via Royal Mail.

The government has no single source of truth. It doesn’t know who is who. It doesn’t know whether a person is a citizen or not, and if not whether they are a tourist, temporary worker, student or asylum seeker. The problem doesn’t stop at central government; it is repeated in the devolved administrations and in local councils. More matching systems, more errors, more inertia and more cost.

Criticism of the government’s digital identity card proposals focuses on privacy and security. But the risks from digital identity cards are small relative to those that already exist. And these are risks that identity cards alone do nothing to solve.

The government will still need multiple copies of your data in multiple expensive matching systems. As well as thousands of civil servants plugging the gaps when these systems don’t work.

Each system is another point that could be attacked. And the more data it holds, the more value there is in attacking it.

The more data someone has on you, the easier it is to assume your identity. Gaining access to one system can mean access to others. Checking your answers to questions, called ‘knowledge-based verification’, only works if the answers are sufficiently secret. All it takes is for someone else to know the answers, your mother’s maiden name, the name of your first school or how much tax you paid last year. Then that person can assume your identity and gain access to more of your personal information. And every additional bit of knowledge potentially helps them gain even more.

The spectre of ‘Big Brother’ arises whenever identity cards are suggested. Because they’ll make it easier for the government to access your data and link it all together. This is true. But this linking is already happening using expensive and complicated matching systems. There is no legislation controlling precisely what data each public body can hold on you and what they can use it for. It is controlled by general principles, not specific limits. The complexity of the current system makes real oversight and accountability effectively impossible.

There is a solution. A single, unique, trusted identifier for individuals, used across all government departments and public bodies. Eliminating the need for both expensive matching systems and the thousands of civil servants that accompany them.

Knowing your car’s number plate does not allow everyone to find out your name and address. But it does allow the police to do so.

Regulated by statute, a universal identifier doesn’t need to mean universal access. Access can be democratically accountable and controlled. Ensuring that public bodies can only store or access data that is needed for their specific purposes.

The government’s digital ID proposals create their own problems of privacy and security. But they do not solve the significant issues that already exist. We need to solve the problem of identification. Not as a matter of convenience, but of privacy, security, cost, and democratic accountability.

Britain is both a trading nation and a welfare state. Our prosperity depends upon the smooth flow of trade across the world’s oceans, and our social contract promises support when prosperity falters.

When trade is disrupted, prices rise. When prices rise, living standards fall. When living standards fall, poverty grows. When poverty grows, the costs of alleviating it fall upon the public purse.

Security abroad therefore matters directly at home.

Yet defence spending is often portrayed as competing with social priorities. It is presented as a choice between tanks and teachers, missiles and hospitals, guns and butter.

But recent events raise a different question.

If defence spending is merely a cost, why do periods of geopolitical instability so often lead to inflation, economic hardship and rising poverty at home?

To answer that question, we must begin with a simple principle.

Security creates stability. Stability allows trade to flow. Trade keeps the essential goods of modern life moving steadily through the economy.

When supply is steady, prices remain manageable. When prices remain manageable, living standards rise.

Security, in other words, is the quiet but essential foundation of prosperity.

But the chain works in the opposite direction as well.

Weakness invites insecurity. Insecurity breeds instability. Instability disrupts trade. Disrupted trade drives prices upward. Higher prices bring poverty.

Britain is one of the world’s largest trading economies and deeply dependent on the stability of global trade.

Around ninety-five percent of our trade travels by sea, from the food that feeds us to the fuel that warms our homes

A country so exposed cannot afford to treat stability as someone else’s responsibility.

The war in Ukraine illustrates this dynamic clearly.

Russia’s invasion shattered Europe’s energy markets. Gas prices surged. Electricity prices followed. Inflation spread through the economy as energy costs filtered through supply chains and into household bills.

The British Government intervened to shield the public from the worst effects. The cost of subsidising energy bills reached £78 billion between 2022 and 2024.

But the economic consequences, for the country and the Treasury, extended far beyond those subsidies.

Inflation drove up the cost of paying pensions, benefits and servicing the national debt. Businesses faced sharply higher energy costs. Investment slowed. Production fell. Jobs were lost or never created at all.

In 2022 alone British businesses faced around £29 billion in additional energy costs compared with normal years.

Costs on that scale do not remain confined to company balance sheets. They appear later in weaker growth, reduced employment and rising poverty.

Energy prices rise and homes grow colder. Food prices rise and family budgets tighten. When prices rise across the economy, wages no longer stretch as they once did.

