IT CAN be hard work writing an opinion column sometimes. Every week, you have to find a subject that fires you up enough to write 800 words. When it’s been a quiet week, and all you’ve done is pick and press apples - and you wrote about that this time last year (and the year before that) - you can be scratching around for ideas.

What you need is something to sink your teeth into, perhaps a combination of a couple of red-hot, toxic topics - say, digital ID and immigration.

But wait - what’s this? Boom. Thank you kindly, Mr Starmer.

The PM says digital identification will be “a bedrock of the modern state” by 2029. If implemented, it will be essential to secure employment in the UK.

The benefits: all the information required by employers will be in one place, on your smartphone - no more turning the spare room upside down for different papers.

And crucially, it will make it tougher for illegal immigrants to get low-paid work under the radar. The authorities will know exactly who’s in the country and working legally.

But, say the opposition, it won’t stop people crossing the channel to get here. The employers who ignore papers will ignore this too, meaning the only people who use it will be those who abide by current laws already.

And ID cards have long been contentious. Tony Blair tried to introduce them 16 years ago, but the idea was canned by the subsequent coalition government, in what Nick Clegg described as “a major step in dismantling the surveillance state”.

At the time of writing, almost 2.5-million people have signed a petition (online, how ironic), against the idea. Parliament considers all petitions with more than 100,000 signatures for a debate, so this seems pretty conclusive.

I’ve seen at least two Cornwall councillors voice their concerns on social media. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, especially Big Brother, is commonly referenced among the reasons why such a scheme should never be entertained.

I’ve never had any real conviction, for or against. I’ve lived abroad, in places that have ID cards, and they never seemed that sinister for it.

That said, when on holiday in a European country (possibly Switzerland, which has just narrowly voted in favour of the kind of e-ID cards we’re currently debating), the Other Half and I were admiring a pretty view when a grave-looking police officer asked us to produce our ID cards for no apparent reason.

When I told him UK citizens didn’t have ID cards, he replied: “Your passports, then.” These, I explained, were in the hotel safe, as opposed to being in our pockets where they could be lifted or simply lost, resulting in major inconvenience. He regarded us suspiciously, but mercifully pursued us no further.

I might not be dead against digital ID, but I am deeply uncomfortable about why they are being proposed: to pacify all those people banging on about immigration. It’s like a national obsession, with all the tedious flag-waving and painting, and the Labour government is allowing it to dictate the agenda.

While ONS figures show immigration has pushed up the population, illegals form a very small percentage of this. The only reason it gets so much coverage is the horrendously dangerous nature of their arrival. In my view, the people who deserve to be vilified are not the immigrants themselves, but the parasites making vast sums out of sticking as many as possible on flimsy vessels without a care for whether they live or die.

One has to ask: will digital ID really help solve the problem? Who will be stopped and asked for it: people of colour? Those with foreign accents?

What about the digitally excluded – the elderly, the vulnerable, those who can’t afford a smartphone, those who don’t want one? (Lord knows I wish I didn’t have one sometimes).

And once it has been rolled out, what kind of bolt-ons will be introduced in the future, until we have exactly the kind of full-on ID card no one seems to want?

The digital ID card has been floated during a week when nefarious hackers have halted production at Jaguar Landrover and threatened nursery school parents the dark web. Meanwhile, GP representatives are bemoaning the admin workload created by the NHS app, which takes them away from actual general practice.

And yet the headlines as I write are all about Sir Keir Starmer’s interviews at the Labour Party conference, ostensibly labelling all Reform supporters (or at least their policies) “racists”. Nigel Farage, pictured over lunch in a Cornish pub, must be thrilled with the exposure, and to see his party painted as the real opposition to government.

To Labour, I say: why not go back to the drawing board and think about what your own party stands for? Stop letting the tail wag the dog.