A secure, optional digital ID could be useful. But not in today’s UK. Why? Because the state has already shown it can’t be trusted with our data.
- Snoopers’ Charter (Investigatory Powers Act 2016): ISPs must keep a year’s worth of records of which websites you visit. More than 40 agencies—from MI5 to the Welsh Ambulance Service—can request it. MI5 has already broken the rules and kept data it shouldn’t have.
- Encryption backdoors: Ministers can issue “Technical Capability Notices” to force tech firms to weaken or bypass end-to-end encryption.
- Online Safety Act: Expands content-scanning powers that experts warn could undermine privacy for everyone.
- Palantir deals: The government has given £1.5 billion+ in contracts to a US surveillance firm that builds predictive-policing tools and runs the NHS’s new Federated Data Platform. Many of those deals are secret.
- Wall-to-wall cameras: Millions of CCTV cameras already make the UK one of the most surveilled countries in the world.
A universal digital ID would plug straight into this ecosystem, creating an always-on, uniquely identified record of where you go and what you do. Even if paper or card options exist on paper, smartphone-based systems will dominate in practice, leaving those without phones excluded or coerced.
I’m not against digital identity in principle. But until the UK government proves it can protect basic privacy—by rolling back mass data retention, ending encryption backdoor demands, and enforcing genuine oversight—any national digital ID is a surveillance power-grab waiting to happen.
I'm certain it's worked well in other countries, but I have zero trust in the UK government to handle this responsibility.
The ID cards as realized in many other countries are comparatively benign, because they are a physical credential in the possession of the person concerned. The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire. Distributed storage in action.
The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database. This database is the definitive record of what you are allowed to do or not do (like reside and work). Which can be changed or deleted at the stroke of a key, through human error or malice. Then what?
When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary. The "digital ID" as set out today can't work for its ostensible purpose. Therefore its actual purpose isn't being declared. Not hard to connect the dots.
> The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire
This is not true. Government agencies generally look up your ID as necessary to check if it's still valid.
Stopped for speeding? The cop is going to look up your driver's license.
Leaving the country? They're running your passport number.
Starting a job? They're checking the status of your SSN.
The physical ID is good enough for low-stakes stuff like renting a car with a driver's license, or proving your age to get into a bar. But it's already not trusted on its own for any of the serious stuff you're talking about, like where you can reside and work.
No the proposal is in line with your first paragraph. 'Attribute level proofs' (cyptographically signed data) stored in the user wallet, with those signatures coming from verification companies polling an API in front of government departments. The other side of it is a trust registry holding verification service public keys for signature checks..
The op is incorrect. The 'database entry' is the one that exists right now at the DVLA for driving licenses or HMPO for passports. Private sector verification services poll that data to verify the data entered by the user in onboarding. That's it.
"Just one more bit of regulation will solve the problem" is how Britain became the most centralised country in Western Europe. The sad thing is that the majority of the population still buy it.
There was recently a request by the police for new laws about overpowered electric bicycles being ridden on pavements. Yes, they want a law against riding an already illegal vehicle in a place it is already illegal to ride it.
Now they want to make it illegal for employers to illegally give a job to people it was already illegal to give a job to by making them have a new ID, when it was already illegal to give someone a job without getting proof of their right to work in the UK!
Doesn't a physically held digital ID also do that? Assuming the encryption is strong, verifying that the data on the ID has the proper cryptographic signature should provide assurance that the ID is real, shouldn't it?
I guess, depending on how it's implemented, maybe an ID could be cloned and still appear valid, but that seems like a possibility for the UK's approach as well (the clone would just point to the same database entry).
In a good modern implementation, it should be extremely hard to produce a physical card with an authenticated pointer to the database, because that would be also signed.
But considering that they've been retiring things like biometric residence cards in favour of web-based systems, it's possible there will be no physical component.
Yes, I think you're probably right. But it still solves other problems such as "the app is a lookalike". If the app is basically an ID delivery mechanism that allows an operator to call up your photo, it becomes a relatively foolproof way to identify you accurately.
We have this is NSW in Australia: the Services NSW app provides a digital drivers license which is guaranteed to be accepted by authorities as legitimate.
>but the more good faith reason for a database entry is it should eliminate fake IDs.
Really? If anything it would make them easier. Hackers routinely break into government databases to exfiltrate information. An ID attribute databases would be no exception, for exfiltration, or simply modification of data. Ie: creating a fake ID.
>When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary.
Penury and deportation are quite a bit of scope already! Maybe they'll put an "arrest" bit in there. Warrants are already a thing. I don't see the UK going in for murder just yet. What's left?
Not just that, but currently, requiring real data to register to eg. social networks (reddit, hn,...) is hard. With everyone having a digital ID on their phones, tying their identity to their real ID will be easy, you'll just "sign" (or whatever) your reddit registration with your ID and your real name will be tied to that account. Combine this with EU chat control (and UK alternatives.. and well, EU digital ID alternatives), and the era of semi-anonymous internet use is over.
>The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire. Distributed storage in action.
Not really. It's part of identity management or whatever it's called to have an ability to recall ids, because they get lost, stolen and people to who they are issued die.
>When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary.
What are the scary implication really? Most of the EU and beyond has some kind of login to the government capability. And?
What's the threat model really? The government will revoke your fancy thing to report taxes digitally for no reason and bankrupt you? They can do so without such roundabout ways.
Was reading through your post, finding it difficult to find fault with anything you were saying, but something wasn't sitting right. And then ...
> I'm certain it's worked well in other countries
It has! In the Netherlands for example, it's just an incredibly convenient system, and if there's anything dodgy going on I'm not aware of it.
So what makes the UK so different to the Netherlands? Genuine question, because I really don't know. My only guess is that the people of the Netherlands hold their politicians to account, whereas nothing ever seems to happen to UK politicians whose corruption is so severe that they're sometimes literally criminal.
So the Netherlands may not be the best example to use as a positive example here.
Notoriously, the national identity system was used during World War II as a system for discovering and eliminating the Jewish community[1]. The lessons learned from that are a frequent topic of discussion in civil liberties groups, and the Dutch experience is often cited, both global conversations and within the Netherlands -- e.g. On Liberation Day 2015, Bits of Freedom held its annual Godwin Lecture on the risks of prioritising ID efficiency over civil liberties[2].
It may be that special protections were coded into the current system to prevent this from happening again, I don't know the details.
Certainly, the reputation for how obligatory papers have been (mis)used in mainland Europe since Napoleonic times have fed into the anglo world's suspicion around introducing similar regulations[3]. There are several recurring memes around how compulsory documents are a sign of an authoritarian environment.
My response as to the difference is the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Something that has already been branded as the Brit Card is simply something that wouldn't work in Northern Ireland, and that the name passed any scrutiny say an awful lot.
Ireland is not Britain, and people from Northern Ireland can chose to identify as British, Irish or Both by birthright.
A "Brit Card" is not something a significant portion of people would want.
I personally am more disgusted by the nationalistic naming, but I also don't like the idea of needing a smartphone or my walle when walking.
If these aren't true details then the messaging has been poor, per form, and needs to be addressed, quickly.
Because they pinky promise?
It'll be required to produce one like producing a driving license is required, but you don't need to have it with you.
It'll be required because pubs/bars etc will require it.
It'll not be required like giving a traffic stop breath sample is not required or like giving up your password is not required.
Imagine it was called IrishID or similar, help you to have empathy for how half of NI residents might feel about Brit-anything?
I guess it depends on its design (does it set up the dystopian infrastructure or not) and then more so on the legislation around it. It's already not uncommon to need your passport for work, making it a law to produce for any work would be the actual thing that changes this.
I get your point about IrishID, but be realistic, none of this is surprising considering the current state of things. I could make some controversial statements in this regard but I'll avoid the flames (I sympathise with you before you place me in the wrong box).
Huh? Everyone carries their phone everywhere and an ID card on an app is carried everywhere. When you stay at a hotel you might have to produce it, go to a doctors appointment,... and so on
Irish and British citizenship are de facto equivalent throughout the UK: any Irish person can simply decide to turn up in London without getting any kind of visa or asking any permission from anyone and live, work, or basically do anything a British person is allowed to do. So I’m curious how this will affect Irish people more broadly, not just in NI. Will they need to apply for this card?
The common travel area + Brit_card might result in an interesting pattern where ID is by association rather than territorial location. For instance, as nationalists reject it and use only IRE/EU equivalents where possible. The passport is somewhat similar already. Would people reject services and jobs in N.I.? Completely possible and it already happens with people working "down south" aka down the road.
The civil liberties concerns, particularly in N.I. (historically speaking), are also important to consider. There is quite a high capacity for discriminatory practices in the region from all angles.
On the other side. The British government are lowering themselves to the position of "just another app on my phone". A system riddled with viruses, cyber attacks, etc. Further, what is to stop groups simply setting up and alternative ID system running on btc or something in the future...if this becomes the norm? At first it would be useless and a farce. Later a complete separate system.
Anyway, horrible idea all round. They clearly have not thought this through. Paper ids and loose associations are things I am a fan of in the anglophone world.
When I moved to the Netherlands I was shocked to find out you have to maintain a registered address with the government.
The government also decides how many non-family members can register at an address, so in Amsterdam it is common for people to remain registered at there parents while subletting a room in an apartment.
You also get a DigiD which very convenient but also terrifying, especially when I walk around my neighborhood and see plaque’s in the ground for the victims of the holocaust who lived here.
My Dutch girlfriend does not believe me when I tell here that you don’t have to register where you live with the government in the anglophone world. It’s just so engrained in the society that anything else seems absurd.
Here in New Zealand, you're required to be enrolled to vote, even if you never intend to actually vote. Enrolling requires an address. I imagine it's similar in Australia, where actually voting is required by law.
I believe in New Zealand other government agencies aren't allowed to access your data without your consent though.
Maybe it doesn't make it any easier but your question does remind us that cataloguing and categorising people can be dangerous. I accept that there are good reasons that the state could use this information, but we should also be alert to possible abuses.
Without looking, I honestly don't know if the passport and driving licence lists this information. But the census certainly does.
It's the difference between proportional voting vs winner takes it all. In the latter case you can't really hold politicians accountable, as you will have to choose between effectively throwing your vote away or voting for the one opposition candidate, that often will be just as bad.
While the UK have some level of representativeness, each circuit has a winner takes it all structure, making change quite hard to achieve on a larger scale.
This might be a "grass is greener" thing. Do elected representatives actually have higher approval rating, or enact policies that better fit with public opinion, under proportional systems? Sure it'd probably make things a little better, but it won't actually solve anything hard, I think. All Western countries are struggling (and mostly failing) to deal with the same problems regardless of details like electoral system.
With proportionate representation you get what _should_ happen, in my opinion, which is sometimes nothing. If the coalition can't decide on something, then it doesn't happen, which is the correct outcome because not enough people agree about it. It represents the people (who also can not agree on it).
The alternative is a decision that most people don't agree with.
That sounds like kind of a mirror of some of peoples biggest complaints regarding bureaucracy and committees. Deadlock can not only be worse than an imperfect solution, it can be weaponized by a minority to exert outsized power and extract otherwise unthinkable concessions. We see this sometimes in the US House, where more fringe or radical groups within parties can block the literally functioning of the actual country, safe in their assumptions that the two parties will not form a majority coalition and that the parties as a whole will take more damage from the fallout than the radical groups.
I'm not saying that that makes the system worse, mind you. I'm not even saying you're wrong that it's a better system. I just think anyone who thinks any one system is the easy, obvious fix to fair and just representational government is either shortsighted, or has different priorities than I do.
That's ironically just something the British government used to pride themselves on, Pragmatism.
If it's important enough or dysfunctional enough a quick decision will be taken. There's clearly deadlock in first past post too, look at the US, if neither party advocates for it at all, it gets nowhere.
My view is it's always organised elites making the decisions, no matter the system. Nominally left-wing parties often make brazen right-wing moves, and vice-versa. The votes that matter are those of the MPs, Congress members etc. which are always influenced by a range of factors and organised factions. That's the actual decision-making mechanism.
It’s the organized elites, true, but they aren’t a monolithic block either. In a proportional system they also must spread their influence on many parties. This is a good thing. With a single party there is a greater risk of a cordyceps infection taking over, see Republicans.
IMHO the simple change that would have the biggest effect on the American political system would be to require Congresspeople to live full-time in their districts and conduct all official business over videoconference and e-mail. Lots of behavioral science has shown that the biggest generator of trust and allegiance is physical proximity and face-to-face interactions. Make all reps have their face to face interactions with their constituents and maybe they will actually start representing their constituents. It also makes lobbying a lot less economical (instead of hiring one lobbyist that can have lunch with 435 representatives, you would need 435 lobbyists, or at least 435 plane trips) and gerrymandering a bit less practical (there's a decent chance the rep would no longer live in the district and be forced to give up their seat).
That and ensuring a bidirectional feedback mechanism between the executive and legislative branch, so that laws that aren't enforced by an administration fall off the books, and presidents that don't enforce the laws lose their job. Right now, the legal corpus of the U.S. is a constantly-accreting body, which means that no matter what the President wants to do, they can find some law somewhere to justify it, and then anything they don't want to do, they just say "We don't have the resources to enforce this". This gives the President all the power. They should be a servant to the law, not its arbiter.
It's the opposite of what you say. Proportional representation isn't accountable because you don't know what coalition you're voting for - coalitions are done in backrooms after the election. Winner takes all is more accountable because the coalitions are done before the election (aka political parties). Parties are made up of different factions and they're agreed before the election.
I guess you don't live in the UK, because winner takes all is far worse for backroom deals. The deals just end up being between factions within the same party!
Deals and bargaining all happen AFTER a party takes power and completely hidden until a government can't pass their own bills like the Labour attempt to reform welfare.
With proportional representation the deals are made in order to form a government, BEFORE it has power, and are between separate political parties.
Sure there may be agreements that are not all made public, but these are much harder to keep in the "backroom".
This time everyone voted for Starmer and got friend-of-Epstein Mandelson via McSweeney as a cut-out.
PMs don't drive the agenda. The UK is one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. The people driving the agenda are billionaire and multi-millionaire donors.
PM is a sales job, not a strategy job, and increasingly ridiculous PMs have been selected because the donors have had enough of liberal democracy as a concept. If it stops working - which it pretty much has - there's going to be less resistance to removing it altogether.
Which is why there's resistance to Digital ID. There's widespread distrust - with reason - of the political establishment right across the divide.
I think he's right, actually. It rings true with what we see here in the Netherlands. People don't feel like they're "throwing their vote away" if they vote for a minor party, so politicians can't have a laid back attitude.
There are efforts to make this happen in the us starting locally and working up. The states are left to decide how they implement elections on their own with a couple of exceptions. There is a tragedy of the commons aspect to it though, as if some states adopt proportional representation but not others the ones that do not adopt it gain advantage. Ranked choice voting is taking hold much faster than pr in the us, and it is pretty slow too. It can happen though. Both are viewed as being left leaning, which doesn't really make sense to me.
If their minor party doesn't end up as part of the governing coalition, there's no sense in which people feel like their vote wound up having no effect?
That's not really true. It just means there is a gradient of success rather than outright success or loss. Particular portions of what you voted for may be successful.
First past the post means you take it all or leave it all, policywise, small things are likely to fall through the cracks.
Don't vote. By voting, you partake in a system unable to give most people effective representation. By voting, you ostensibly accept your own alienation.
This is bad advice. By voting, you accept nothing. By not voting, you merely lose the small power that voting grants you. (Why do you think people are working so hard to disenfranchise voters in the US?)
Construct better systems, by all means, but don't just ignore the system that exists.
Mandatory ID cards are a cultural no-no in the UK. They were required during WW2, then discontinued in peacetime. People burned them in the street. You are not required to show ID to a police officer. Even when driving you don’t need to show a license on the spot, though if stopped for cause you have to present it at a police station within three days. At least those were the rules when I was a young driver there.
The UK has an idiosyncratic relationship with freedom. Technically you have little because (formally limited) monarchy. In practice there’s this aversion to IDs, things like freedom to roam which gives a lot of access to private property, and the ability to get citizenship elsewhere and keep UK, which republics like the US and India won’t allow.
And yet there’s massive camera surveillance from the recent nanny state. And libel laws mean you have to be careful what you print about people. Odd place. Maybe the weather inspires it.
Yes, and this cultural attitude really goes way back, like since pre-1500s for England. Then throw Scotland and N.I. into the mix and there is absolutely no interest in this type of system...to put it mildly!
You assert that the US does not allow dual citizenship, but that is wrong:
>U.S. law does not require a U.S. citizen to choose between U.S. citizenship and another (foreign) nationality (or nationalities). A U.S. citizen may naturalize in a foreign state without any risk to their U.S. citizenship.
I know absolutely tons of people with US + one or more other citizenships. You are misinformed. IDK if there is technically some law against it, but if there is, that law is totally unenforced.
I don't understand why Americans hold freedom of speech / the First Amendment in such high regard.
What does it buy you?
Major corruption, abuse and misconduct still happens. Being able to criticise your government doesn't seem to matter in the social media age. Look at the state of politics in the US right now.
Seems like it's slightly redundant these days – a bit anachronistic?
Kind of odd the obsession with it.
(p.s.: All the social media companies being from the US, of course – thanks for all the misinformation, disinformation and hate speech platforms along with all that 'free speech'!).
Well, for one thing, it's not a transactional question of what it "buys". It's a matter of principle and defense against future repression or manipulation by politicians on a power trip.
For example, given Trump's current and blatant attempts to crush free expression against his own policies and bullshit, or even those who constantly insult and criticize him (whining about it like a little kid actually) imagine how much easier he'd have had it if there were no U.S 1st amendment to use against him.
There's an example of its value. It's just one of many.
If you think being able to protect free expression and the ability to speak out freely against power and its abuse is anachronistic, then I don't know what else to say except that you're a naive or dishonest fool, and possibly part of the very problem in places where péople just don't seem to care that under pretext X or Y, they can be stifled at any time.
Yes, the social media companies produce, or facilitate the production of, vast amounts of misinformation, disinformation and even hate speech, but guess what? All that shit gets produced en masse anyhow by repressive authoritarian regimes with narratives to construct and agendas to maintain. Free speech certainly isn't at fault for its existence, given that such things have existed since there's been propaganda or a perceived need for it.
At least, in a place like the U.S, where free speech remains protected (for now at least), any misinformation, disinformation or whatever speech by those in power or outside of it who create it, can be countered by others trying to speak more truthfully.
