 One of the surprise announcements from the government on Monday's so-called Freedom Day was that vaccine passports would be made mandatory for entry to clubs from the end of September. Now the announcement follows the government suggesting they had ruled out the idea of vaccine passports. It also runs counter to many pass statements from the Prime Minister. Stammer brought up those inconsistencies at Prime Minister's questions. Why is it okay to go to a nightclub for the next six weeks without proof of a vaccine or a test? And then from September it will only be okay to get into a nightclub if you've got a vaccine ID card. A minister. Mr Speaker, I think the the Labour leader traditionally has a choice in the national crisis and that is whether to get behind the government and to be or to offer constructive opposition or to try endlessly to oppose for the sake of for the sake of it in trying to score cheap political points. Everybody can see that we have to wait until the end of September by which time it's only fair to the younger generation when they will all have been offered two jabs before we consider something like asking people to be double jab before they go into a nightclub. That's blindingly obvious to everybody. It's common sense and I think most people in this country understand it. Most people in this country want to see the younger generation encouraged to get vaccinations. That is what with great respect to the right honourable gentleman he should be doing rather than trying endlessly to score what I think are vacuous political points. Now following PMQ's Labour announced they would be voting against the introduction of vaccine passports for nightclubs. A Labour spokesperson said, we oppose the use of COVID vaccination status for everyday access to venues and services. It's costly, open to fraud and is impractical. Being double jab doesn't prove you aren't carrying the virus. Testing for access to venues would be more efficient and would give people and businesses more certainty. Now that position from Labour could be very consequential. There are already 42 Tories who have indicated that they will vote against vaccine passports and the Lib Dems have said they will do the same. That vote is expected to take place after the summer recess. So that's in September. Presumably that vote will have to happen early in September so that it can be implemented by late September. Darlia, have Labour here made the right decision? I think vaccine passports are a bad and unnecessary idea. They're bad because it sets the stage for a huge infrastructure of data collection, of data storage, of tracking that leaves us extremely vulnerable to an even more empowered big tech sector, big tech industry, especially the linking of health data to identity has particularly worrying consequences when it comes to surveillance, privacy and the unaccountability and the lack of transparency of private corporate big tech power. What basically a vaccine database would essentially do is create this huge centralised database that tracks where everyone has gone at all times, what services they're using. That's extremely rich and empowering data. Whoever holds that data and has access to that data has a huge amount of power. The idea that once we started down that road, that we'll be able to control where it goes, especially if it's in the hands of private companies, is laughable. I think it's very different as much as privacy concerns around the Track and Trace app are really important. This is a much further along step because the Track and Trace app didn't track location, it didn't track where you were, it didn't connect your Track and Trace identity to other biometrics or your health data. It tracked connections, which has its own issues, but there's a gulf between those two different kinds of data collection. Not only are data leaks possible, but there are severe implications there of this data being potentially shared with the police, shared with the home office, with private corporations who will do with that data what they will. And it will also re-entrench existing inequalities because we already have this issue of essentially vaccine passports already being in place for international travel, where it's done in a way where the mobility of people from the global south is going to be many of whom are not vaccinated. And if they are vaccinated, it's with the Russian or the Chinese vaccine, which is not recognized as legitimate by some Northern American and European countries. And obviously the reason that the global south is in that position is because big farmer have patented the technology so that they can't be reproduced cheaply, and Europe and the US have bought up a load of the vaccine supply so they couldn't be fairly distributed. So there's already a problem of inequality of mobility as movement to the north from the south is going to be policed and managed and reduced through what is essentially, like I said, already a vaccine passport system, but an actual vaccine passport system would already further entrench that. Black minority ethnic communities are less likely to be vaccinated due to legitimate historic distrust of healthcare institutions. And there are so many implications there as well, especially the idea, I think Michael Gove said something like, oh, this definitely won't happen in the UK because the UK is not a paper carrying country. And I would say, ask that to any migrant that has tried to live in this country and get basic services since the introduction of the hostile environment, this idea of having to produce documentation in order to access service provision, although it doesn't go quite as far as hospitality and bars, but to access basic service provision, that is a reality for many migrants already living in this country. But I also think it's really not necessary. It's really crucial to look at who is actually pushing for this. It's not public health officials. The World Health Organization actually advises against vaccine passports. The institutions that are calling for this are big tech and increasingly authoritarian governments kind of like our own who are, despite saying that there's no plans for vaccine passports are kind of actually on the side funding pilot schemes for vaccine passports. So they're sort of saying one thing and doing another, which doesn't help with the whole trust issue. But the reason that they're desperate to pose this as a solution is because they are seeing big money signs. They are seeing this as building an opportunity for a big juicy data grab through building infrastructures of surveillance and data tracking that would have been unimaginable under any other circumstances. We know that big companies, that governments use crises in order to force through systems and changes that would have been unacceptable. Otherwise, we've all read Naomi Klein, we've all read the shock doctrine and I'm afraid that's what we're seeing here. There are so many other measures that we could implement that would manage this virus before getting anywhere near this extreme of measure. Things like continuing the public mandate of masks with like clear public health messaging and clear enforcement, things like suspending intellectual property laws that stop global South countries from making and distributing their own vaccines, making a single effective vaccine widely available to everyone, supporting people who need to self-isolate from work. But those policies don't benefit big tech, they don't benefit big pharma. So instead, we're going for these incredibly elaborate and risky and highly problematic solutions and bypassing the very easy ones that actually could help us equalize society