When stability breaks down the burden does not fall evenly. It falls first and hardest on those least able to bear it.

We are seeing the same pattern today.

The current crisis in the Persian Gulf threatens the arteries through which much of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows. When conflict threatens those routes, markets react immediately.

Energy prices have again risen. Transport costs will follow. Food prices soon after.

A crisis that begins thousands of miles away arrives quickly in the weekly shop and the household energy bill.

Yet for decades defence spending has often been treated as a cost to be trimmed.

Governments of every persuasion are tempted to grasp the headline today and leave the hardship to tomorrow. By the time the public must face the consequences of their decisions, they may already have left office.

But the saving is an illusion. And an expensive one.

Defence is not merely an expenditure. It is an insurance premium against instability. When that premium is not paid, the danger does not disappear. It merely waits.

And when the reckoning arrives, it rarely appears first in defence budgets.

It appears in higher prices, weaker wages, lost jobs and growing pressure on the welfare state.

Of course, defence spending does not automatically produce stability. Resources poorly spent may buy little security. But the absence of resources leads to instability.

Stability requires a government be both willing and able to act to preserve it.

Capability without political will only invites testing. Political will without capability invites failure.

The price of strength appears in defence budgets. The price of weakness appears everywhere else.

Over the coming days and weeks, we shall see this pattern unfold again. Instability abroad will be translated into higher prices at home.

The lesson is plain. Security neglected is never a saving. It is merely a debt deferred, and sooner or later the public must pay it.

The Government has chosen not to take part in the initial strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme. That decision, taken in the name of international law, is one the Prime Minister is fully entitled to make. Indeed, it is the decision many would expect from him.

He has long argued that the authority of international law must stand above the expediencies of power. Within the Labour Party, both in Parliament and among its supporters across the country, this view is widely shared. No one should pretend that the Government has acted contrary to its convictions, or to the political mandate upon which it was elected.

But recognising the Government’s right to take this position does not oblige us to agree with it.

Indeed, recent events have clarified several uncomfortable truths. Iran’s response to the strikes has demonstrated the danger posed by the regime and strengthened the case for preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Britain’s own response has been dangerously passive, leaving our citizens, allies and forces exposed. This passivity reflects decades of neglect that have steadily eroded the country’s ability to defend itself and those who depend upon it. And it illustrates a deeper truth: values and international law carry weight in the world only when nations possess the means to defend them.

For my part, I take a different view. The Iranian regime has declared itself, through its actions over decades, not merely an adversary but an enemy. For years it has armed and directed militias across the Middle East, sowing violence from Lebanon to Yemen, threatening states across the region, including many Arab governments. It has also sponsored terrorism beyond the Middle East, including on our own soil. These are not the actions of a state seeking peaceful coexistence.

Now, following the strikes by the United States and Israel, the regime has answered with volleys of drones and ballistic missiles launched toward nearly every nation within reach. These attacks have not been confined to military targets. Civilian infrastructure and centres of population have been struck, and states that played no direct role in the initial operation have found themselves under attack.

This behaviour should give us pause. Rather than confining its retaliation to those responsible for the strikes, Iran has responded by spreading violence across the region, threatening a wide range of states including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman. These are not the actions of a government narrowly defending itself. They are the actions of a regime seeking to demonstrate resolve, reinforce its ideological posture, and show that it is willing to destabilise the entire region in pursuit of its aims.

Such conduct reveals something important about the nature of the government in Tehran. It suggests a regime less concerned with protecting its own population from the consequences of war than with defending its authority and projecting its revolutionary ideology. A government that sanctifies martyrdom and prizes ideological struggle above stability cannot easily be assumed to share the same instinct for restraint that has governed the nuclear powers of the past.

If such a regime were to acquire nuclear weapons, the consequences would be grave. The strikes now falling across the Gulf offer a troubling glimpse of how a future crisis might unfold: retaliation not narrowly directed at combatants, but scattered across the region in order to demonstrate strength and defiance.

In this sense, Iran’s own actions have strengthened the very argument that led to the strikes against its nuclear programme.

The case for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is therefore not merely theoretical. It is grounded in the conduct the regime has already displayed.

Some will argue that the risks of confrontation are too great. Yet the alternatives have already been attempted. For more than a decade Iran has faced sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and repeated negotiations over its nuclear programme. None of these measures has halted its progress. Instead, they have coincided with the steady expansion of the missile and drone capabilities now being used to strike states across the Middle East.