Try doing the same against misinformation and disinformation by government in Russia, or many other countries where "anachronistic" free speech is curtailed right to hell.
In essence, when governments can legally censor speech they decide is misinformation, disinformation or "hate speech", they can create all sorts of um, interesting, rubrics for deciding what fits under these labels, and then oops, by coincidence it can be anything that goes against their agendas. Going back to the Trump example, just pause for a moment to think about all the uncomfortable facts and opinions he loves to label as "fake news" or "misinformation" or even as hate speech. Now imagine him having the legal authority to sweep them away.
Nothing in any state guarantees against a future leadership with similar authoritarian proclivities from forming to use anti-free speech laws in similar ways.
There, my good faith response to your completely absurd line of rhetorical questioning.
My point isn't that you should wash it down the toilet because it serves no purpose (of course this is a useful strawman to employ when anyone criticises it); rather, perhaps, that obsessing about it and fully believing it can protect you against eg a Trump presidency isn't very healthy. A bit too much tunnel vision?*
> Well, for one thing, it's not a transactional question of what it "buys"
Let's not play semantics. It's just a phrase
> defense against future repression or manipulation by politicians on a power trip.
Why hasn't it defended against current or past ones? It's not a new amendment, is it?
> For example, given Trump's current and blatant attempts to crush free expression against his own policies and bullshit, or even those who constantly insult and criticize him (whining about it like a little kid actually) imagine how much easier he'd have had it if there were no U.S 1st amendment to use against him.
What has all that criticism gotten you? He's still President right? And there is a worrying number of people talking about a '3rd' term
> when governments can legally censor speech they decide is misinformation, disinformation or "hate speech"
Your government via its plethora of agencies absolutely does this
> At least, in a place like the U.S, where free speech remains protected (for now at least), any misinformation, disinformation or whatever speech by those in power or outside of it who create it, can be countered by others trying to speak more truthfully.
How's that working out?
> There, my good faith response to your completely absurd line of rhetorical questioning.
Wow, Americans really think they are protected from criticism like 'civis Romanus' were protected from harm.
I think your opinions are exactly those I was questioning. Maybe it isn't as useful as you think it is
First, I'm not an American nor do I live in the USA. My mentioning the 1st amendment is because it's the best known example of free speech protection enshrined in the constitutional law of a country.
Secondly, your logic is well off. I never said the 1st or any similar sort of legal protection for free speech is a guaranteed tool against bad government, repression and censorship. Instead it's ONE tool against these things, and better than its complete absence.
Other efforts still matter and in the U.S, we'll just have to see how they pan out, or not. That still doesn't mean that the 1st or any equivalent to it is irrelevant.
By your apparent reasoning, it's worthless because it doesn't guarantee results and that's sort of like having a fireman throw away their fire axe because it's not a sure fix against a house burning down.
Yeah, the UK's goverment does seem to be always be run by extremely unserious people. And yeah, I also don't know why this keeps being the case. It's not unique to the UK at all (actually I think it's mostly the norm, worldwide) but perhaps not quite as much the case in the Netherlands?
>> So what makes the UK so different to the Netherlands?
Id say it’s not a difference in the politicians but the citizens. Pessimism and paranoia are rampant in the UK. We already went through this ID card debate 20 years ago and the fear-mongering won. So the idea just reignites that debate with a lot of baggage.
The UK has various systems in place to ensure people are legally allowed to work, rent, etc but in reality they inconvenience people without actually catching “the bad guys”. This system would make life more convenient and make the chance of catching the bad guys higher.
In truth though the problem is dodgy employers on a large scale. Take Deliveroo or Uber Eats. The accounts are rented out to illegal workers. You could literally catch one for every order you make. But for some reason the government isn’t actually going after the obvious hanging fruit.
Because the government doesn't actually care about illegal workers. Otherwise, like you said, they would spend 1/100th the money and go after low hanging fruit.
Which begs the question - if that's not the purpose of this law, then what is?
Spying has always gone on, however, in the UK there is a lot of it. WW1, WW2 and the Cold War was all about spying. Considerable infrastructure was built to support this, culminating in 'Five Eyes'.
Furthermore, the former empire was built so that all of the telegraph and telephone lines went to London. If you wanted to make a call from one African colony to the next, London would be in on the man in the middle.
As well as this vast international capability, there is also the domestic front. During the Miners Strike in the 1980s the secret services were tasked with spying, notably on the leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill. Allegedly he used to pick up the phone and just give them a few words, either to misguide them or to tease them.
This spying continued with Northern Ireland being a 'training ground' during 'The Troubles'. There was also considerable opposition to cruise missiles in the UK during the Thatcher years and all of the people active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were under surveillance. This was not the end of it though. Eco-activism was also of interest along with a few high profile problem people.
As well as the secret services, there is also Scotland Yard. They infiltrate every anti-government single issue pressure group as a matter of course, placing people in deep cover. Two Guardian Journalists brought this to light in 2012 or so.
Then, on top of that, there are the capabilities of the big companies such as British Aerospace. They have their spies too.
Hence, on the domestic front, surveillance is vital to cut anyone down to size if they might challenge the establishment at a later date. Everything just gets nipped in the bud.
The 'Special Relationship' is the spying arrangement at the heart of 'Five Eyes'. In the USA, surveillance of the population is not allowed, so the workaround is to get the Brits to do it for them. This is how it works and has been working for decades.
If the UK secret services want to spy on someone in the UK then they will have the manpower to do it without getting caught. They will be able to get school reports, attendance at political demonstrations and much else regarding a person of interest.
There is nothing new that I have said here, Snowden and The Guardian brought all of this to light, in broad strokes. Both HUMINT and SIGINT is world leading. Compare with the USA where they have the dragnet but are not so capable when it comes to the HUMINT needed for monitoring a small group of individuals such as the leadership of a trade union.
It is for these reasons that spying has to be made easy for them, for instance by banning Huawei 5g routers on the pretence that China is using Huawei backdoors to spy on the UK. The problem was not that, it was different. With the likes of Cisco et al, the secret services can specify their own back doors, however, that is not so easy with Chinese owned companies.
There is much in the way of law that has gone along with this, for example the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 and the Terrorism Act 2000. The latter was definitely to target eco-activists, not anyone else. At the time there were eco-activist groups such as Reclaim The Streets that organised things such as rioting in the City of London with no identifiable leaders. They also did not book their protests with the police or organise security for the day, hence they needed to terminated.
9/11 brought new challenges and that brings us on to where we are today. I personally do not think this digital ID is a big deal. Any British citizen can already be easily identified even if they don't know their National Insurance number, and even if they have no photo ID in the form of a passport or a driving license. Name, date of birth and hospital of birth are the three bits of information needed. As well as the police, the NHS can work with that. As for employers and their needs to hire only people legally permitted to work in the UK, this is just for due diligence reasons from their part. If you speak with an accent that can only be British then you can meet the employer's checkbox requirements easily, with no photo ID. Just a bank statement should do.
So, where is this coming from? What plausible reason could there be for a fresh attempt at identity cards, for the umpteenth time?
Brexit...
As you know, Brexit happened and it was ugly. Due to the way that 'The Troubles' ended with the Good Friday Agreement, the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland (The Irish Republic is just 'Ireland', not any other name) has to be kept open.
What this means is that the EU is not a complete fortress, there is this imaginary border in the Irish Sea that can't be closed.
Immigration post-Brexit
A major selling point of Brexit was an end to immigration. However, due to the open border with Ireland, immigration has become a problem to the authorities, not least because working class people despise losing their jobs or getting paid less because there is a constant stream of people that will undercut them in the employment market.
What happens is that some country ends up being regime changed, as per the goals of The War Against Terror. Syria was particularly notable for the refugee situation. However, there is also Afghanistan, Iraq and everything in between up until Ukraine. What happens is very sad. People walk, hitch or smuggle themselves into Europe to arrive in one country such as Greece. Here they are looked after but they are unable to work or escape the refugee camps to buy a house, start a family and all those good things.
So they escape the cage of the EU country they first entered to try somewhere else. Maybe they get to Germany. However, in Germany, they will be asked where they came from, for example Greece, and get sent back to Greece. Maybe they try another EU country, to get sent back again. And so it goes, until someone advises them to go to Ireland, where they can walk over the border to the UK, as in Northern Ireland.
Since the UK is not in the EU, they get a fresh start at claiming asylum. This gets granted and the local authority is then likely to put them up in temporary accommodation.
Next they get 'dispersed'. What this means is that they get sent to another British town or city. Here they get temporary accommodation and a ridiculously small amount of money to live on. This money does not meet their basic needs. The asylum process leads to refugee status, which is not citizenship, however, they are permitted to work, legally. At a guess it takes two years to get to this second hoop. To get past refugee status takes even longer, if successful.
During this time the asylum seeker is not allowed their passport, the government keeps that. They can get a travel permit, however, if they return to their home country then they get banned and are not allowed back.
So that is the general process. To say immigration is out of control is an understatement to some and 'fascist' to others. It is a topic best not talked about, and the practicalities of it are not well understood. A boat crossing the English Channel full of asylum seekers are going to make the headlines of the gutter press, but this Brexit loophole situation is not something that the journalists appreciate fully, particularly if they voted for Brexit, then they are just not wanting to know.
Plausibly, the compulsory digital ID checks for work can be used to make the UK unattractive to asylum seekers that know the deal in the EU.
Currently the biggest threat to the main political parties is Farage and his Reform party. In recent polls, Reform (or whatever they are called) would sweep the board, taking seats from both the Conservatives and Labour. Due to how it works with no proportional representation, the exact outcome of this does not necessarily mean Reform would have a majority, however, it would be the end of the Conservative Party.
Hence, compulsory digital IDs would provide convenience for everyone, when dealing with the government, whilst giving the spies the primary keys they always wanted. However, for reasons of holding on to power, due to the threat of the Reform Party, there may be extra urgency.
> And so it goes, until someone advises them to go to Ireland, where they can walk over the border to the UK, as in Northern Ireland.
This is absurd. The problem is the exact opposite, nearly all IPAs in Ireland come from the UK via the common travel area. Ireland is not in Schengen and is not reachable from the continent by small boat, so there is negligible migrant flow in the opposite direction.
If a State can't be trusted with data of its citizens it can't be trusted with passports, birth certificates, or any numerous other instances of identity. Being able to identify citizens is basic and essential to the functioning of a State whereby the failure to do means the total failure of the State.
In effect the State is no longer a State and is in fact entirely dysfunctional.
I accept all these valid points, but don’t they already know exactly who we are and have a digital file on us already? I mean, I have a drivers licence and a home address and an internet connection I typically don’t use a vpn on. There’s no way they don’t have all this already right?
Italy has got an ID card since forever. Of course it was a piece of paper, it's a piece of plastic with a chip now. There is some experimentation to move that into the state app.
Everything accelerates when it becomes digital, for the better or for the worse. One thing that an ID does not do is preventing crime and allowing only legal jobs. People find a lot of ways to circumvent the rules as long as there are money to earn.
do those state apps use Play Integrity on Android? will you be required to lock yourself into Apple or Google's walled garden in order to be a citizen?
With all the cameras and phone tracking you've brought up, what does the ID give to the government that they don't already have? I get where you're coming from; I think about this myself. However, I usually come to the conclusion that concern around this is being penny wise but pound foolish, considering both the point you've brought up and also that I have a tracking device in my pocket with me at all times that already keeps track of where I am, what I'm doing and what I'm thinking. I don't really trust Google, Apple, etc. any more than the government. I've also seen governments punish people extrajudicially (or just trump up charges) when they want to, without this.
Also, is the data secure? Who else has access to that data? Will I be protected if I am in this system?
If they were open about the system, it would be one thing, but they never are. It is funny how this has cropped up gain after the recent pow wow with the yanks and the tech companies.
The fact is that no government can be trusted because they are not permanent. If a previous government had instituted, the current one would not be rolling it back. The loss of rights is like a ratchet: it only goes one way, click by click.
I wonder if zkSTARKS could help here. Prove that the validity of a statement (like "I am a citizen that is authorized to receive benefits") without revealing your precise identity.
Whizz-bang cryptographic solutions to this class of problem (digital ID, electronic voting, etc) have at least three major problems that I consider fatal:
1. The contract to build the thing will go to the lowest bidder, who is all but guaranteed not to do any of it correctly (cf. the UK Post Office scandal and Fujitsu's role in it).
2. The public has no guarantee that it is implemented in the cryptographically secure way, or that is is ONLY implemented in the cryptographically secure way (e.g., either by accident or through malice the system leaks info it shouldn't).
3. The overwhelming majority of the public are not trained in nearly enough computer science to understand "no actually this system isn't a total privacy nightmare" (assuming that it's actually implemented securely).
That's basically how the existing share code system works for non-citizens. You the worker ask the government for a share code. You provide that to the prospective employer and they can check that it is valid. The same or similar system can be used for driving license validity.
The digital ID is presumably (this is my pulling a guess from my rear end, but if I had to implement it, I'd use the existing system) an extension to cover citizens too. In fact, in principle of that's how it works, it will marginally improve privacy because current status quo is basically that citizens provide their passport to the employer to demonstrate right to work via citizenship.
I also assume that the universal use of a single system means that spot-checking any workers status becomes easier. Currently if police, say, to use a common example, stop a food delivery rider and ask for their right to work they can say they're a citizen and just don't have ID on them. The UK has long derided the idea of everyone being expected to have ID with them with phrases like "papieren bitte", but it does mean that the authorities basically cannot check working statuses unless there's a physical workplace they can raid. Which is a weakness app-platforms and many people without the right to work have figured out.
A cynic might think that that kind of problem sounds a lot like a problem the government could already have solved in several other ways, but by letting it fester might finally garner public acceptance for the universal ID system they've always wanted.
There's a full section of the government website dedicated to this subject, and also a recent act of parliament which in part prepared legislation for it, the Data Use and Access Act 2025 [1]. See my other answer in this thread for the links.
The Digital ID scheme isn't new. The only change is from it being optional to mandatory.
Thanks for the link - I was aware the government was preparing voluntary ID. I meant the zero proof element specifically as this is the first time I have heard mention of it.
You're not correct in saying nobody knows. This has been in discussion for several years, and the standard is outlined in detail on the government website [1], and also discussed in a blog [2].
But I fully agree if you mean it hasn't been adequately explained to the public [3].
Can you spell it out further from that document? There's only one mention of zero-knowledge proofs in there, mentioning it as one thing that could be used in verification. The rest of the document is similarly simultaneously dense and vague, so it's really not obvious to me that the actual implementation will be cryptographically privacy-preserving.
> Prove that the validity of a statement (like "I am a citizen that is authorized to receive benefits") without revealing your precise identity.
but... why? the agency that gives out benefits has to mint this credential and has to assess your dossier. Or they can assess your dossier, write you a snail mail with a result and wire the money.
What's the use of this fancy crypto other that finding a but in this token-minting service and getting those benefits without actually being entitled?
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.
It's worth designing a system of government that works for everybody, if only for the simple reason that we will very shortly (if we don't already) have a system that works for nobody, and likely everybody shooting everybody else will follow soon after that. A utopia at least gives people something to shoot for, and if you get very lucky you might end up with an idealist in power who's willing to give it a shot.
> I'm certain it's worked well in other countries, but I have zero trust in the UK government to handle this responsibility.
This commenter may sound like a paranoid person (and may very well be, I don't know them) but read about the way the UK government handled an IT error in post office accounting software. Someone living there has good reason to not trust the powers that be.
But don’t you understand, it will be so convenient. Just imagine the convenience! Are you opposed to convenience?
Frankly, you’re just being paranoid. It’s possible that mandatory digital ID could be abused, but officials haven’t yet announced their intentions to abuse it. So why are you so worried? You’re already tracked everywhere you go, and many countries already have this system. It seems to work well there for keeping people in line. Do you have something to hide? Seems a little suspicious, no?
> officials haven’t yet announced their intentions to abuse it.
This one is my favorite. I don't know if it's just unthinkable naivety or a misunderstanding of how bad actors work, but it boggles my mind that this type of reasoning is often one of the top arguments I hear.
The post office scandal wasn't that long ago, even. How can you blame people for doubting the ability to keep integrity of the system and that it won't be abused and that any abuse or incidents won't be covered up?
Silently pointing out to the whole world that does this already and nothing scary happened that can't happen otherwise.
The only reason we have ids is the borders and codified inequality anyway. I can't go to certain places with one id and can go there with the other. In some specific places I can go in, but would not be able to get out.
Somehow I haven't seen a lot of intersection between people who believe we should not have borders and people who believe we should not have ids.
> but officials haven’t yet announced their intentions to abuse it
That one is perfect lol. It speaks to the baffling immense amount of trust people still have in institutions.
I mean, people are still outright alarmed that the BBC resort to clickbait or quietly change articles after publication. I mean, it's been a good 10-15 years - stop trusting them.
Get a grip. Everybody in the UK already has a National Insurance number and NHS number, and most have either a driving license or passport — all the elements of national identity are already in place. This is just FUD.
Before the election I was approached by a bubbly young woman who tried to persuade me to vote Labour: "No thanks, last time I did that they tried to introduce ID cards", "But that's not in our manifesto" she replied, "It wasn't the last time I voted for them either".
It was introduced by the Tories, supported by both parties, and you live in a place with FPTP voting. Not voting for labour isn’t going to help anything except give more power to the others who are worse.
It all depends on exactly when they're mandatory and what tracking is associated with them.
My own personal thinking has evolved on the subject since I campaigned against ID cards under Blair ("no2id"). It is a question of trust and purpose. Things like the Estonian digital identity scheme do not seem to be bad in practice. The problem comes from identity checkpoints, which serve as an opportunity for inconvenience, surveillance, and negligence by the authorities.
Remember the "computer is never wrong" Fujitsu scandal? The Windrush fiasco (itself a story of identity and records)?
And anything born of an immigration crackdown is coming out of the gate with a declared intention to be paranoid and authoritarian.
> "Remember the "computer is never wrong" Fujitsu scandal?"
For anyone outside the UK who doesn't know this reference, the UK Post Office (originally the state postal system, privatised by this time) paid Fujitsu to build a computer system. It had bugs which made it look like money was going missing. The bugs were reported, and ignored. The Post Office prosecuted employees for theft and fraud over sixteen years, ruining hundreds of lives and reputations, sending hundreds of people to prison, and causing some suicides.