rather than further entrench existing inequalities. And those solutions are kind of right in front of us. I've kind of changed my position on vaccine passport because I thought earlier it probably wouldn't be necessary because I thought by the time you'd rolled them out, we'd have herd immunity anyway, so it'd be a bit of a moot point. What's happened since then is a Delta variant came along and because it's so transmissible, actually we would need something like 96% of the population to be vaccinated for us to have herd immunity. So it's probably never going to happen. That's from Adam Kaczarski, he's a modeler who's on spy M, the modelling group that advises Sage. So I do think we are going to have flare-ups of COVID, probably indefinitely, it's going to become endemic. We might have super vaccines that mean that we can overcome that eventually in a few years time, but I think this winter is going to be quite grim. I think there are going to be quite a lot of calls to close nightclubs, close social events and to be honest, this seems to me something that could quite possibly keep those clubs open. And I kind of disagree that this will be necessarily this dystopian thing where loads of data is collected because there is already a vaccine passport, it's the NHS app. If you get your passport, you can, sorry, if you get your second vaccine, you can plug that into your NHS app or you can register a lateral flow test in the NHS app and then you show it to a nightclub. It's already being implemented in some nightclubs, just a minority of them. So I don't really get the dystopian angle, the nightclub doesn't register the person, they just look at your app, the app tells you or tells the nightclub that you've been vaccinated. This data is already stored on the NHS database, they know exactly who was vaccinated and when, that's why when you go to get your vaccine, they type you in and that's on the NHS app. I don't quite understand all the fear about it and for me, if one thing can make going out and having fun possible and safe during this winter, or it's never going to be completely safe by the way, make it safer than it otherwise would have been, I don't think the counter arguments are strong enough to dissuade me from thinking that's probably necessary, right? I mean, what do you make of those points? Well, I think that there is still, you know, the vaccine, the problem with the vaccine passport is that there is a more space for a stringent relationship between your health data and your actual personal identity. And also, I'm not sure that it is actually as effective because in Israel, we have been seeing, you know, I mean, there's a whole issue with Israel's vaccination program that they're not actually vaccinating everyone that's in the country. But, you know, with a high vaccination rate, using these, they had like, you know, these green passes so that, you know, nightclubs and bars, etc., would only have, they would have vaccinated people indoors. And if you weren't vaccinated, if you didn't have a green card, you would have to sit outside or you wouldn't be allowed in. They are having to go back into a lockdown because it hasn't actually curbed it as much as we might think. And I think that, like I sort of mentioned before, before we kind of get to these forms of data collection and data storage, which, you know, the question is who's going to design that? Who's going to own that? How is it going to be protected? You know, I think that there are, you know, many concerns about the Track and Trace app as well. But, you know, the Track and Trace app would not be as invasive as I think what is being provided, what is being proposed here. The question is, you know, first of all, what kind of infrastructure and what kind of system are we building and how can that be used in the future? But also, there are so many stages that we could actually implement before we get to that point. And it feels like we're going straight to the most risky, the most problematic and sort, you know, solution rather than sort of catching that low hanging fruit at the bottom, which we know from the management of pandemics, the management of viruses in the past before any of this technology would have been available, were adequately managed. So I think it feels like the motive is somewhat different, because we aren't, we're having governments that are pursuing these solutions and, you know, big tech that are trying to sell these solutions to public health advocates and public health experts who aren't convinced of their necessity, given the risks, instead of actually focusing our resources and pushing for the more simple but more equalizing solutions that are right in front of us. Well, I mean, in terms of the Israel example, they stopped using their green pass system in June because they thought mission accomplished. And now they've had some outbreaks and now they're meeting to discuss whether to bring it back. So I'm not sure that point stands, but also it's worth saying, even with a vaccine passport, you would still get outbreaks in night clubs. So I'm not suggesting that if you bring in vaccine passports, you won't get any outbreaks in nightclubs. I just think you're quite likely get less outbreaks in nightclubs. And given this winter is going to be about trying to control the size of outbreaks, especially when we're also having flu at the same time and hospitals are under pressure, I think anything that keeps those institutions open, go for it. I also just don't, you know, we do have the infrastructure for this already is the NHS app. Most people that go to nightclubs have a smartphone. I think you get into much bigger problems if this were introduced in pubs, for example, because lots of people go to pubs who don't have smartphones. But when it comes to nightclubs, the overwhelming majority of people there are going to be quite used to showing someone a document before they go in, which is normally just your photo ID to prove your age. So for me, it doesn't seem that big a deal. But we probably shouldn't debate this all night. So we will come back to it later. Do you want to just I want to give you the final word on this? So what I would say is that one thing that is different because data is only useful. And I say useful both for bad ends and good, like primarily for bad ends, it's useful when it's connected in particular ways. And what we've seen with the NHS test and trace app or track and trace app is that the connections between, as I said, your identity and all of the things that might come, all of the other ways of marking your identity with what exact nightclub you've been to or what cafe you've been to or every grocery store that you've entered into, it's that connection of those data points that provides the risk as it were. That is not as much of an issue. When you show your ID at a nightclub, that's not logged in a big database system that connects the fact that you've been to that nightclub on that day. And that you're also a female age, 28, who also has this Facebook profile and this Instagram profile. And do you know what I mean? So I think that there's a big difference really between showing your ID or even the track and trace app, which doesn't require you to, you can put your NHS number in, but you don't have to. You can just have your Bluetooth on and have exposure notifications on. Whereas in order for these vaccine passports to work, I imagine that it would have to be linking your location data to your health data, to your biometric data, to your personal identification and ID data. And who knows if it could also be linked to things like national insurance or other things. So I think that's where the risk comes here.