What we are witnessing today would be dangerous enough if limited to conventional weapons. Were the same regime to possess nuclear arms, the consequences would be immeasurably worse.

Notwithstanding this, even if one accepts the Government’s decision not to participate in the opening strikes, it does not follow that Britain should remain passive.

The failure to strike at the regime’s ability to attack our allies, our territory, and our forces in the region is a grave mistake. It is weak, it is hesitant, and it sends the wrong message to friend and foe alike. British citizens live and work across the Middle East, and British service personnel are stationed there in defence of our interests. Yet by declining to act against the systems now being used to threaten them, the Government signals that attacks upon them are tolerated without consequence.

This is not prudence. It is abdication.

Equally troubling is the absence of adequate defensive preparation. The failure to pre-position sufficient defensive assets, most notably Type 45 destroyers capable of providing advanced air defence, in both the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf represents a serious lapse in judgement. These ships exist precisely for moments such as this: to shield forces, protect civilians, and intercept attacks before they reach their targets. Their absence is not merely an operational oversight; it is a humiliation for the Government and indeed for the country.

The Government, like its predecessors over many years, has placed the foundation of our national security in maintaining strong alliances, both at the diplomatic and military level, with partners across NATO, the Middle East and further afield. Yet its inability to act, both in lacking the political will to defend our allies and in refusing to support a defence establishment equal to the task, means our allies will rightly question the value of our friendship and support.

But this failure did not begin with the present crisis. It is the result of years of naivety and neglect.

For decades successive governments have been content to exist in a dream world where the threat of force, of state-on-state violence, is somehow something humanity has moved beyond. They have ignored the repeated lessons of history and thus abandoned the foresight those lessons might have provided. As a result, they have made savings on the nation’s defences repeatedly, savings in the short term at the cost of capability in the long term.

Yet it remains true that what appears economical today often proves ruinously expensive tomorrow. When crises arrive, as they inevitably do, we discover that the tools required to defend ourselves and our allies have been allowed to rust away.

The current Government, particularly though not uniquely, seems uneasy with the idea that the objective of British foreign policy should be the defence of British interests around the globe. It prefers instead the related, but distinct, aim of defending “British values”, and upholding the principles of international law.

I do not intend here to argue the validity of such a position. Yet whether one sets out to defend interests or values, the same requirement remains: the ability to act.

Values unsupported by the means to defend them are little more than declarations. If Britain wishes to uphold international law, to defend liberal principles, or to deter those who would violate them, it must possess the capability to do so.

That in turn requires more than strong alliances. Alliances are indispensable, but they cannot substitute for capability. A country that becomes wholly dependent upon its allies, for critical military capabilities, for mass, and even for the production of its own weapons, inevitably surrenders a measure of its freedom of action.

And with that freedom goes something else: the independence of its foreign policy.

One cannot demand the protection of allies while declining to support them in return. Nor can one claim the authority to defend international norms while lacking the capacity to act when those norms are violated. If a nation subordinates its defence to others, it will sooner or later find its diplomacy subordinated as well.

If Britain wishes its values to carry weight in the world, it must therefore ensure that it retains the means to defend them, both alongside its allies and, if necessary, alone.

This is where we might look to France for instruction. France remains a committed NATO ally, working closely with partners across Europe and beyond. Yet it has preserved a degree of strategic independence that allows it the freedom to act, or not to act, when its national interests demand it. It can cooperate with allies, challenge them, or operate without them when necessary.

Britain once possessed a similar capacity. It should seek to regain it.

When the Government finally publishes its long-awaited Defence Industrial Strategy, independence should lie at its heart. Not isolation, but independence: the ability to act, to defend, and to decide without waiting upon the permission or capabilities of others.

The alternative is the course we see today, hesitation abroad, vulnerability at home, and the slow erosion of the security we once took for granted.

Nations rarely lose their influence in a single moment. More often it slips away through a series of small decisions, each defended as reasonable, each justified as temporary, until one day the loss is complete.

The age of comfortable assumptions is ending. Alliances grow less certain, rival powers more aggressive, and war itself is changing before our eyes. The lessons of Ukraine and the Middle East are plain enough. If we fail to prepare for this new reality, the cost will not be measured in abstract notions of national power, but in lives: the lives of our servicemen, our citizens, and those of our allies.

This is not a matter of prestige. It is a matter of protection.

We are entering a period of consequences.