It eventually came out as an investigative journalism story that the system was at fault, the people were innocent, and the Post Office knew about the bugs right from the start and had been hiding them from the police/courts. "In 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the scandal as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history" that's almost 10 years after it ended and 25 years after it started, rather too late to undo all the harm.
I've had a very similar journey. I also campaigned against them, rejoiced when the hard drives were shredded after the election. I am now less worried. The devil is in the detail, and the issue last time was in the database rather than the cards. That said, I think since then we have bigger concerns, and if an ID app alleviates some concerns about immigration then I'm fine with it. One big thing that has happened since then is GDS – the various GOV.UK apps tend to be actually good. I recently used the new GOV.UK One Login app to renew my driving licence and it was impressively good.
> and if an ID app alleviates some concerns about immigration then I'm fine with it
It won't.
The US border is now locked down far tighter than it ever was when I was a kid, and the cries for locking it down even more and violently apprehending suspected violators are at a fever pitch. The UK too - like many countries in the recent rightward lurch - has gone from a country where I can just show up to visit to one when were I need to request permission beforehand.
It sure seems like the "concerns about immigration" in the UK mirror those in the US, which in my analysis is a reaction towards the loss of white privilege combined with the loss of economic power. Putting stricter id checks may assuage abstract xenophobia, but the concrete details don't fundamentally change the concrete details.
It's not like Brexit fixed those concerns about immigration.
'Opinion polls found that Leave voters believed leaving the EU was "more likely to bring about a better immigration system, improved border controls, a fairer welfare system, better quality of life, and the ability to control our own laws"'
Doesn't seem to have helped, has it?
So a justification based on a premise of alleviating some concerns about immigration has a long historical trail of failures behind it, as I'm sure the Windrush generation can share. The US and Canadian citizens along what was once pridefully called the world's longest unprotected border have also their misgivings.
As I read here, the UK passed the law that required employers to check employee eligibility. I'm sure that was meant to alleviate xenophobic concerns. Why wasn't that enough?
> Through this new network, much personal information which the individual has to provide, for example to claim a benefit, or to an employer - will be routed through successive computers to wind up on a ‘central index’. Even if no new law is passed, the effect of the system will be to create a national population register which each individual is obliged to inform of changes of name and address (and often a great deal more). Moreover, by the same time, the majority of adults (on present plans) will have been issued with a National Insurance (NI) ‘Numbercard’, laying an easy basis for the future introduction of a national identity-card system.
> Since the start of 1984, a NI Numbercard - resembling a standard plastic credit card, complete with signature space and a magnetic strip encoding the bearer’s name and number — has been issued to everyone reaching the age of 16, and to anyone else registering in the NI system for the first time or applying for a new card.
> Eventually, the cards could be used in automatic readers, similar to the present automatic telling machines (ATMs, or cash dispensers) installed by most banks.
> Despite government claims to the contrary, the Lindop committee concluded that the British NI number was already close to being used as a personal identity system. Although no further government proposals have been made for the use of the NI Numbercard, it is fairly certain that - for benefit claimants at least - its carrying will become obligatory. It did not take long for suggestions about compulsory carrying of NI cards to creep into public discussion. In August 1984, in what NCCL called the ‘thin end of a nasty wedge’, the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons suggested that casual workers should be issued with the new Numbercards and required to produce their cards when being paid - so that information about payments made to them could be collated successfully by the Inland Revenue.
Here's also a picture of the thing in an advert in Smash Hits:
Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number -- oh, and you'll need to install this app on your phone which I promise will never be used to monitor your location, purchases, friends. Then I'll explain.
With your logic, everything can be used, or change to be used in a bad way, so nothing should be changed. There is never a guarantee. Seriously, is there anything which cannot be changed to be shit, in the best case to be a worthless money pit?
Edit: btw this proposal already has something which can be criticised: ID on mobile phones… so probably they’d lock everybody into a duopoly.
Yes? They can kill half Europe with a single nuclear power plant if they really want. They are safe only for accidents, and external sabotage. They are absolutely not for intentional internal fuck ups. The whole system is built on that most workers there don’t want that. The whole system is built on trust.
No, I’m arguing that it can be used for good, and it shouldn’t be dismissed when it cannot be used for evil things by law, especially not because of future possible evil usage, because that’s true for everything. Btw, why do use the internet? It’s quite contradictory to argue about this here. And that is the case since almost its inception.
They'll invoke one of the more ambiguous sections, it's usually the anti-terrorism one, but sometimes is the anti-drugs one (i can't remember the numbers), and they'll detain then arrest you and haul you to the police station.
You can complain later, and maybe get some pounds out of it, but make no mistake: if the uk police wants you identified, they will identify you.
there's a difference between "the police can request this information from an individual" and "this information will be automatically gathered from everyone at all times and stored by the state". for one, there are circumstances in which the police are allowed to request that information and you can say "no", and there are also practical limits to the number of police that can be out requesting. The central equivalence you're trying to draw here is simply false.
Interesting. We could turn it into a logical argument just so we can see if this is the case. The course of the argument is:
> Could you explain what is so distasteful about ID cards?"
which is roughly how humans say "ID cards are okay" (P0)
> I mean if you have a passport then you already have an 'ID card', but I certainly don't want to take that out with me to prove my age.
which is roughly how humans say "We already collect information that would be on an ID card and store it against a passport" (P1) provided only for completeness because it is not used later
> "Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number -- oh, and you'll need to install this app on your phone which I promise will never be used to monitor your location, purchases, friends. Then I'll explain."
which is roughly how humans say "If (ID cards are okay) (P0 again) then (there should be no problem sharing that information with me, a stranger) (P2). But (there should be no problem sharing the information with me, a stranger) (P2 again) - is absurd"
Therefore, if all of these were logical, then indeed this is a valid proof that ID cards are not okay by reductio ad absurdum, a valid proof technique.
I suppose the gap in the argument is in the logical statement P0 => P2. If some chain of argument could provide P0 => P2 then this would indeed be a valid proof of the falsehood of P0 by reductio ad absurdum to P2 an absurd conclusion. Of course I wrote it out to illustrate, but it was obvious it was reductio ad absurdum.
It just strikes me as curious that someone would point that out. A bit like saying "syllogism" when someone makes a one-step logical conclusion, which is not something that humans usually post on web forums. Then again, if you say "Knowledge is power" someone will inevitably say "France is bacon" ;) so there's a bit of an ability to prompt things out of human beings that only has phatic purpose. Perhaps Latin, in particular, draws this out of someone but I'd think it odd if people went around saying "quod erat demonstrandum" in replies to someone who proved something.
I suspect this particular human was trying to say "straw man fallacy" but ended up with "reductio ad absurdum" instead, which is pretty much the opposite. If you think the first thing entails the second thing then you've executed a successful absurdum, if you think it doesn't then the second thing is a straw man. These are both annoying ways to wrangle about perceptions.
The nuance is that you can have a NI number, then have your visa lapse for whatever reason - you still have the NI number. Hence the requirement to prove your right to work through another means.
Previously you could use proof of British nationality or a physical biometric residence card - but they've been replaced by the digital share code system (which tbh hasn't been too bad)
Sorry I worded that poorly - I was trying to make the point that citizens prove their right to work using passport/birth certificate, and until recently visa holders used a physical BRP, and now a digital system (which oddly enough uses your expired/redundant BRP number as a username)
I am sure by now it has been explained by others. But basically - an ID document is like a bearer token that does not need to call a central authority every time it is verified. I am sure there are cases where it is, but a digital token that is linked to location every time it is verified is a quite different thing. Currently in the UK the law states that ultimately only a court can force you to identify yourself - by which time hopefully the purpose for which identification is being done is quite a serious and valid one. Making it cheaper to track people is not exactly a goal worth pursuing in my (not so humble) opinion.
To add to this - there is very rarely in my mind a need for someone to actually identify themselves - there are plenty of examples where it's useful for *audit* purposes to have a record, or to have a role-based credential to be able to do a thing, but *identity*?
Should be used for basic things like driving a car or signing up for a government service. Should be used to determine if you can make money to survive on or walk down the street without being stopped to very that you as a brown person are legit. "What are you doing in this part of town? Your sort isn't usually around this area"
If you want to prove your age, there are a host of *voluntary* forms of identity you can carry if you wish to do so. Please tell me how a new *compulsory* scheme (with privacy invading overreach) is going to help you.
And even then you're never asked for it if you look over 25. Which is fair - if in doubt, verify, but usually you don't need to give over your *identity* to a place that serves alcohol.
Showing a birth certificate isn’t a particularly hard bar to pass if you want to fake that you’re a national to be fair. You need just that and a printed letter and there’s nothing an employer will do beyond copying that (afaik you can’t look up a birth certificate and check it’s valid)
This is where you get certified copies should you ever need that for interfacing with foreign governments that want them (the European country I live in very much wants a copy of my birth certificate).
It's not an identity check by any means but a legitimate birth certificate ought to be findable here.
But yes birth cert + utility bill is a very, very weak binding to identity.
Is this a real thing? It would be essentially identity fraud and having more than a couple of jobs linked on PAYE at the same time would likely raise a flag somewhere in the government
Yes - people are getting tax bills from HMRC after selling their national insurance numbers to dozens of people for them to work illegally, not realising they will be on the hook for the tax which will the affect their benefit claims (child tax credits, etc.)
But then the government should also know where to find all these unauthorised workers, I can't imagine how could anyone pull this off for more than a couple of months without getting arrested (or at the very least losing their job)
This is my thought exactly. Don't they already have something like SSN to identify people in Britain? I don't see how a digital ID would be any better.
You are correct and this won't help. The government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this proposal but I think people can see through it. That should really raise a red flag.
Easier to check during a raid? There’s no requirement to have a birth certificate or passport or other ID on your person. If they currently check national insurance numbers and names you can give someone else’s (no photo).
The same thing is happening in Greece. The new mandatory digital ID replaces and unifies everything about citizens in one place, "to make it easier for government services to share information between each other". It can indeed be useful, but the privacy implications are enormous. Just imagine that a policeman, employer or anybody else with access to the information linked to the ID can instantly view our medical records, tax status and even simpler things like if we've ever been caught driving while drunk. Nobody knows what other information could be attached to it, but it's certain that it can be used to discriminate against us.
The worst part is that we no longer have any power to do something about it. Eventually, after it goes through the testing phase in the UK and Greece (and a few other countries where it's being implemented), this will probably roll out on a global scale, making privacy impossibly. I'm starting to get this feeling that in the next decade, we'll be living in 1984...
> Just imagine that a policeman, employer or anybody else with access to the information linked to the ID can instantly view our medical records, tax status and even simpler things like if we've ever been caught driving while drunk
Why would I imagine that? There are privacy implications, but a unique ID doesn't mean everyone has access to all your data at any time for any reason.
> All it takes is one breach or vulnerability and then yes, they DO have access to all your data.
No they don't. If they breach the health system, they don't have access to tax returns.
Just because people are identified by a single ID number doesn't mean all their data is being stored on the same server. And for purely organizational reasons, that's incredibly unlikely to happen.
And I don't know what you mean by "steal your identity". People's names are date of birth are generally a pretty unique identifier already. It doesn't really matter if systems use that or a single ID number to identify you, or if hackers look you up by your name.
When a credential is stolen, its validity across multiple unrelated services is often checked by credential stuffing. That's just one type of simple attack.
Has cybercrime been rendered obsolete with a government credential? Why is this master account immune to theft? On the contrary, it appears to be a credential that once stolen, could be more impactful than having your primary email account and phone compromised.
It's reasonable to be concerned even just from an infosec perspective.
What master account are you even talking about? That's not what this is.
The subject was a system being breached.
And the account you set up for a driver's license is generally different from the one for your health care. If you're reusing the same password for both it doesn't matter if they're linked by the same digital ID number or the same email address or just the same name and birthday.
In the UK's own post linked below (also in the OP), they describe what's more than a digital ID number. It's credentials. Which humans are bad at handling. And there are always implementation flaws, because we're humans.
The accounts generally aren't linked together. Everything about the UK government IT is a huge group of independent systems all pretty much isolated from each other. You can argue over whether that's down to incompetence, organisational turf wars, or good security design.
Which is why you have completely separate account to pay the same government for crossing one specific brige in East London than you do for vehicle tax.
Most government websites do use the same frontend toolkit (a rare win for UK governmental IT) but front completely separate systems.
Doesnt have to be a Hitler, imagining the worst case scenario for laws is absolutely apt.
Consider the Australian Access and Assistance bill. Among other things, it permits ministers to issue TCN's verbally. As far as we know (theres no oversight) this hasnt been done. But its concerning that the government can verbally require a corporation to (open endedly) change app functionality.
It would be better if Jim Hitler, had to fight the existing democracy to erode our freedoms, rather than just having to ask a minister to make it so.
Its absolutely better to assume the worst case than the best.
But that's -likely- what it means in the near future, along with 24/7 tracking via observation posts along streets and highways. I wonder when people will start realizing a smaller government is a better government and vote accordingly. When things make a task "easier for the government" your ears should prick up and you should start paying attention. Today's "more efficient democracy" makes for tomorrow's "more efficient autocracy" when everything is already in place
It doesn't have to be dead, that's a choice we made as a society. It's an artificial limitation if people wake up and vote against it while they still can
>The worst part is that we no longer have any power to do something about it.
That's not true. If a large enough mob of citizens went to the capital, burned down the government building and harassed MPs on the street (and followed them to their homes), as recently happened in Nepal and before that in Bangladesh, things would change very quickly.
He was acquitted by a jury. Do you think Keir Starmer is bribing juries when the defendant is a Labour supporter or something? I'm sorry if that sounds flippant, but what exactly is your assumption about the underlying mechanism here? If there were some sort of Labour cabal controlling the justice system then this person would never have been arrested and tried in the first place.
No, but the government also didn't have the communication and organization ability either. Imagine if the British generals could have communicated in real-time with London, or had spy satellites that could watch the revolutionary troops in real time, or had the ability to fire missiles thousands of miles with extreme precision. There would absolutely be no USA if they had
Maybe I'm too cynical but from where I'm sitting Google and Apple already have all the info about citizens in a giant database that they use for their own purposes. Why are we upset that the government might create a more limited database?
The cows are long since out of the barn on "don't collect a giant database of everyone's personal information"
a) The government can subpoena Google, Apple etc. for whatever information they want - or not even subpoena, often they ask nicely and the companies hand over any data requested.
b) Many people are extremely angry about immigration. They very much want the government to control "where and with whom [certain other people] work, live, play"
>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK.
How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited in several years. If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation.
In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account.
The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live.
It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.
> In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular.
The circular issue is quite similar to Spain. Where in order to obtain residency you need an address. But for being able to rent, most likely you’ll need a bank account and ideally a Spanish identification number. But for having a local bank account you need an address.
Similar to the above. This needs to be broken in order to get residency.
In Portugal it gets even worse, because many landlords still ask for a guarantor willing to take responsability over the rent.
My experience in a few European countries was also circular, the only thing that helped was that I could use the work contract and a letter from HR to break the cycle, however this naturally only works when the job is already secure before coming into the country.
There is a way to get into the Spanish bureaucracy quite painlessly! Its NIE blanco. You can get it in any Spanish embassy, before even getting to Spain. With that you can create a bank account or job hunt.
That won’t work entirely.
The NIE blanco is a PDF so it does reduce complexity later as you have a number predefined.
But many services and people might ask you to show physical NIE. And also without address you’ll be able to open a foreigner bank account which is different than local.
AFAIK the recommended way is to open a bank account through smaller banks (aka neobanks). They just send you a card to address specified and once you activated it you (first) get a bank account for payments and (second) can use it to prove address for others.
Also, if you legally rent then you get the council tax documents, though it takes roughly a month for them to send. This is another proof of address.
And the bills of course, but again it takes a month or so to receive the first letter.
So it's unclear how a digital ID solves anything in regarding the proof of address.
> The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
They already ask you for a "share code" which they then verify on the Home Office website. What does the Digital ID add to that?
Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries.
It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west".
Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad.
At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades.
Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients.
So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on.
A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs.
So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases.
I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.
You are correct.
The Identity Cards Act of 2006 was brought in by Blair’s Labour Government under the guise of preventing terrorism, the hot topic at the time. It was repealed by the incoming Tory/Liberal coalition under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Lobbying for Digital ID cards continued by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” amongst others.
While there is almost guaranteed to be an aspect of this, the UK is going through a period where immigration is in the news constantly and the populist party "Reform UK" are on the rise.
The Labour government has realised that whatever their own feelings are about people coming to the UK by irregular means and claiming asylum, they need to be seen to recognise the popular narrative right now that the boats must be stopped, and be seen to be taking action.
So I don't think the immediate state goal right here is likely to be anything deeper than desperately trying to head off Nigel Farage, who is capturing a lot of public discourse about this 'crisis'.
… except that trying to out-Farage Farage (by being bastards to asylum seekers) will lose them many of their traditional supporters (who are not big on being bastards to asylum seekers) and seems unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters (why would they take some half-hearted populist bastardry when they can have the real deal?).
The ‘small boats’ narrative is ludicrously over-reported here. It’s such a clear case of those with most of the resources scapegoating those with none of the resources as the cause of everyone else’s problems.
It’s amazing to see Labour fall for the same trick that the Tories did with Brexit, and also incredible that Farage is still a political force after all the Brexit lies.
That's not a trick, it's how third parties have influence in a two-party system: the two main parties are compelled to steal any popular policy from a third party before it becomes a credible threat.
I don't think any of that matters any more, the issue is so firmly in the public eye that Labour need to show that they've solved it whether it's a 'real' problem or not.
> unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters
Farage is polling ahead of both major parties at the moment. That support came from somewhere. To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue. Why have they turned to someone like that? Most likely they feel their own lives and prospects getting worse and in their dissatisfaction have turned to an easy answer, someone who promises to change everything and blame the outsider. To put it starkly, reductively even, you don't get nazis when everyone feels like their life is on the up and up. Well not many anyway.
The mainstream of UK politics needs to get to grips with (perceived?) worsening standards of living and failing services, and actually take action that makes people's lives better. Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air. It's not really a wonder to me that a sizeable minority are looking outside of that, or are getting frustrated that they can't get a doctor's appointment or the roads are falling apart. It's all too easy for Fartrage to say - look over there!
