Let’s drive people into the shadow economy to shrink the shadow economy

One of those facepalm moments:

Every worker in Britain will require a new government-issued digital ID card to stop illegal immigrants from “slipping into the shadow economy” and driving down wages, Sir Keir Starmer has announced.

The shadow economy is where people already don’t use national insurance numbers, work permits, identity papers and the like. That’s what it actually means. The shadow economy - as opposed to the black - is where people do things which are, by themselves, legal but do it in illegal ways. Illegal in the sense of being without tax, without regulation, without permission or licences. That’s simply what the definition is.

So we are to institute another licence, another condition that must be fulfilled to be in the white economy, and this is going to reduce the shadow one, is it?

Or, perhaps, will everyone who cannot gain this new digital ID card, this new permission, find themselves only able to earn a crust in the shadow economy and thereby expand the workforce of that shadow economy?

Tim Worstall