Any ideas how leaving the european convention on human rights, deporting some barbers, takeaway owners and illegal construction workers, and stopping small boats in the English channel will reinvigorate Sunderland, fix South Wales after coal mining stopped, restart British Steel, bring life back to coastal holiday towns in the aftermath of cheap flights to warmer places, fire up the tired overworked Londoner on the crowded tube, bring European finance investment back into The City, tempt foreign industries to open factories in the UK, cause more doctors and nurses to be trained and paid better, and give little Sally and Timmy something to look forward to in life?
"Freeze Non-Essential Immigration. Essential skills, mainly around healthcare, must be the only exception" - Reform manifesto page 5.
The main thing Farage supporters are voting for is to see fewer Muslims and brown people and Pakistanis and Africans, and the main thing Farage is doing is stirring up is racist hate and division; Reform's own manifesto tells their supporters that they will still be seeing an awful lot of foreigners under a Reform government.
Of course it won’t help. Never claimed otherwise. That’s my whole point - while everyone’s lives and the state of the country seem to get worse, people blame the other and look for the person offering them easy answers.
If their lives were looking good, if government services weren’t a mess, and if they perceived the government was actually changing things for the better, reform would have a hard time finding suckers to vote for them.
The small boats issue is enough in the public eye it’s going to have to be tackled. But beyond that, reform need to be beaten by the UK government fixing things and making the UK optimistic about the future, rather than just same-old same-old and the whole place feeling like it’s in managed decline.
> Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air
Speaking from the other side of the pond, we can say quite confidently that the solution is not electing someone who will make reckless, bold moves. The brain trust here voted against “ambitionless, measured improvements” and for that, we got a chaotic circus.
we spent decades dying to "measured improvements". I don't like what my peers did about the fact that they're angry or what in particular they demanded but I don't begrudge them being angry or demanding something. You can only bullshit people about their basic living conditions for so long and long ago our political class gave up on the idea of working for people as their raison d'etre and decided instead that their job was to give us as little as it takes in order to get our votes and then use the power we give them to funnel money back to their donors. The mistake wasn't in realzing that the "left" wasn't on their side, it was in thinking that the right was just because they were the ones who pointed out how feckless, entitled and self-absorbed the center-right elitists that pass themselves off as the left had become.
Agreed, but unfortunately at times when things seem not to be going so well in general, people are prone to electing the person that promises them large positive changes by throwing out the stale old rulebook. Even if it’s not credible. Even when large parts of what’s apparently going wrong have been invented by that same bad actor…
I think this is part of why Brexit got through as well, some people felt it was a way to shake up a crusty, unresponsive establishment. That didn’t go so great!
Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.
For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.
The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.
The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window.
What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration.
I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not.
Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street.
Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats.
Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back?
Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.
Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.
If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.
If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.
Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).
That says if you don't you need a birth certificate and an official letter showing a national insurance number. I guess the new thing would substitute for that?
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem
It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke).
It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke.
Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior.
Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself.
Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.
Proper border checks don't do much if people enter the country legally but overstay their visas
IDs (along with verification laws) discourage employers from hiring unauthorized immigrants, and without access to gainful employment, many will opt to return to their country of origin, or choose not to come in the first place.
You are describing the current system. Employers can receive business-ending fines (at least in theory) for hiring illegal labour. I’ve never worked a job in the UK that didn’t require me to prove my right to work here, eg by showing them my passport. Digitising the IDs will make no difference.
And frankly, if you believe this is actually about immigration then I’m embarrassed for you. Everyone can see that they’re just using the current crisis an excuse to ram through the unpopular thing that they've wanted for decades.
I have never seen a report of a business ending because of a fine. I have seen reports of hospitality business having to close because they lost their alcohol licence, where the licencee employing illegal immigrants was deemed not to be a fit and proper person.
On paper, the punishment for hiring illegal labour is £45k per worker for the first offence and up to £60k for repeat offences[0]. That's enough to ruin a small business.
Whether or not these laws are actually enforced is another matter. [Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops]. But I've been asked to show ID at every job I've ever had, so companies obviously care about it even if the risk is low.
It's a popular stereotype in the UK (although it only seems to have arisen in the last year or so) that "Turkish barbershops" are a front for money laundering.
They're certainly suspicious: all across the country, high street retailers are going bust, and yet somehow all these barbershops, nail salons, takeaway joints etc are staying in business, able to afford prime commercial real estate even though you never see anyone in there getting their hair cut or their nails done.
I don't know why the Turks in particular are being singled out, but that's the meme. The "American Candy Stores" in London are another famous example.
There's an old saying where I'm from that the barbershop is the safest line of work because everyone needs their hair cut.
Where I am, admittedly in the Netherlands but I grew up in the UK and haven't noticed a huge difference, nail salons are always quite full when I pass, and I see food delivery drivers almost every time I look out the window. Similarly the barbers always seem to have clients. Could be the time of day you look?
Just going to throw it out there that it's a bit disconcerting to see these kind of criminal stereotypes associated with a certain people on HN.
In the town I live there are 3 (or 4) barbershops - one Turkish and the rest are British - I don’t notice any difference, they all have a long queue on Saturdays but empty in the middle of a working day.
What a lovely framing that is. Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever. Then, finally, in one of these inevitable spasms of authoritarianism, they do away with it and we're now turned away from the polling station unless we can show our permission slip.
Then they come up with even more papers for us, and the argument for it is that it's now a benefit that we can more easily comply with Voter ID laws.
Bugger off with that. Don't talk to me about any "benefit" in relation to voter ID that isn't abolishing it.
> Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever.
I don’t disagree at all, however we are where we are. The laws were introduced by a different government in a failed bid to maintain power by disenfranchising voters less likely to have ID.
That being said, we are where we are and having government-provided ID is a benefit in that context.
Only a day or two since this was announced and a petition against ID Cards has already reached 1 million - way beyond the 100,000 required for a Parliamentary Debate. I wonder what the petition's growth rate will be over the next couple of weeks or so.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
It doesn't. The kind of employer who would employ an illegal immigrant is certainly not going to ask to see ID of any kind. They would surely be especially wary of any electronic ID because that would make it easier to associate them with the immigrant. ID cards are only of any use to legal workers and honest employers.
If the UK wants the benefits of a solid ID it should look to Scandinavia. In Norway everyone has a unique number in the population register and this ID is your user ID for all state services. Employers can ask for this number and look you up. Of course it still doesn't prevent people working on the black for cash in hand but neither will an ID card or ID app.
There is no appetite for ID cards in Norway either, yet successive governments keep pushing the idea despite there being no compelling reason to believe that any problems will be solved by them.
Every job I’ve worked in the last 10 years has asked to see my passport so they can check I’m allowed to work in this country. I expect employers who aren’t checking don’t care, and digital ID isn’t going to change this.
If anything it could help legal immigration. There's a bootstrapping issue where you need a utility bill to open a bank account and a bank account to get paid and get paid to pay the utility bill. And also need all 3 to rent a property to live in. You can choose the right providers to work around that with just your passport, but that involves a bit of work and research.
No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.
Most companies will not pay a local employee to an international amount. You're also going to pay quite large fees for any transfers if you wanted to pay bills. Also, the account abroad is not a proof of address in the UK which is the thing you want from statements.
Long time ago when I came to the UK I had that exact problem, there was only one bank (HSBC I think) that agreed to open an account for based on passport only. Even though I'm an EU citizen and UK was part of the EU at that time. Otherwise I would be stuck, because my employer (no employer I know of) would send my wage overseas.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.
> I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true?
Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system.
> If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.
> anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I don't get this. Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like? I imagine that tax authorities and immigration authorities don't actually cooperate together (and for good reason!) but my impression for places like the US is that you really do have to provide some sort of number provided by the government for most kinds of employment.
Unless of course you're just not trying to pay payroll taxes I guess?
There are countries where each citizen has one unique identifier (Sweden's "personnummer", Denmark's CPR).
The UK is definitely not one of those! [yet]
Instead there are many different identifiers, each for a different purpose, and stored in different systems which almost certainly don't talk to each other.
Just for starters: NHS number for healthcare, National Insurance number for social security and pensions, Unique Taxpayer Reference for tax, Passport (with a number that changes when you renew your passport), Driving licence (with a "number"[alphanumeric] which stays constant even when you renew)...
Multiple overlapping identifiers... and I may have missed some :)
> Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like?
There is, but it's not tied to any strong identity verification process, and so there's a thriving fraud where unemployed citizens will rent out their numbers to working illegals. It's not something that the tax office has ever really worried about, since if anything it tends to increase the amount of tax paid (if several people are sharing the same tax ID they'll pay a higher tax rate), and while they might bat an eye at someone with 5 different salaried jobs it's not particularly suspicious when it's gig economy work.
To work, you need to provide a National Insurance number, which is unique and tied to certain state benefits like pension. The idea is you work, pay "national insurance" contributions and accrue "contributing years" to get a state pension later.
The wrinkle is that it doesn't seem to be tied well to identity. Someone working illegally can provide an NI number that's legit but not theirs. Their work accrues to someone else's NI record, but the person getting the extra years probably never notices and the person working under their NI number doesn't care because they aren't entitled to a state pension anyway, they just want to work now.
Tax numbers have no bearing at all on your right to work. If you work legally in the UK for a while then you get a national insurance number but if you then leave and your work visa expires, your national insurance number remains as an identifier.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents?
Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working.
During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/
Checking for right to work has been legally required for over a decade. Checks in the formal economy are now routine. Can sometimes be a nuisance, like for my friend who doesn't have a passport and his driving license was issued before those went photographic.
Someone who is prepared to pay people smugglers to help them cross a border illegally may not choose to restrict themselves to working in "the formal economy".
"Illegal working and streams of taxis - BBC gains rare access inside asylum hotels"
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents
For criminals it is already essentially impossible to forge new polycarbonate documents. Acquiring them by defrauding the application processes remains easy however.
Of course, if the person checking doesn't know what the real document feels like in their hand, whether it's real polycarbonate or a shit laminated TESLIN fake makes little difference.
But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.
That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip.
So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them.
I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.
I’m not sure how about illegal immigration but, coincidentally, it’s really handy for tracking people’s online activity when combined with the Online Safety Act.
You know, coincidentally.
(Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)
I can think of several, which problem were you thinking of?
In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work.
Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem.
Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system.
So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad.
And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle.
Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc.
And, of course, that digital ID will require an "approved app" (blessed by Apple and Google) running on an unrooted phone. Don't want spyware running on your phone? Too bad.
A National Insurance Card (needed to get a job), drivers license and passport, one of latter is also needed (in practice) to get a job.
Why would a brit card help us reduce the number of people working illegally?
The only notable 'employers' of illegal workers in the UK are American tech firms Uber and deliveroo (doordash) because they allow driver substitution without verifying that the substitute is legit. That should be made illegal and then fine them into the ground for anyone who slips through. Brit card doesn't help and is a distraction.
But the person you're replying to, just explained to you, how the government already have the relevant data. So it's clearly not about data, because the government already issue his NINO and passport
Edit - I mean, just play it back in your head. The PM is probably watching small boat arrivals and reform polling numbers like a hawk. And here's his idea to fix both problems, and you're saying, actually no, the PM is just doing this to get data on where I go to work, even though they already have my PAYE details
I beleive that Labour see this new ID system as the solution to all the age verification questions now required by the Online Safety Act. e.g. access to things like Reddit, BlueSky messaging, Spotify.
With that in mind I think new data you're talking about will be enhanced tracking and monitoring on everyday online activity of UK citizens.
I don't think it is only online.
It is really a distopean future in US and UK right now.
I honestly understand the problem with immigration, but at the same time, I think this way of approaching the problem is just to create "the enemy" from 1984.
It seems that immigrants right now move something between 4B-10B a month in UK which is not a small number.
Considering the costs elsewhere altogether, it seems quite small win for the risk.
The digital id is not the reason for that comment, or not solely.
I mean having AI cameras, legalised racial profiling, attack on vessels in international waters without proof (likely killing innocent civilians too when it could be intercepted easily on the coast), we have politics talking about cultural incompatibility of their own people because different religion, we have a post truth media, etc
I guess the guy above is right. It is about the data and the right to use your face and track you everywhere. This can be easily paired with that UK bonkers camera ai thing.
They might not need to know who is illegal, but if the camera does not know you, you might need to explain yourself and show an id.
At the same time, I wonder how will they deal with people wearing burkas, masks, balaclavas etc
Government already have my photo for passport and driver's license, I struggle to believe that there's people here working who don't have at least a provisional license or passport of any kind.
In order to drive a motorcycle or car you need a driving license which has photo ID?
Ok maybe you deliver by push bike.. but if you arrived here legally you will have a passport? If you didn't you ergo don't have the right to work here?
Outsourced to companies that don’t share data, which is why the government is requiring you to submit more data. How hard is this? Eventually they’ll have your DNA, Fingerprints, photos, family trees, employment history, money, spending habits, vices, travel locations, conversations, and your comings and goings via license plate readers.
It is happening already. Some insurance companies in my country wants to demand DNA testing and to withold that information for indeterminate time and to be able to sell that info.
Thankfully, although not even close to EU data protection there is some and this was deemed irregular for now.
Attention for the word "irregular".
They will take maybe few more years to turn it onto regular. It is not illegal which is bonkers.
A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - a paper birth certificate is also acceptable (and paper can be lost, damaged, forged), as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
A NI number is not ID, it's a reporting number.
Lastly, a national ID is a tried and tested scheme in many, many countries and brings a lot of positives. The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
A birth certificate is not proof of citizenship or legal presence in the UK for anyone born after 1983.
Anchoring proof of citizenship is going to become a very obnoxious problem going forward if there is not a population register or universal ID system introduced, as you'll have to go back however many generations it takes to reach birth before 1983.
I think the UK and Ireland are the only countries in the entire world that have non-birthright citizenship and no citizenship register, which is a less than ideal combination.
The UK has no notion of a person number or national ID number that is tied to citizenship. Therefore it is not possible to prove British citizenship except with a British Citizen passport, naturalisation certificate or pre-1983 birth certificate.
It’s therefore a lot harder to prove citizenship for an initial passport application in certain circumstances than you might expect. You need to prove that you have an unbroken link of people born in the UK to someone born before 1983, and as time goes on that will mean even more generations. Right now you typically need to provide your birth certificate, up to 2x parents birth certificate, and up to 4x grandparents birth certificates.
In many other countries the birth certificate will have the person numbers of the parents, which will mean there’s essentially guaranteed to be a record of the citizenship of the parents that the state can check. Alternatively there’s a national ID scheme that helps bootstrap this information early in life.
> A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - paper birth certificate is also acceptable, as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
This policy would absolutely sail through, with no controversy at all, if it had just been "free passports for all" reusing all the existing rules, existing IT and existing bureaucracy; and "Optional digital passport on your phone" for those who want that.
Why they're doing this in the most expensive, unpopular way possible - I have no idea.
You don't currently have any National ID. You have forms of ID, which others might not have, but none are national mandatory ID that every citizen and resident has. As such many benefits in streamlining and simplifying processes cannot be achieved when everyone has a UID as such. Imagine making a system where you used various ID formats, and you couldn't guarantee anyone had one in particular, and some people had none.
Your NI card literally says it's not identification. A NI number is not linked to a passport as it's not mandatory to have a passport, so that would not work for many people. It is just a number used for tax accounting.
Ok then 'Government issued [photo] ID' so what if it's not a 'national ID'? They have all the data they need to tackle this. You can't get a NI number without proving who you are, if the government don't trust NI numbers (which they are minting?) then they could simply re-issue them? That would be far far easier than a new national ID.
>You can't get a NI number without proving who you are
That's not true either. You're sent your NI number just before 16 years old without providing anything.
Also, an NI number is just a number. There is no photo. How can you look at it and say it belongs to the person presenting it? And no you can't look up a passport or something in another system based on the NI number, because those other IDs aren't mandatory so the person might not have them.
The only way to really ID someone is to have mandatory photo ID, whether that be digital or not.
How do you think HMRC know to send you a card? If they're giving them out like smarties to foreigners then they could simply... Not (a British person gets one as a function of having a birth certificate)
Now that ID is required for voting, it's reasonable that the government provides a form of ID, for free, to all citizens. Passports cost money and not everyone has one. Same for driving licenses. It should also streamline other government services.
I think it would be simpler to repeal the ID requirement for voting. I don't believe there is any evidence of widespread voting fraud, so it adds unnecessary cost. I certainly wouldn't try to sell the ID as preventing illegal work, which is obviously ludicrous.
> The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
This is an exaggeration. There are countless examples of how this has played out in the past, a quick google search will yield many of them[1][2][3].
The point is that any kind of data collection by a government can and will (eventually) be misused and abused. The UK government is currently abusing its powers to access Facebook and Whatsapp private messaging to arrest regular people for words (i.e not CSAM)[4].
This particular national ID introduction has about as much to do with illegal workers as the Online Safety Act has to do with protecting children.
You don't need the card itself in order to get a job, just the number. In this respect it's rather like an American social security card. (I know some US employers will ask to see the card, but that's not a legal requirement: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/SSNcard.htm)
"Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said ID cards were not in the party's election manifesto and added: "That’s not our approach.""
– July 2024
"Asked about the possibility of introducing digital ID cards, Mr Reynolds [then Secretary of State for Business and Trade, now Chief Whip] told Times Radio: "We can rule that out, that's not something that's part of our plans.""
And "become customers" means it will become mandatory to sign away your rights to a foreign corporation by agreeing to their terms of service. This kind of abuse of power is a clear example of why the UK needs a real constitution.
And if Google bans you for some reason (which they have been known to do sometimes), I guess you'll be kicked out of the country unless you buy an iPhone.
Well, maybe the app will keep working and you can update it from Aurora Store, or maybe you'll be fine as long as you don't change your employment or residence. Pretty vague so far.
A real constitution is not a vague collection of traditions. Every other country understands "constitution" to mean a written document. A collection of traditions cannot meet the primary aim of a constitution, which is granting people clear and unambiguous rights.
Furthermore, a constitution is generally more difficult to change than a law. The Human Rights Act can be repealed by a simple majority of MPs voting to repeal it.
> Stored on mobile phones, the ID would contain details including a name, date of birth, residency status and crucially a photo - which would distinguish it from National Insurance numbers.
Surely it will be possible to also store it on some government-issued, GCHQ-vetted digital device, and not rely on foreign companies (Google/Apple) and their locked-down mobile platforms?
This is the most alarming aspect of the proposal to me. I find it wild that the government will require me, by law, to buy an expensive electronic device I don't want or otherwise need, in order to be employed. It's absolutely amazing to me that the government is forcing me to spend money in this way.
My government requires me, by law, to send it tens of thousands of dollars every year, much of it to be spent on things I don't want or need, in order to stay out of prison.
Requiring me to spend another $100 or so on a phone seems like pretty small potatoes, compared to what they intend to use the device for. I'm not saying I'd like it, but it's a detail, not the main issue.
It's not so much the money but rather being forced to do business with a company I do not want to do business with. If this were an optional activity, like driving a car and being forced to do business with an insurance company, that's one thing. But this will be a forced commercial interaction simply to be employed in the UK. That's a very novel abuse of power.
This is the crazy part to me. I want nothing to do with the iPhone/Android duopoly and I do not participate in it, at the cost of some personal convenience from time to time. If my own country were to implement this I’d honestly just tell them to stick me in jail. I can be a test case, why not? You have to draw the line somewhere.
Whenever you hear someone say, "everyone has a phone these days", you must push back against that. It might seem like it to them but it's just not true. I've always chosen to point out that it isn't true because I was worried that one day, it would be become a legal requirement to own one. It seems that day has arrived, in the UK at least.
I'm a little in disbelief that I will soon be legally required to own one of these things.
They've already said you won't need a mobile phone. They mention phones as a deliberate distraction from the fact that they will be building a huge central database.
I will be very surprised if the app does much more than dish up a pre-signed chunk of ID data, much like an e-passport does now. It won't actually need a secure device.
(Which isn't to say they will support anything except android and iphone.)
They have said it will work for people who "aren’t able to use a smartphone". Nothing is said about people who are able but unwilling. I can only assume I will forced to submit to the terms and conditions of a foreign corporation, and forced to use non-Free software.
> There will be no requirement for individuals to carry their ID or be asked to produce it - but digital ID will be mandatory as a means of proving your Right to Work.
So it's mandatory for everyone except old people and the unemployed. It will almost certainly also be mandatory for renting, which has the same check. Then it will gradually seep into everything else: benefits and pensions, to cover the categories not initially covered. Then police spot checks and ICE sweeps.
> its required to have some sort of ID for renting, job or voting _already_ the difference here is there is a digital version of it
It's strange how last time I campaigned against ID cards 25 years ago, none of those requirements were in place. Voter ID in particular is a very recent idea imported from the US (and of course doesn't apply to postal votes, where there are actually real concerns about security and diversion).
And may never have. Believe it or not the UK and the USA are two different countries, thank goodness. So making an assumption that the two will adopt exactly the same policies is a little ambitious to say the least. For example please note that the UK just agreed to recognize Palestine.
Using the name of the US body to associate it with the immigration sweeps carried out in an abusive manner; the corresponding UK immigration raids are currently the responsibility of the Home Office.
Having just paid a small fortune to renew my passport. I'm not super excited about this, especially as I live outside the UK.
I also don't trust them not to make a complete hash of all this, removing all potential utility while simultaneously increasing the chances of my ID being stolen.
As an American it seems to me that the UK government insists on finding a way to upset all sides on any given issue like illegal immigration. If anything it's the singular and unique skill of Whitehall.
It's more that the average Brit finds a way to be upset about everything any UK government does. Even just the test of the cell emergency alert system was met with fierce public criticism: what if people crash their car out of surprise?!
But being critical of your leaders isn't the worst thing in the world. It's fairly bipartisan too; most of the people who voted for our current PM just a year ago now disapprove of him. A high level of public scrutiny on one's leaders' is probably quite effective at preventing totalitarianism. Whatever can be (often justifiably) said about our ineffective leadership, what we do have is a good track record for stability.
However, sometimes it's really just cynicism for cynicism's sake.
IMO this is a gimmick and probably won't have much effect either for good or bad. I would vote against it given the chance. But there aren't that many British people who feel especially strongly about this.
In the last 10 years the UK has had 4 general elections and the Brexit referendum. Some countries have more local democracy (e.g. direct elections of DAs in the US), but in terms of opportunities to change the national government or influence national policy, I don't think the UK is doing too badly.
I didn't watch the video, but have read other reports, and it's worth noting that the context for this is the Labour Party conference, which starts on Sunday. The UK govt are under pressure from the tories and Reform to do something about people entering the UK from France by crossing the channel in small boats. Nothing much seems to be working. So this announcement is about trying to control the narrative by making a big, distracting announcement. I'd mlbe surprised if many people in the government/police/civil service expect it to make a difference.
Also, seems to be intended to be mandatory and require a smartphone. Hows that going to work?
Also, what happens when the database is inevitably stolen?
The small boats crossing are a small fraction of immigration. Some Google number claims 37k people got in this way in 2024. With net migration hovering around 0.8-1m people per year, arrivals must be well above this number (surely some people are leaving, making the net number smaller). But even then, this is less than 5% of the legal immigration, and probably a lot less than that.
I'm not saying it doesn't need addressing or isn't serious, but I think it's a convenient topic for politicians. It's a lot more media-friendly than the arrivals queue at Luton Airport. And the illegal immigrants aren't the ones putting pressure on NHS, housing market or train driver unions.
Depends on if you are looking at this in terms of numbers of people or cost. The Home Office annual spend on processing asylum seekers has ballooned from just under £1 billion to near £5 billion in the space of 5 years, which is 1/3 of the estimated £14 billion raised from the unpopular National Insurance increase.
Even then, what fraction of all asylum seekers comes via small boats, vs other means? I believe the UK is entirely within its right to send small boats asylum seekers back to France, since it is a safe country. International conventions on asylum seekers state this - you are not entitled to drive thru the whole of Europe then demand asylum specifically in the UK.
I don't want to come across as uncaring, I'm sure there are tragedies that drive people to doing this, that doesn't mean the UK has to also mismanage the process on its side.
From what I've read, about 1/3 of all asylum seekers over the last 7 years arrived via small boat crossings.
Looking forward though, about 90% of those arriving in small boat crossings are currently going on to seek asylum and the average annual cost of supporting an asylum seeker during their claim has risen to an estimated £41k, so for ~30k arrivals this year, the financial cost of not processing these claims promptly could increase that overall annual bill further still.
Also, in the first year of processing, costs may be drawn from the overseas aid budget (which was recently shrunk). This results in possibly 1/5 of the overseas aid budget being used for costs associated with processing asylum claims, which perhaps doesn't match most people's expectations as to what overseas aid should be used for.
I think that's why even though the number of people involved in these crossings is small compared to net migration, it has a big financial impact.
The UK was indeed part of treaty system that meant other states had to "take back" asylum seekers that traveled through them to the UK, but it decided it was in its best interest to quit that a few years ago, so France is a lot less motivated to do that now.
We keep getting told that these people are predominantly young men of working age.
If only someone could come up with a brilliant idea which might allow them to make a long-term contribution to the economy far in excess of the cost of processing their asylum applications...
0.8m is like on the average a whole county in the UK, and such massive influx would destroy the housing- and job market. Not to mention pressure on schools and healthcare.
Exactly, this is what I am saying. The 0.8-1m number is the legal, net migration into the UK, very significant, and adding to the downsides people associate with immigration. It's not all downsides etc etc but still.
The 37k small boats migration is very small in comparison. Plus there's illegal immigration not via small boats - overstayed visas etc.
Hence my point that the overfocus on small boats crossings seems misplaced to me.
The actual number is like half of that because while 800k people came, about 400k people left.
I am an immigrant myself but I start to think that such policies are short-sighted. The end result is often fragmentation of the society, because immigrants rarely truly integrate, and at some point they become the majority, and then you're effectively a minority in your own country. It takes at least two generations for newcomers to become fully integrated, and that assumes things going right.
“Nothing much seems to be working” because the government is completely unserious about stopping the boats and is unwilling to do any of the things that might actually work.
They could stop them in a week if they actually wanted to.
What are the options legally available to them? They have their own experts, but it sounds like you have a novel idea that hasn't occurred to anyone before.
Stick them in processing centres until they can be deported. Send a clear message to anyone who might come that it won't work, you won't get in, we won't give you anything, don't risk your life or waste your money.
Australia did exactly this (in the face of howling opposition) and it worked: illegal boat arrivals dropped from ~20,000 per year to almost zero. Thousands of people used to drown attempting the crossing, now no-one drowns. There's your moral case.
Legally, Parliament is sovereign. If the current legal framework doesn't allow it, change the law. Except they won't, because they don't want to solve the problem and they use the law as an excuse as if they aren't the fucking government.
I'm genuinely wondering how harsh you'd be willing to be to get what you want.
What would you do if an individual can't be deported because no country will accept them? Or if their country of origin is likely to kill or torture them? Or if no commercial carrier is willing to risk operating to that country? Would you be willing to deport unaccompanied children with no guarantee that they'd be cared for?
This is a perniciously xenophobic take, tbh.
Who are you to decide your values are objectively better than theirs? /s
There is a village A dragon comes to the village every year. In exchange for 2% of the children, it spares the rest and promises its “magical” protection from unseen enemies. This arrangement has lasted 2,000 years. Most villagers worship it, even though the custom has left their village far worse off than others in the land.
Some villagers move away. Not all of them are dragon-worshippers, but some are and they still try to summon the dragon.
Now the dragon free villagers face a choice:
Keep them out. But that means some innocent children among them will die.
Let them in. Risk the cult spreading again inside the walls and possibly bringing the dragon back.
Go kill the dragon themselves. Accept substantial casualties including innocent dragon worshippers and some of their own people.
Killing the dragon would mean temporarily brutal treatment of the worshippers and the destruction of their culture, but it would spare future generations from an unbounded amount of suffering.
It isn’t hard to parse. If you’re very literal minded, forget the mapping and just engage with the story on its own terms, then we can parse it.
Otherwise, I can only assume the trade offs are too uncomfortable (cognitive dissonance, you're a gentle soul!) or it’s a bad-faith feint to shift the burden while posing as “too rational” to engage.
No analogy is perfect. The question is whether the trade off it illustrates applies. Engage with that.
There are already hefty fines for owners of businesses where the people are not working "legally". There's a "share code" that employers are supposed to check to verify visas. All the laws and machinery is already there and it does not look particularly high-cost to me.
Inability to work is going to be a far bigger deterrance to illegal immigration than any kind of border control you can put up. Regardless of all the propaganda immigrants aren't coming into the country in droves to bum around, commit crimes and get free services from the government. They want to be able to work and live a normal life. If you deny them that, they will look elsewhere.
> The other complaint I often see is immigrants' failure to assimilate to British norms, language, and culture.
I do get your point, as an Indian who migrated to Canada, it’s one of my pet peeves where some of my relatives live in their enclave only, i.e. surround themselves with like minded Indians, but this is pretty ironic when it is coming from Brits.
Presumably the form for applying for benefits has a reasonably high bar for identifying the fact that you are in fact legally present in the country? Or how else do you imagine people living at "taxpayer's expense"? Just begging on the streets?
Do you know how much money the immigrants pay as taxes, health surcharge and National Insurance contributions in exchange for the right to live and work in the UK? Don't forget that the taxes, health surcharge and NI contributions of the immigrations are literally funding the NHS! I think it is fair to expect the contributors to get treatment when they are contributing so much to it.
In my experience, immigrants have low paying jobs and regularly use cash to avoid paying taxes. Most have no sense whatsoever of cohesion with the country they live in and instead make groups of similar culture that don't really try to fit in.
All my immigrant friends are skilled workers who earn more than an average citizen, contribute more taxes and pay exorbitant fees for visa, health surcharge and NIC. I am sure there are immigrants in low paying jobs too. Perhaps we need to talk about different types of immigrants rather than clubbing them all into one "immigrant" category and reinforcing the same tired tropes about immigrants.
This thread is about illegal immigrants. If your friends paid for visas, that would imply they are in a different immigrant category than what we're discussing.
Really "Illegal" immigrants are often a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction - pretty much a rounding error in budgets. But naturally blown up for Politics.
It's not actually particularly nice to live illegally.
No it isn't. This line of comments is explicitly in response to your claim:
> Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy, living at taxpayers' expense
No one has yet mentioned illegal immigrants except you.
In any case it doesn't matter, since GP was specifically replying to:
> In my experience, immigrants have low paying jobs and regularly use cash to avoid paying taxes. Most have no sense whatsoever of cohesion with the country they live in and instead make groups of similar culture that don't really try to fit in.
They were simply giving their own opposite experience on the subject of immigrant wages and taxation, which is equally as valid.
If this thread was actually about illegal immigrants, both comments would be equally off topic. I find it interesting which one you decided to respond to.
Yes, but generally a Medical Incident isn't really particularly desirable. You don't really get anything out of it other than "being healthy", which could be argued as being a right, and often a prerequisite for starting to contribute. Gatekeeping that just ensures they never will.
>The UK must surely have satellites or drones that can spot boats of migrants coming in via France
You don't really need that - you can stand on the beach and watch.
The issue is more with the laws - we have human rights laws where you can claim asylum and a very slow and expensive legal system where almost no one actually gets send back. What the government should do is change the laws to something that agrees more with common sense.
> Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy,
The bigger issue is people not contributing to the economy. Let’s not peg laziness as an immigration problem because British people are equally lazy.
> The other complaint I often see is immigrants' failure to assimilate to British norms, language, and culture.
If we forced people to conform to British norms then we wouldn’t enjoy the variety of takeaways that Brits have enjoyed for decades. Which is ironic because a kebab is now considered a British norm for post drinking meals.
Plus it’s not as if British people are particularly good at integrating with other cultures. Most Brits can’t even speak a second language and don’t even attempt to learn the customs and language of any other countries they visit.
> People who complain about these things seem to often run into the UK's limitations on freedom of speech.
I think the opposite is the problem. People have been far too vocal about the mythical problems that immigrants bring and anyone who attempts to present actual facts gets shot down as “woke” or “leftard” etc.
We need to stop blaming other people for our own problems.
Major difference between visiting a place and emigrating there. How many cultures actually learn another language just to go on their annual vacation? You seem to be arguing simultaneously that the Brits are worse than average when it comes to adapting to local norms as tourists, while also suggesting that the people moving to Britain permanently shouldn't have to?
There's nothing wrong with a culture adapting over time without losing their identity, like your example of Brits deciding to add the kebab. But a small country can't preserve their identity when they are overloaded by so many immigrants coming in at once who FORCE their ways on their new home. Think of it as Push vs Pull, there's a difference.
Every country having a unique culture makes the world more interesting. Imagine how boring it would be if you saved up for a trip to Japan/Kenya/Chile/etc, only to find that almost everyone there was a white English-speaking American living the exact same lifestyle you have at home? Leftists would in that case be empathetic toward the remaining indigenous minority who feel their historic way of life was killed off against their will. Why should it be any different if you swap the country and nationalities in this example to what is happening in the UK?
I am an immigrant myself, and a fairly liberal one at that. But I made the effort to come to my new home legally and assimilate to the best of my ability. I'm not sure why I should hold others to a lower standard.
> You seem to be arguing simultaneously that the Brits are worse than average when it comes to adapting to local norms as tourists, while also suggesting that the people moving to Britain permanently shouldn't have to?
No. I’m arguing that people who say “people change their personalities to suit mine” are hypocrites.
> But a small country can't preserve their identity when they are overloaded by so many immigrants coming in at once who FORCE their ways on their new home. Think of it as Push vs Pull, there's a difference.
Citation required — for literally every part of that sentence.
> Every country having a unique culture makes the world more interesting.
Exactly my point as well.
> Leftists would in that case be empathetic toward the remaining indigenous minority who feel their historic way of life was killed off against their will. Why should it be any different if you swap the country and nationalities in this example to what is happening in the UK?
If you think a fraction of a percentage of people coming to the UK is suddenly going to change the identity of the entire country then you need to get out and explore more of the UK yourself.
> I am an immigrant myself, and a fairly liberal one at that. But I made the effort to come to my new home legally and assimilate to the best of my ability. I'm not sure why I should hold others to a lower standard.
The problem isn’t the suggestion. The problem is the entitlement.
I do think it’s courteous for people to make an effort to integrate. But it should also be their decision, not ours.
And that’s the crux of the problem.
Most of the time, the complains about immigration are unfounded scapegoating of people who are different. It’s got fuck all to do with facts. It’s just people who the government have failed, or people who feel entitled, being fearful of other people who are different. It’s literally just an unchecked primal instinct. And we need to grow past that as a species.
>I do think it’s courteous for people to make an effort to integrate. But it should also be their decision, not ours.
If I choose not to integrate, and to instead practice particularly illiberal approaches to women, for example, is that still my decision? If my culture uses rape and acid to control women, may I continue?
I'm picking on a particularly onerous difference between Western and MENA peoples that's been a flashpoint in the UK, from what I can see.
If immigration was purely unfounded scapegoating, and we all could simply talk about our heritage and share new foods in these borderless economic zones that used to be countries, why would there be articles like these popping up:
Another debate probably reduced to a single bit of information between participants. Class based analyses on immigration are probably more telling, but there doesn't seem to be much available.
> If I choose not to integrate, and to instead practice particularly illiberal approaches to women, for example, is that still my decision? If my culture uses rape and acid to control women, may I continue?
You’re now conflating culture with crime.
And are you honestly suggesting that other cultures have literally nothing to offer asides violent sexual offences?!
Ridiculous.
> If immigration was purely unfounded scapegoating, and we all could simply talk about our heritage and share new foods in these borderless economic zones that used to be countries, why would there be articles like these popping up
The first article is debunking headline claims about immigration. Ostensibly supporting my claims.
The second article is just a commentary of the government’s plans to deport.
> No. I’m arguing that people who say “people change their personalities to suit mine” are hypocrites.
Assimilating doesn't mean changing one's personality. I'm still the same person I was before I came to the USA, but I respect that some things are customary and others are considered offensive. I know I'm expected to tip for services that in other countries would be considered insulting. Yet if enough immigrants refused to tip, it would become a stereotype that would create negative sentiment towards said immigrants because workers rely on that income.
> If you think a fraction of a percentage of people coming to the UK is suddenly going to change the identity of the entire country then you need to get out and explore more of the UK yourself.
I roadtripped across the UK earlier this year actually, spending time in 2 major cities and 4 small towns. The demographic shift over the last decade is immediately noticeable. It is multiple orders of magnitude more than you're making it out to be.
> I do think it’s courteous for people to make an effort to integrate. But it should also be their decision, not ours.
That's a matter of opinion, and perhaps not up to either you or me to decide whether it is right, but up to the % of citizens who will vote against immigration at the next election. Unchecked immigration is the top reason that western populations are shifting rightward. And this trend has evidently scared the Labour Party enough that they're finally preteneding to do something about it.
But let's say it is up to an immigrant to decide whether to integrate. What if their values are incompatible with the country's? If you move to the UK and take great offense over how people dress or their type of humor or their freedom of religion or their pub culture or whatever, why did you even move there? And if you then expect this entire sovereign nation (who is already doing you a favor by allowing you in) to change their ways to accommodate your beliefs, that is a hell of a lot more entitled than the other way around (the country expecting an individual to integrate as part of the terms of being let in).
> Unchecked immigration is the top reason that western populations are shifting rightward
There never has been unchecked immigration despite what various hard-right publications might say.
> to change their ways to accommodate your beliefs
Literally no one is advocating that the UK should change its culture to suit any beliefs of immigrants.
Being inclusive doesn’t mean we have to change our own culture. Unless, that is, you consider xenophobia a “cultural” problem. And if you do, then I don’t think changing people’s attitudes there is an unfair ask.
The real reason society is shifting rightwards isn’t directly due to immigration. That’s actually a symptom of the shift, not the cause.
The real reason is poverty and greed. The wealth gap is grown, the rich have gotten more greedy and the working class have gotten poorer. So people want change. The right promises change by scapegoating people who are different. And then the the poor vote for that change, without realising that they’re just voting for the institution that screwed them over to begin with. As evidenced by the fact that the wealthy largely also vote for the right.
You see this cycle over and over again in history throughout the world. Unfortunately it’s usually followed by war.
Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy, living at taxpayers' expense, with many immigrants engaging in crime?
No, this is not supported by any real evidence.
They could create a polite British form of ICE
I can think of few things the UK should do less than ape American attitudes to immigration currently.
Articles like this [1] (re: Rochdale gang) are contributing to the impression of a link in the UK. There's also the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal [2] which affected an estimated 1,400 girls specifically in Rotherham. Population of Rotherham is 265,800, for reference. In both these cases, girls were charged and the offenders are Pakistani.
There is also a recent video of a girl wielding an ax and knife to protect her and her sister in Scotland [3]. She has been charged with brandishing weapons. Interestingly, the BBC has issued an article [4] claiming that it was a "Bulgarian couple" that the girls approached, and to not "spread misinformation." I am a researcher of Slavic languages, so I can tell you from watching the video in [3] that the accents featured in this video are not Bulgarian. I am not willing to stake a claim in what they actually are (someone else is welcome to comment).
Actually, I'm quite alarmed that the BBC is claiming this, as I generally consider the BBC reputable.
I just overlaid that with the immigration into uk with that chart (both from statista) - charts are disturbingly similar trend. I would hope that its correlation and not causation but its definitely eye opening and kind of concerning.
If we wanted we could stop illegal immigration extremely fast – as you say we are an island so it's relatively easy to stop people arriving. We don't need drones. At the moment after the French have given life-jackets to the illegal migrants and their boats have set off into the British channel, the people smugglers will call the British coast guard and ask them to go pick up the migrants they're smuggling into the country. The UK coast guard then picks them up and escorts them safely to shore. From here the police will be waiting, not to arrest them, but to take them to their hotel and give them a hot meal. Shortly after this charities in the UK will give them phones (typically iPhones), clothes and bikes to get around. The government will also give them some spending money to spend in our towns and cities.
We obviously don't have to do any of this and ID cards wouldn't stop any of this. We choose to do this and this is why they come.
However between the various reports of migrant hotel stabbings, thefts, sexual assaults, and rapes of children, it's been discovered that some migrants have been working in the UK – primarily in the gig economy. All of the things I've said to this point are not deemed issues and the government has no intention in changing them, but the fact that a small percentage of the migrants coming here are working has caught the eye of our politicians who have stated very strongly that they would prefer the migrants coming here don't work. The digital ID cards will hypothetically help with this "problem"
It's hard to explain to people outside the UK how strange this place is. Most countries want a controlled immigration system and treat border security as a national security priority, and when they do allow immigrants into the country they almost always want them to work and pay their own way. The UK basically does the inverse of this. The explanation varies between some combination of letting hundreds of thousands of Afghans into the country is the right thing to do, to it's the law so there's nothing we can do about it.
Legal note:
This is not an anti-migration post. I am pro-migration.
The French have no incentive to do the British immigration authorities' job for them. In fact, Britain very recently loudly quit an multilateral alliance that involved — among other things – common migration policy.
Why shouldn't France give life jackets and boats to people who want to leave France?
I agree. I think the French are doing the right thing here. I only mentioned it because it's one of the many things governments do which encourage and normalise more coming.
British politician could try to strike a deal with the French to stop them helping individual who try to enter the UK illegally, but obviously it would only make sense for them to do that if the British were also trying to stop people entering the country illegally. Like you say, we can't expect the French to defend UK borders.
In regards to leaving the EU this wouldn't change the situation meaningfully, it would just allow for more cooperation in how illegal migrants are distributed across Europe. Like the UK, EU countries are also legally not allowed to deport Afghans. It's not as if the EU doesn't face similar problems.
The UK would arguably benefit from being able to redistribute migrants to other less-popular EU nations. For reasons inexplicable to me, many people seem keen on migrating to the UK.
Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants? How big is it compared to, for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
Or are those things somehow related?
I would be crazily scared to know that immigrant care workers will leave NHS as most hospitals relies on them.
The government already made clear they won't pay people more nor will give more benefits for NHS workers and I am quite sure not Brits will take those spots when Tesco express pays more for less hours of work with more benefits.
>Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants?
This minimises the problem. The UK voters have consistently voted for reduced immigration, with polls showing the preferred number to be somewhere between 0-100,000. Those elected have consistently ignored them which has raised tensions.
In the last few years, the UK had around 1 million people net per year. 1 million people is bigger than most cities in the UK for comparison, so imagine a new city of people, every single year. The infrastructure could not, or did not keep up and has contributed to worse living standards through overly-subscribed national services, increased living costs, etc.
>for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
The NHS is already the single biggest expenditure of the UK's taxes. I remember it being more than 25% of the total budget. How much should be spent on the NHS? 50%? 90%?
The cost of defending democracy and freedom from a tyrannical Russia is also barely a drop in the bucket, while having huge meaning for many. Only 2% of the budget for the entire Armed forces, let alone just some support for Ukraine, compared to the 25+% on NHS. It's nothing.
I think there's some conflation happening here (not necessarily from the above comment).
Those figures relate to general immigration, which wouldn't be affected by ID schemes since people are given approval by the government to arrive and work in the UK. If the government wanted to reduce regular immigration, it could just decide to award less visas.
The ID scheme would only affect irregular immigration which is much lower (approx 50,000 a year by the governments stats, obviously hard to know how accurate that is, but much lower than 1 million[0]).
You are absolutely right to point this out. However, I don't think many people in this thread are actually confused. It's rather clear that this scheme has about as much to do with immigration as the Online Safety Act has to do with protecting children. The UK government is just getting more and more bald-faced about these sorts of things.
Thank you for the numbers. Could you please clarify how much money this translates to, both in terms of income and expenses generated by skilled workers who are legally employed in the UK?
I must say I am not doubting nor being pedantic. I am indeed trying to have a conversation based on the facts and people I know. I would happily change my mind if I find reasons for that. At the same time, I would like to share my views which might give some perspective on my opinions.
Based on government figures I've saw, the annual economic contribution from skilled workers alone is estimated to range from 4 billion to gbp. Moreover, it's important to note that these skilled workers generally don't receive government benefits.
Literally. They pay double on nurseries, they pay for NHS in advance, they do not have any financial government assistance at all, contrary to what people believe.
I do not understand what kind of problems they cause. Would you mind explain it to me? I am not being pedantic nor ironic. I want to understand what is the complaint?
I agree about drug dealers, rape gangs and etc, but they in the UK before and they will remain independently of the political changes regarding immigration.
Ten years and no settlement will only put away skilled workers as they will not be able to retire on time, nor have any financial safety as the UK only provides 8 weeks for them to leave after the contract termination.It also means spending more on health, education, and living, which is already a struggle.
Refugees receive £50 per week, which isn't enough for groceries and rent. The system is broken, but attacking another unrelated group does not seem to be the answer.
While I acknowledge that some individuals are abusing the system, I maintain that the overall impact is likely positive, especially when considering the near-zero population growth among native populations.
Who will pay for pensions 10 years from now? The money you pay now goes towards current pensions, and the government does not save taxes for future generations.
So 1 million people per year was the supposed peak, right? The actual numbers are definitely far lower than 5 million, I think.
More than that, NHS workers in hospitals are immigrants because no British person is insane to work for it under current conditions.
At the same time, no Brit wants to increase taxes even more to cover the costs of paying more for health.
A short-sighted solution will be another blow to the UK economy as the Brexit was. Well, they are being orchestrated by exactly the same folks.
This also bothers me because there's a clear conflict of interest. Trice is married to an editorial lead at The Telegraph and receives funding from Lloyds.
Not sure about Sky News and others, but I would not be surprised that some digging would lead to the same people.
There is a clear financial cost related to the war in Ukraine. Whether it is a fair cost or not is a moral and ethical point, which I think is an individual opinion. But there is a cost regardless. Money spent in war is money that will never ever come back at any proportion to its society.
The NHS may lack funding, or it may not. But what is certain is that if you know how the NHS operates internally, or you know someone who does, then it's extremely evident that the NHS is severely mismanaged by administrators who definitely are not underfunded.
I think saying "the NHS is underfunded" all day is just ignoring the other major issue: even when the NHS has funds, they squander most of them.
I don't think solving just one of them will solve the whole problem, but maybe solving the blatant corruption at the NHS's administrative level might improve their financial situation by virtue of the money not lining the pockets of the rich.
Not to mention if you have suddenly have 1 million more people a year, many of whom are not in good health, you will suddenly have a lot more demand on that already broken and under-funded system.
Where do you assume they are not in good health?
Or many of them are not in good health?
Most of them are university students or economic active people as far as I know.
Cutting those places will put UK in even a worse place then after Brexit.
For sure there are sick people. Over any population there is a sample which is sick, but how much is it according to you or your sources?
I don't think, nor I have proof, but seems logical, that there will be many more healthcare workers than sick people.
The real mess is not about immigrants, I cannot blame them for the lack of investiment, training and planning over 20 years or more.
If anything, I am grateful that if I go to a hospital they can admit me because there is AT LEAST enough people.
It seem lack of character to change policies after asking people to come.
This is a natural and unfortunate consequence of crime and foreign aggression getting increasingly borderless. As the world gets smaller, and as more and more of the world's population knows about the outside world, the more badness we face.
Like it or not, our high-trust society is devolving into a low-trust society as the world opens up. Our defences must evolve -- and the current free-for-all needs to end.
Perhaps the better solution is to stop opening up and make a concerted effort to return to a high-trust society, rather than destroy privacy and go full authoritarian polite-state?
Or must we absolutely must accept eg every Nigerian, Pakistani, Syrian, Afghan, Indian etc who has a fleeting desire emigrate, else our society will collapse?
I don't understand why we can't have both - are you saying that native-born Brits are inherently more trustworthy than people from other nationalities? Or do you mean that we should also curb internal migration as well?
It's quite possible that this whole digital ID thing is a red herring, to distract from recent revelations about Morgan McSweeney - who illegally took money from the Israel lobby, to fund a fake "antisemitism crisis" in Labour, with the goal of replacing Corbyn with Israel-aligned Starmer.
Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
> Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
Wow straight out of the Tory playbook (see eg Rhys-Mogg "lying [down] in Parliament" to poison search results for lying to parliament). They are so incredibly similar
It's incredibly misleading to call a phone app a "card". This is much worse than it sounds. Am I going to be forced to buy a smartphone? Am I going to be forced to run non-Free software? Am I going to be forced to enter into a restrictive contract with a foreign corporation?
Hah this is the UK. No, it'll be optional to begin with to make people like you asking important questions seem like a whacko. Then once they use propaganda to make people opt into it, and it reaches mass adoption, then it'll quietly be made mandatory - or extremely annoying not to have it
Are you suggesting they will draft the law in such a way that in order not to be fired people must download this thing onto a smartphone and show it to their employer, post-haste? Your link does not support any evidence of that (the line " will be mandatory for every worker in the UK" links to just another one of their own articles, which also does not support it). I imagine it'll be phased in for new employment.
No, it won't be mandatory in all situations all at once, for every facet of life (I did not specify employment).
Yep. It's literally always this way. It's starts with "we hope everyone will do the right thing". To, "it's concerning some people are refusing to do their part". To finally, "do it now or we'll lock you in a cage".
There was a big backlash and they eventually caved in and cancelled the scheme when the government changed.
I lived in South London at the time and sent a letter to my MP to protest about the creation of a database state and increased surveillance, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
About two months later I got a form response that started "Don't worry, it's not just an ID card, there will be a huge database behind it!"
Thanks. Way to show you didn't even read what I wrote.
I think in the intervening years that relationship has already fundamentally changed though. Privacy from government in most western countries seems to be something of a fading memory, it would be hard to make those same arguments in 2025.
The MPs never read anything. You got sent back one of a few pre-written replies by a secretary. I was stupid enough to reply to one of those replies once and never got anything back.
If you look at the countries that are lauded at having the best online government services. They all have some type of digital ID.
Having something like that is imo. a cornerstone for building out top notch digital governmental services, and I don't fault the UK for trying to get this in place.
That being said, I'm not convinced it will be that much of a blocker for illegal workers. I'm sure they will find a way around it.
In addition to all the issues mentioned in the article, this seems to mean that UK citizens will effectively be forced to accept the terms of service of one of two US companies (Apple or Google). If you must have either an Android or iOS device to run this digital ID app (which presumably will be distributed via the Play Store on Android), there's no other option!
For me a big red flag is that the government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this: "in an effort to crack down on illegal migrant workers" is complete, transparent rubbish.
Of all the things there are to complain about these ID cards, I don’t think this is the one to choose.
Starmer has been ambivalent on ID cards (at least compared to Blair, who must think Xmas has come twice this year). Really the only reason this is being introduced is because it lets Labour look like they’re trying to tackle illegal immigration/employment/benefits-claiming.
Reform (led by Trump’s mini-me) is making political progress hand over fist by casting immigration as the root of all evil. I’m pretty certain this is Labour’s response. They don’t want the populist (otherwise known as “batshit insane”) policies Reform are proposing (“end all immigration, send all immigrants back home”) - but a more-moderate “you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits” seems on-message to me.
So for once it might just be ok to take a politicians word at face value. This doesn’t preclude nefarious use later on, of course…
If that's Labour's response to Reform UK then it is the most ill-thought-out, if not idiotic, possible:
There is a real issue with immigration in the UK.
People want actual action on immigration, not gimmicks, not lies. The Conservatives were annihilated because their voters caught up with the fact that they were lying (talking tough while actually pushing immigration higher).
Those Digital IDs would do nothing against illegal immigration considering existing right to work and right to rent legal checks. It is clear and people see it, so see previous point. "you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits" is already the case and has always been the case. He is copying the disastrous Conservative strategy to talk tough while doing nothing and in fact actually keeping immigration up.
There have been previous attempts to introduce ID cards. People have always been generaly against them and the most against them are probably those already supporting Reform UK or the libertarians on both sides. So he's only eroding the little support he has left (progressist liberals) while strengthening the opinion of those already against him. I was looking at the readers' comments on The Guardian and there are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal. So if even them turn against Starmer he is well and truly toast.
I don't understand how people are able to work in the UK illegally without employers already breaking the law. Employers are required to pay payroll taxes for their employees and you need a national insurance number for the employee to do this. I'm not sure how this fixes something that should already be fixed.
I just wonder how widespread fraud is without any form of ID.
A fake utility bill is just a few clicks away on my PC.
Govt surveillance? I'm much more worried by the ever increasing number of cameras in the streets rather than something similar to having a passport to prove who you really are.
This is just wishful thinking. They're not going to make all of the farm workers, many of whom have difficulty reading ANY language (let alone English), download an "app" and install it on their phone.
"In 2024, a significant portion of the UK adult population, approximately 8.5 million people (1 in 6), struggles with reading and writing at a basic level, according to The Reading Agency's 2024 report"
Maybe they'll have an exception for people who are more migratory in nature. In that event, I think we'll get to see a nice real-world example of a cyberpunk-style dystopia. "High tech, low life". The upstanding citizens will be surveilled, preyed upon by corruption, and will be running on a social credit score treadmill designed to work them to death. Meanwhile, a plucky band of rebel farm workers, who are free to work outside the system, will bring down the establishment and bring freedom to all. Roll credits.
I’ve always lived in places where having an ID on you has been part of your “citizen responsibilities”. So reading the post my feeling was “oh cool, they’re getting a new eID-like system”. But I imagine it’s a huge step if folks could get by without an ID at all.
In this case, sounds like you'll not just be required to carry an ID. Everyone in the country will be legally required to carry an Android phone or iPhone.
Well, maybe the app will keep working and you can update it from Aurora Store. Pretty vague so far.
In the UK it has never been compulsory to carry ID, even when driving.
At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy.
And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive and don't travel, some folks just get by without.
So if there is a requirement to have a Britcard, and to present your 'Britcard' when stopped for any reason, then it is definitely a change.
The counterpoint to this is obviously that the requirement to present ID to vote is tantamount to voter suppression - iirc there is no “free” form of ID in the UK.
As an ex-Brit I am also used to carrying an ID and a drivers license, and I’ve always found it quite weird that you can’t get an ID card of any kind that isn’t a full-fledged passport or a drivers license.
I mean I guess this new thing is going to be free?
I also don't live in the UK any more, still a brit and not yet Australian, but I have had to adjust to it being necessary to carry your license here when driving. It means I can't really leave home without my wallet, which is odd. We're getting electronic licenses before long though, hopefully.
Honestly no idea. Hopefully! And hopefully you’ll be able to vote with it.
I just have a magnetic wallet on the back of my iPhone with the two cards and my travel card, so I always have them. I don’t carry a physical payment card or cash so don’t need a wallet otherwise
That is very surprising. In the US, you are legally required to carry your license when driving. If you are caught driving without one, expect to be arrested.
Also the US reserves the right to demand ID if you're within 100 miles of a border - which is effectively 2/3 of the population. And detain you until your status can be "verified", however long that could take.
That should only be for non-citizens, but I have no idea how you could prove that without documentation in the first place.
So for the vast majority of Americans, you probably have to be carrying ID at all times anyway, else you risk someone deciding you "might" not actually be a citizen.
If this same rule was enacted in the UK, there would be no place on the British Isles that would be excluded, as nowhere is more than 100 miles from the coast.
In France you have to carry a state issued ID regardless of your location within the country. Driving license might be asked to be provided if there is an assumption you have one. A lasting legacy of the 40s.
In practice the pseudo-crime of being "suspicious looking" also requires ID. Good luck if you want to argue your constitutional rights. Immigration status is topical for the current era. Something as benign as walking up the street to pickup takeout could involve identifying yourself to the police and waiting for them to clear you for warrants.
I lived in the UK for a while as a teenager. During that time I got a driver's license. I was astonished to find out that it was paper-only. No photo. My brother could use it if needed. The laws were changed around 2000. But I think you are correct. UK used to be a high-trust society.
That hasn’t been my experience, perhaps it’s state to state. I’ve been stopped without ID and had no problem. I’ve even boarded a plane through TSA without my license.
The point of digital ID might be to add more cases when ID is required in future. One thing if everyone buying a kitchen knife must fill a long form, another thing if they just must tap a phone on the cash register linking knife ID and person's ID. Half of you are already tapping a phone to pay for the items anyway.
One thing is showing a passport to enter the gay bar, another thing is tap a phone and have time, person ID and bar ID recorded. Much faster. Also the mobile application can collect other data from the phone without distracting a user. So much more convenient.
Once the ban on pointy cutlery is imposed and knife crime gives way to fork crime, you’ll be glad you only have to tap your phone at the pub instead of eating that Sunday Roast with a spoon.
What's the benefit of this over a passport? A passport is a physical thing, so you don't need to have a phone to be able to use it, proves who you are with the same details as this digital ID, and will probably require a similar amount of paperwork to get hold of
You usually don't want to carry a passport with you at all times. In some European countries (e.g., the Nordics), you have your ID, driver’s license, firearm license, etc., all in a government app that can be verified with an app used by officials. You can also sign and authenticate all paperwork with the same system
I use my passport to verify my right to work in the US during the first week of my job, and then I don't bring it any other time. So unless you're changing jobs very frequently it shouldn't be necessary to carry all the time. A bigger issue would be that many people do not have passports.
I would trust the Nordic governments to write an app to put on my phone and not slurp up all my data and spy on me with it. I can't say the same about the British government
Easy and cheap regular checks on the spot presential or/and online, as frequently as you want vs rare scheduled difficult and expensive checks.
Possibilities get realised such as regular remote checks (ie selfie to prove you are the id owner holder, address proof, etc, flagging odd id holder behaviour or employer, etc). Currently, you cannot do this, no visibility into who works where and where that person even resembles the person meant to be working for [insert gig company].
I do selfie to prove I match my driver's license all the time (needed for app based banks, and so on)?
The government absolutely knows where I work, are you joking? That's what NI numbers are for. You seriously think there isn't a join table in a government database with my NI number and passport number?
There are other workers in the UK aside from you. The policy affects them too not just you. You are getting the business requirements wrong. You are unlikely to be the main reason for the policy. Folks getting paid under minimum wage such as some gig workers using someone else's identity are the main target.
If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
> If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
Simple. Overstaying or/and expired passport will lead to that. Valid status is not a fixed binary state. It is better described as a function of personal id, rights docs and current time. Currently, the checks are more akin to updating a Boolean column on rare occasions. Digital id countries do checks more like function calls that you can perform easily and quickly
RTW already requires ID plus NI, but OK what about if we just said 'free passports' and then said passport or driving licence plus NI is needed to get a job here. If you have a foreign passport and no UK driving licence then yes you'll have to keep that up to date in order to work here, c'est la vie.
To the extent this is technically possible, if the gig economy companies wanted to do this, they could do it already.
When the driver signs up, check their passport or driving license in the normal manner, and take a matching portrait you keep on file. Any time you want to, compare a selfie to the portrait on file.
Reason they don't do this is it's profitable to hire people who can't legally work in the UK, if they can get away with it - and the government lets them get away with it.
One of the problems the UK has is that our two primary government IDs – driver licenses and passports – are not universally issued. Instead, these IDs have requirements and must be applied for at a cost, so not everyone has one.
This means when you want to implement things like the Online Safety Act you basically have to implement alternatives to ID verification like age estimators which isn't ideal (for the government anyway).
With a digital ID anonymous age estimators will no longer be required, so when someone is trying to watch porn or view footage of a political protest they'll have to identify who they are instead of using a fake AI face.
They don't have any real benefit over passports expect for the fact that a passport is a selectively issued document which not everyone living and working in the UK has access to or has applied for, but with digital IDs everyone will have one so there will no excuse to not identify yourself any time the government wants you to.
Can't use your passport online. In Sweden we have bank id, its used for everything from validating purchases, logging in to banks, government or other websites, to sign documents, get a loan, etc. To get it you would need to go to a bank and present a proper ID, the ones using bank id for auth or otherwise only get your name and personal number.
A passport is the universal identity document. It's way too valuable to carry around and expediting a new passport is costly and slow. Checks need to be done in person and the passport holder needs to be told in advance about the check (so impromptu checks don't work and expired passports get through, also catching fake passports and the like is hard).
A digital ID as its name says is digital, checks can be done remotely (as often as you want) in a secure environment with physical checks possible in addition to that. Regular and unscheduled checks are possible with a digital id after the initial check both presential and remote. Online checks especially can cover for things like the same id being used in multiple places, it also means employers cannot fudge it as the actual repository of truth lies online. None of this is possible with a passport.
Citizen IDs and more recently digital IDs have been used in Europe for decades now. Having a redundant piece of ID is incredibly valuable.
The fact that the UK doesn’t allow “impromptu checks”, otherwise known as “Papers please!” is not a bug, it’s a feature that distinguishes our democracy from other states and we are pretty proud of it.
There is nothing undemocratic about checking whether you are compliant with employment regulations on a regular manner anymore than it is to check whether your gas installation is compliant with gas regulations or your voting registration is compliant with voting policy. It is completely orthogonal. You might not be in favour of a policy but that does not mean that the policy is undemocratic.
In the UK you do not have to have your drivers license upon your person when driving a car. Usually you'll be instructed to present it to a nearby police station within a few days.
Not required by law in the UK to have ID on you while driving. Works well enough (you have to produce it at a station within 7 days). I'm sure if it's serious enough, the police can force some other method
In times of war, civil liberties get curtailed. And in 2025 when Russian and Chinese bots are interfering in our democracy at an industrial scale to destroy our countries from within, the idea of identity being overlooked for all aspects of public life is looking increasingly untenable.
The government has been able to do checks on me using my passport number etc, like when I was getting my provisional driving license, so somewhere there is a digital version of it on a government server or something. Can't they just make that information available?
What impromptu checks would you need this ID for? The use cases I've seen for it are to make sure you are legal to work, and when renting a house, both of which are circumstances that you can be told about beforehand
That is not what I mean. Doing checks using your passport number is not good enough . It only proves that you someone used your passport number for a job. It doesn't prove it's you. It doesn't prove that you didn't swap with someone else (worker proxy). A digital id is a token fully controlled that opens compliance possibilities that are not possible or financially feasible by using just a passport number because the government does not control the passport numbers of everyone (especially those for which this policy is intended).
Think: the ability to verify that the id owner's face resembles the face of the id holder. The ability to check that the id owner address matches that of the id holder. The ability to flag employers containing id owner employees regularly failing those checks. The ability to do this regularly without previous notice to the id owner at national scale remotely or in person is a level of compliance you will never get even halfway with just using a passport number.
The driving license application page pulled up my photo from giving it my passport number. That photo of me proves that I am the owner of that passport. I recently gave my work my passport information to prove that I was legal to work there. If we need a new system to prove that I am legal to work there, then how was it good enough to use my passport for that?
Nothing is going to change unless you put the entire penalty of illegal employment on the employer. This could mean massive fines, shutting down the business and/or jail time. In the US hundreds of illegal workers are rounded up every day and jailed/deported while their employers get a slap on the wrist, and these employers then just turn around and hire more illegal immigrants. The overall problem goes unsolved.
I don't understand why this needs to be linked to a smartphone. No issue with a national ID, but should we really shackle everything to a phone? They're already lost on the questions coming in about those who don't have one.
There's a lot of resistance to this because people can see this is the big pill they want you to swallow. Then smaller ones can follow.
You might need digital ID recorded to buy a house. Then a car. Then eventually pretty much anything.
Any legislation allowing the State to link systems via digital ID would be unremarkable and not newsworthy, but the end result could be the Panopticon we are all dreading, or perhaps a toolkit for more hardline governments in the future.
For now, you can sign a Petition [1] against the introduction of Digital ID.
In the future, you may need to submit digital ID before signing such a petition (rather than the current email address validation).
Imagine what a tool that could be for identifying dissenters and undesirables.
. The UK is in shambles. For 15 years, raw sewage has poured into its rivers unchecked. The government shrugs. Meanwhile, the nation wallows in self-pity about losing “world power” status, yet produces little of note. In the AI race, the space race, the EV race? Nowhere to be found.
Anti-migrant rhetoric used to push control that will only ever apply to citizens from the supposed party you should have voted for if you're pro-migration is wild.
Leveraging a central authority to issue standardised, signed tokens to all citizens, then letting the public and private sectors make use of it: that’s something I could get behind!
The government steps in solely to manage token issuance. New use cases appear as emergent properties. DebbiesDrawings.com lets you use your tokens to sign eCards. HMRC.gov.uk lets you use then to sign tax returns. RonsRentals.co.uk lets you use it to sign a new lease.
In a pessimistic world, without watching the hyenas closely we end up with Capita or Accenture or Concentrica or Syntegrico (I made the last two up) syphoning off £8bn to create proprietary tokens that can only be used with sanctioned government JavaBeans webcrap. It would also be fundamentally flawed and won’t launch until 2037.
"The new digital ID will be held on people’s phones"
Is the implication here that it will become a legal requirement for me to own a modern phone (will it have to be a google/apple blessed phone?) in order to get a job in the UK?
> In designing the digital ID scheme, the government will ensure that it works for those who aren’t able to use a smartphone, with inclusion at the heart of its design.
I guess we'll have to wait for specifics. Unfortunately "it will have inclusion at its core" doesn't really say much.
They are considering enabling its use for more than just work, so what happens when my grandma forgets to charge her phone before her doctors' appointment?
What happens if you want to give teenagers a dumb phone because you as a parent decide a smartphone isn't appropriate, but they need the ID for the NHS too?
What of people like me who are able to use a smartphone but are unwilling to?
It's not just the elderly and homeless as mentioned on the page, but also those with religious objections, members of the digital disconnection movement, those concerned about electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and so on.
Should there a right to an offline life for the simple reason that you want live offline? A right which is protected in a few other places in Europe, at least to some extent when it concerns government services.
I don't think Kier Starmer understands that when people voted for Labour, they were, in fact, voting for Labour, not Reform / the Tories. This proposal at least has some merit (though it is not without issues) but trying to sell it as preventing illegal work is ludicrous, attempting to appeal to the right-wing votes who will never vote Labour, and giving control of the conversation to the Weasel in Chief, Nigel Farage.
Their strategy seems to be that they think their left flank is secure and they need to pull to the right to secure Tory voters who are now at a crossroads with how diminished the Tories are. Will they go to Reform? Will they go back to the Tories? The Lib Dems? It seems that Labour think some of the toughness without the undertones that Reform often has might grab them some of their voters. Maybe the implosion of Your Party gives them a feeling of more security on the left flank.
But yeah, this abandonment of the issues they traditionally represented to try and attract the soft centre right voters might not cause their traditional base to vote for the Tories. But it might send their centrists to the Lib Dems, their lefties to the Greens/SNP/etc and their "I just want change, any change" supporters to Reform. Along with increasing apathy and reducing turnout on their former core. Polling certainly seems to indicate that this is happening.
If he doesn't realise that then he probably also doesn't realise that all this dictatorship tooling he's installing is more than likely going to fall into the hands of Reform at the next election.
He'll have to live with the consequences as will the rest of us.
The voters misunderstood too. How much evidence and examples from the period of 1997-2010 did people need? All a quick google away
A harsh lesson in believing the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Though mostly in the UK it's usually just apathetic "well time for the other party to have go" (due to 14 years of the last lot) more than anything more educated
I've always associated Labour with ID cards, so this feels right for Labour. Last time they pretended it was needed to prevent terrorism as that was the issue de jour but this time it's immigration.
Are there any Amish in the UK? In the US, they probably have ID (like most other citizens) but not the digital form that's being discussed here. I'm not against the idea of having an ID card, as like many others I have some of my own, but that's a physical, inert object which stands on its own, not tied to anything ephemeral and fragile like a mobile phone or computer would be.
It has been obvious for at least 10 years of "digital privacy" as an issue that the next time people with certain database attributes would be restricted from full participation in society or rounded up by armed men, the attributes at issue would be citizenship and immigration status.
This moment is the test for the edifice that the privacy advocates have built in all that time. We should all be watching closely.
Absolutely, calling it a ‘Brit’ card will make it wildly unpopular in certain areas let alone the headaches in terms of the common travel area and the Good Friday agreement.
>Article 1 (vi), commonly referred to as the birthright provisions, states that both governments, "Recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish, or British, or both
You use the ID to create an IRL identify anchor certificate, then use other certificates with varying privacy profiles that are then cryptographically linked to your identity but in a privacy preserving manner.
I don’t understand what is wrong with this system:
“Please employ me.”
“OK, fill out this form with your name, D.O.B. and national insurance number, and if it matches against the government database then you can have the job.”
What am I missing here? I suppose they could use someone else’s details, but then HMRC should be able to easily see that the NI account seems to have multiple taxpayers.
You will also want a photo that matches the face presented every time your gig worker looks at his phone to see the next order, etc or better yet fingerprint
This appears to just be an extension (in free app form) of the UK government “One Login” system used to get access to most government web services. This currently has about 12 million users.
Leaving aside that this ID solves no problem (as noted in may comments here) the last thing already stretched budget needs right now is a new expensive project.
Digital IDs will be used to restrict your internet access.
They'll roll them out gradually. You won't need one at first. You'll still show your passport, driving license etc, until one day you give up because the digital version is convenient and you "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? Have you got something to hide?
Then they'll attack the easiest target: porn. We already have age-verification laws, implemented through dodgy third-party providers. But now everyone has digital government ID: we "might as well" unify things so all the porn sites check your age using the centralised government system. What's your problem? Why do you care? Won't you THINK OF THE CHILDREN??? You want to let CHILDREN watch PORN???
Then comes online retail. After all, the Southport killer bought his knife from Amazon — that was the front page headline on every paper, remember how organic and uncoordinated that was? It could all have been avoided with better age verification. And hey, we already have a way to verify age with our digital IDs. We "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? You want to let CHILDREN buy KNIVES?
And what about social media? Kids shouldn't use Facebook, it's bad for them. Australia already bans under 16s from social media. We already have age verification for other things. We "might as well". WHY DO YOU CARE????? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
Oh, that's handy, everyone's social media accounts are now tied to their real identities. That'll come in handy when people say nasty things that the government doesn't like. After all, those riots only happened because of "misinformation". Why do you need to stay anonymous anyway? What's the problem? Why do you care? Got something to hide? You're in favour of HATE SPEECH??
The slippery slope has never been more lubricated.
I won't hold my breath. It'll take 5 times longer than planned, cost 10 times more, won't do everything it originally set out to do, then won't work on the tech that everyone will have when finished, and a future government will decide they don't like it and will start over.
I genuinely think the next move will be using it as part of their age verification check. I am guessing they want it to be your online id. No more anonymous internet usage.
It is really grim what is happening to the UK. For the most part no one gives a shit. And if you do, you are automatically branded as "right wing".
And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Recall that Iran cut off the internet for university exams, and the volume of posting by Scottish pro-independence accounts on Twitter/X dropped 98%. Food for thought.
Are you thinking of the US bombing Iran perhaps? Assuming they are running such a disinformation campaign (which is the theory you are talking about) why would they shoot themselves in the foot and cut their own spooks' connection off? And you're off by almost two order of magnitudes, the study in question found that 4% of pro-indy activity was linked to Iranian controlled attacks (and I am highly doubtful of Twitter's influence in that debate in 2025...)
> And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Reddit is the most left-wing moderated, fedora-tipping regime it's possible to get.
Digital as opposed to analog..? Or does every adult need to have a smartphone on them all the time?? I think most countries legally require adults to be able to identify themselves with government-issued ID. Is this so novel for the UK? But I really don't get the "digital" bit...
When the cops stop you on the street and ask for your digital ID and you can't show it to them, they'll take you to a deportation center. #PapersPlease
"Tourism in the United Kingdom is a major industry and contributor to the U.K. economy, which is the world's 10th biggest tourist destination, with over 40.1 million visiting in 2019, contributing a total of £234 billion to the GDP"
Like the US, I think there are multiple interest groups, not all of whom are interested in seeing "aliens" on British streets. I was named a "Highly Skilled Migrant" by Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and paid a fair amount of money to the University of Liverpool and yet, never got the feeling I was in any way anything other than a foreigner.
The same way other things "help" migration. By making life very difficult for you if you aren't a proper citizen. I imagine the outcome for this would be to make it nearly impossible to do anything with the government or doing anything you might need an ID for, especially online. Some citizens will probably suffer too, but it is a price the government is willing to pay.
The UK is absolutely paranoid about national ID cards and has been for decades. Not sure how that happened tbh seems like the US has a similar allergy.
I am concerned about the UK's initiative to implement mandatory digital IDs, particularly regarding scalable threat detection. This could lead to an increase in spoofing attempts and automated credential stuffing once the system is rolled out.
Next comes sensors in said cards, if someone walks by an digital observation post without the card on them they will now be tagged by visual recognition and documented as illegal/possibly illegal until proven otherwise. Expect the database to record it and start drawing up statistics on said undocument individual. The undocumented police will be notified and be on alert to apprehend at first opportunity. Coming to you in 2030.
The issue I have is that it provides a convenient way for people to hassle me for my identity. Being able to identify myself is not a problem I've ever had and I don't like the idea of being forced to buy a smartphone just to remain an employed citizen in the UK.
1) I don't like centralised ID, its ripe for abuse.
2) I don't like the idea of crapita/accenture/G4S/some other dipshit company designing and running this.
However
if its an extension of the government gateway, then actually the only "innovation" here is the presumable fine for not keeping it up to date. (that and the smartphone integration, which I suspect is largely symbolic)
So long as its GDS rolling it out, and its properly designed (two big ifs) then in principle it could be a useful as the original GDS scheme to make government services "digital"
But, the problems of authoritarianism are not to be ignored. starmer doesn't have the bollocks to be a dictator, but jenrick and farage do. Our constitution has no guards against authoritarian capture, its just "good men" doing "good deeds". That was easily overridden with Boris. A decent majority in the House of commons gives you alomst unlimited power of the state.
Exactly, as I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45385512 it's a question of trust and purpose; I don't trust these people, the companies behind them, the public opinion they choose to pander to, and the stated purpose of immigration enforcement.
Something similar to Estonia would be much less controversial.
Estonia's system was an area of some fascination for me years ago, so here's what I can remember:
After splitting from the Soviet Union, Estonia were basically starting from scratch with their telecoms system. Finland offered them their old stock to get started, but the Estonians decided to instead treat it as a greenfield project and deploy the most modern infrastructure available at the time. Compare to the UK, where most of our infrastructure is literally crumbling as it passes its 50-year predicted lifespan and we spent almost a decade of time and tens of billions of pounds on a vapourware railway line. So the technical inheritance (or lack thereof) favoured Estonia.
I don't know much about how the Estonian system was initially built, but I would imagine a post-Soviet state likely retained enough state capacity to do it mostly in-house (and perhaps they received outside funding too, as the '90s were a period of largesse). Compare to the UK, where state capacity is effectively nil and the project would invariably be outsourced to the same contractors and consulting firms that have taken on every other aspect of government, with concomitant price and time overruns (see also: train).
A crucial element of the Estonian system is that data is private by default (see https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/e-services-regi... ) If I recall correctly, any government agency can request access to specified data for a state purpose, but each request must be reviewed and approved by the data subject. All access requests are logged so a subject can audit who has been accessing what (which suggests maybe it's possible to bulk approve access in advance, or grant persistent rights to someone like one's own doctor). In comparison, the Snoopers' Charter granted unfettered access to Brits' Internet connection records to a huge number of agencies, from the security services to the Food & Agriculture Agency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#... ).
Estonia is also recognised as a global leader in IT security, following massive investment after Russia-attributed cyberattacks in 2007; they host the NATO Centre of Excellence and the eu-LISA HQ. As far as keeping one's data away from prying outside eyes, they're probably a pretty safe bet. As for the UK… (Eyes passim ad nauseam).
Lastly, I believe Estonians generally report greater levels of trust in their government than Brits. 2023 figures suggest the gap may have narrowed from when I last looked (I can't say I've been following Estonian politics, so I couldn't suggest why) but still some 37.8% of Estonians say they trust their national government as compared to 26.7% of Brits (see https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru... ). And there are certain sizeable constituencies in the UK where, in light of historic abuses, they are even less likely to ever trust the government: Scousers; northerners; women & ethnic minorities (specifically for the police, doubly specifically for the Met); environmental activists (see the spycops scandal); and people of Irish descent. I'm sure there's some skeletons in the Estonian government's closets, but there's a limit to how much damage you can do when your state is 35 years old rather than a centuries-old former world-spanning imperial hegemon.
Those stated trust figures also predate the UK government's support for the genocide in Gaza, which has doubtless had a significant impact on that figure; even people who wouldn't have considered themselves particularly political a couple years earlier are appalled at the regular arrests of protesting pensioners outside Parliament (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/09/palestine-acti... ). The incredibly unpopular incumbent government is only the latest in a long line of increasingly authoritarian regimes of both the political right and (allegedly) left (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/09/labour-needs-arrest-uks-... ), meaning everybody in the country of any political persuasion can think of recent examples of why they might not want to invite increased government surveillance. Plus, with the recent passage of the Online Safety Act, most people are now primed to associate a new digital ID with the government wanting to know their porn habits, and we're a famously prudish nation.
So, in short:
· the Estonian government had the ideal circumstances, made all the right choices, prioritised privacy and security and are reasonably trusted by their citizens
· the UK government has doddery old infrastructure to work with, no money left, an addiction to outsourcing in spite of repeat disasters, a track record of authoritarian disregard for privacy and have little to no legitimacy amongst the populace
And, as others have pointed out, there's just no obvious constituency in the country that would be interested in this sort of thing (outside of Tony Blair and his mates) and no obvious problems that it provides a solution for; it seems like a hard sell, whether on ideological or practical grounds.
This quote from Starmer tells me that this is as much about control of its citizens as anything else:
"In the UK ... we have got a right-wing proposition that we have not had in this country before ... so the battle of our times is between patriotic national renewal ... versus something which is turning into a toxic divide."
Do they not already have the equivalent of a US social security card? (For the employment eligibility, not the program benefits.) Is this something much different from that?
You aren't required to show your social security card to your employer. You aren't even required to have the physical card for almost all purposes. It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
> It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
The US tried that back when Social Security Numbers were introduced. It specifically said it was for tax-purposes (a context where it might've been adequately-secure) and not to be used for anything else.
Yet without any actual penalties against "other places", it got misused everywhere by companies trying to save a buck on primary-key choice and authenticating people.
They have a couple “numbers”, but not a id “card” besides a passport (which only citizens get, not permanent residents). ID cards are pretty standard across EU.
We have a “national insurance number” used for tax purposes but it’s just a number that you fill in in forms; no-one asks to see the cards. I’m not sure they even issue the physical cards anymore? I lost mine a long time ago.
Headline (here and on Sky) is clickbait - should read that this is a PROPOSAL.
This is a proposal at a party conference, not law. Previous initiatives along these lines have not come to pass, and this is unlikely to as well.
Expect universal rejection by the tories, lib dems and reform in parliament, purely because it’s a Labour initiative, and expect plenty of Labour MPs to disobey the whip.
From the BBC this morning:
“Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch calls it a "desperate gimmick", while the Lib Dems fear it would force people to turn over their private data”
If it does somehow get beyond the commons, expect lords to quash it.
I give this about a 20% chance of actually coming to pass.
I am not going to download an app to work. If they need some form of ID they can provide me a physical one, oh wait that sounds like an NI number. What's the point of this again?
"Government says digital ID will make it harder to work illegally"
Today it's immigrants, tomorrow it could be dissidents.
In East Germany a common strategy the government used was to not put dissidents in prison, but make life hard for them in many ways including by denying them employment.
Of course none of this stops under the table work - which those engaging in illegal work are probably already doing.
In Sweden we have bank id that you can optionally use as ID (new feature). But its mostly used to validate purchases, sign things, or login to banks, government websites or whatever website might use it to auth. It does not hand over all id information to the site that uses it to identify you, just name and personal number.
My prediction is that it will soon be a requirement for all websites and apps with user-generated content to require authentication with the UK government's Digital ID OAuth provider and that requirement will include linking the user's username to their Digital ID. It won't require websites and apps to pay a third-party provider to check users' identity, so the UK government can argue that it doesn't place a disproportionately burdensome cost on smaller websites and apps.
After the UK implements this, other western countries will follow. For example, here in Australia, it's a simple solution to the under-16 social media ban which is about to come into effect. The bill was given deliberately weak verification requirements so it didn't seem too big-brother, but I'd bet real money that there's already an amendment in the works to tie it to digital ID after they discover what everyone already knows (i.e. that it'll be easily bypassed), followed by another amendment to tie the digital ID to site/app ID, for online safety reasons of course.
In time, websites/apps may offer your government's digital ID as an alternative to their in-house identity provider. If this becomes globally ubiquitous, many of them will stop maintaining their own authentication and rely solely on government ID providers. The identity provider you use will depend on where you are, so VPNs will become useless.
This was all inevitable from the day the internet opened up to everyone. Governments have an insatiable desire for power and limitless paranoia about threats to their power.
I remember when the Internet was celebrated as decentralized media, allowing common citizens to criticize repressive regimes. Today it seems like the west is emulating the countermeasures already perfected by those repressive regimes.
"But it’s not just “online comments” as Yaxley-Lennon seems to imply. A police officer quoted deep within the article explains that these acts include “any form of communication,” and can relate to “serious domestic abuse-related crimes.” "
I find it hard to make a nuanced take without being downvoted sometimes, but I honestly both agree this is bad/not necessary, AND that half the people in here are worrying a little too much/being a bit too pessimistic about it. Can one not hold both of these opinions at the same time?
What the hell is with these overly-draconian bills prioritizing control over individual rights being passed as of late?!
The online safety act & now this. Our private right to anonymity & privacy has utterly gone out the window at this point...
I don't think this is on a par with the online safety act. That was fundamentally flawed. This isn't a huge issue and the benefits for ease of access to government services is a positive step. One thing that users of government services face is the need to provide documentation that supports their request. This can be an impediment to users accessing services that they are entitled to in a timely manner.
The biggest risk is from a data breach and this information being accessed by unauthorized parties, but that is something all online services are at risk from. The absolute worst way to implement this will be to contract it out to a third party. If it is built and maintained by civil servant developers who have already proved their mettle with a variety of govuk services then I would have confidence in it. If it is farmed out to Fujitsu or some other 3rd party then it will be an shithshow and an expensive one at that.
What’s the point of easier access if it comes at the cost of our rights?
The potential for BritCard to be used for surveillance outweighs the benefits of convenience tenfold... Privacy is not something we should compromise for easier access to services- what starts as a way to "streamline services" can quickly turn into a horrible mechanism for tracking citizens under the guise of security..
It'll be handed to Palantir. Starmer has run out of things to sell off to billionaires and the only reason this bill exists is so he can sell off the actual citizens too.
"Hackers obtained the details of tens of millions of British voters in a “complex cyber attack” on the Electoral Commission that went undetected for more than a year, the elections watchdog admitted on Tuesday. The body said “hostile actors” first breached its network in August 2021, gaining access to its file-sharing and email systems and obtaining copies of the electoral register, but “suspicious activity” was not identified until October 2022."
Of course such a thing will never happen in relation to Digital ID Cards, will it?
It's interesting how an idea almost nobody wants to see implemented in practice keeps coming back thanks to the efforts of the person most of the country, including his own party would rather forget.
We already have multiple forms of identification. The National Insurance number, passports and photo ID such as driving licences, which we must provide when starting employment.
If you're not from Britain, you must present evidence of your right to work or other documentation. This is already the law.
Any company that does not follow this is violating the law.
In reality, most illegal workers are engaged in cash-in-hand jobs that never require ID. A digital ID alone will not solve this problem.
Adding a digital ID won't make any difference.
We've also seen similar issues with the UK's attempt to censor adult content "to protect children." It sounds reasonable on the surface (no child should have open access to the internet!). Still, the law was written so broadly that even community clubs involving children with no relation to adult content were caught in its provisions.
Threatened by fines and bureaucratic red tape, many closed their doors. International sites that had no idea what to do - now block the UK. And did this stop access to explicit content? No. Anyone can use a VPN, or an anonymity-oriented browser like Brave and use a Tor tab to bypass the blocks completely. For the non-technical, how long before these Age ID check services, which the government wants everyone to use (private companies owned mainly by adult companies), are hacked and everyone's viewing habits are released?
How long before we're required to use our Digital ID to log on to the internet, enabling monitoring of everything we browse?
A more innovative approach would be for ISPs to by default integrated parental controls on residential connections, something that has been technically possible for decades. In fact, any mobile phone contract in the UK operates similarly. Why not home internet? This isn't about new legislation; it's about education.
Parents already understand why they shouldn't give alcohol or tobacco to their children; why not teach them how to protect their children online?
The new NHS app and driving licence app are expected to be available by the end of 2025. How long before they're integrated into a single system where the government maintains one massive database containing every individual's driving information, medical records, browsing history, banking and tax details? It's not far-fetched to imagine such overreach occurring.
Also as of this week, HMRC (our UK tax office) also now has the right to raid any UK bank account for taxes owed (leaving only £5,000 in the account). This applies to both individuals and companies. Consider a company that becomes insolvent days before paying salaries how will they pay their workers? Some companies have already become insolvent after paying wages while still owing taxes and National Insurance. Just HMRC now get their money and the employees won’t.
I realise there are several loosely connected points above, but that's precisely the problem: all these developments have emerged over the past 18 months.
So when the UK government claims these measures are "for the people," the argument falls flat.
It's difficult to believe that policymakers don't recognise these fundamental flaws.
This raises the question: what's the real motivation? To me, it seems less about protection and more about monitoring and control, implemented by people too afraid to speak against their superiors.
At nearly 50, I see a UK very different from the one I was born into. One thing I know for sure: once this process begins, it will only worsen, and a new government will maintain these systems and extend them further. We left Europe - but kept every single law! As a nation, we just allow all of this to happen. It’s the British way!
Quite ... a papers please moment.. if I recall correctly, South Korea has it where you have to register with the government to get an assigned username and password.
this is corny and weird. feels like cyberpunk, government run oligarchy. however, maybe this will improve the UK and stop all the illegals. about time they clean up that country. yuck
Digital ID is the pattern of the mark in revelation.
Once you let go of God (worship of truth and love) the government or other totalitarian force will try to control people top down. The logical way is to identify them.
You go from a system of free will and distributed cognition to one of enforcement top down. New things can always be added to it as you don't control it. All the "problems" of the states will tag along.
Making it digital is way worse than anything before because it allow to control you without having to pay a cost in enforcement, you control the flow of money, of exchange, you let the computer control people allowing a system so top down the Nazi and communist couldn't even imagine.
Worse part, it's already there for sure but in shadow form, they have all the info about the people, it's just not tied to financial transactions and out there in the public.
This is widely unpopular because the idea of ID cards is unpopular in general in the UK and the people also clearly understand that the argument that this would combat illegal immigration is total rubbish. Even the comments on The Guardian's website are overwhelmingly negative, which should really tell the government something.
The proposal is also drastic because it would be de facto mandatory for all residents. It's hilarious and pathetic to see the government argue that it wouldn't be mandatory, just only needed to get a job (which probably means also mandatory to rent and to study)...
> Id cards are not unpopular with the general public.
At the time of writing, 1,017,754 British people have already signed the official petition opposing them; a petition that has only been running a matter of hours.
This is HN, it is unsurprising that you will find complaints of people who think governments are icky. You know, the usual libertarian bullshit.
I lived in countries that have mandatory unique IDs, and countries that don't. Typically the countries that do not are more a pain in the ass to deal with, because institutions will proxy to the next best thing in the absense of an actual ID, typically documents that are not mandatory and not supposed to be used as ID, but end up being used like that anyway.
> - is it a good idea to tie various public records together under a unique ID
Generally, yes. It simplifies dealing with government bureaucracy. Proving your identity is generally something you will have to do anyway, this is will just remove a bunch of hoops you have to go through.
> - is it a good idea to issue voluntary ID for those situations where people need to prove it
One of the countries I lived in had a system similar to this one. It worked fine
- typically you only needed this ID when opening a bank account or registered for work. Originally it was a tax registration ID (which is why it was related to banking and working), but it was secure enough that it was later repurposed as the actual unique ID. Nowadays I think they issue one to every registered person (e.g. newborns).
> - where is this going to be made mandatory and under what circumstances will it be used against people?
We are talking about the government here, who has the monopoly of force. If you live in an authoritarian country where the government fucks over citizens, they will do it to you irrespective of you having a mandatory ID or not.
My actual main concern is the level of access private corporations have to the records tied to this unique ID. I am highly suspicious of corporations (e.g.: banks, healthcare providers, etc).
> Generally, yes. It simplifies dealing with government bureaucracy. Proving your identity is generally something you will have to do anyway, this is will just remove a bunch of hoops you have to go through.
This community, more than most, should understand in its bones that security and convenience are the ends of a see-saw. Convenience is five-character passwords, security is 2FA. Convenience is contactless payments, security is cash. Etc etc.
When you argue from convenience, I find it almost axiomatic that my security is going to take a beating.
Convenience and security are not opposite to one another, they are orthogonal. Inconvenient means to prove your identity may be terribly insecure, and still be inconvenient.
Ok. Well I gave a couple of examples of what I'm getting at.
So how can a convenient way to establish a digital identity also be secure? To run with the see-saw analogy, what element would of that process would make the process both more convenient and more secure? (make the see-saw rise at both ends).
This is just another pillar of fascist Britain. Developed mostly by multinational corporations in bed with government, hosted on private servers presumably under Cloud Act.
It's just so frakking disappointing for a there to finally be a huge labor landslide in 2024 then for their leaders to turn around and be ongoingly in bed just the same with right wing fascism. There was such a clear mandate for something different something better something good, and it's such a stark betrayal, such a vile repudiation than republicanism is ever going to be acceptable to see such a mass betrayal such a hard sell out. To Palantir grade fascist information overloading control that Kier would commit to. Ugly gross time line of no good. One would kind of hope winning elections might meet something better than right wing fascist over-control, but no, not here. Disgraceful.
I hope the card will include an asymmetric digital signature from a government authority. That way, concerned members of the public will be able to verify anyone else’s Brit Card.
This would in turn enable citizen-operated checkpoints to verify the Britishness of food delivery drivers, mosque worshipers, suspected pedos, anyone who smells a bit too much like curry or garlic, or blokes what look funny like they aint from round ere.
HARD eye-roll at the libertarian scaremongering about this basic, sensible idea to tame the identity mess.
* I have half a dozen different ID numbers for various things like NI, NHS, drivers license, tax etc
* I also have a dozen different GOV.UK logins for various services.
* When need to provide strong proof of identity to AWS to reset a root password, I have to go to a notary and pay £200 for a signature and stamp and then scan the paperwork into an email.
The antis, as always, are clutching at straws. At what point does this stop being acceptable because of libertarian vibes and scaremongering about 'Big Brother' -- especially when most of the rest of the world has had ID cards for decades?
I don’t own and refuse to purchase an iPhone or Android device. Where would that leave me? Fortunately I am not a UK citizen!
This effectively blocks development of mobile Linux as an alternative in the UK. It is already enough of a challenge to get people to try Linux phones without support for their favorite apps, and now it’s a requirement to own a US big tech pocket spy device? Absolutely absurd and Orwellian, and from the birthplace of Orwell no less.
They would have allowed EU travel without a passport, but sadly didn't take off. Initially they would have incorporated driving licenses too - lots of people already carry a driver's license.
Ironically I've of the reasons for not having them, back in the noughties, was because it would target minorities.
Now, the right wing are beying for blood over immigration, national IDs do seems like they would reduce the ability of illegal immigrants to work/collect benefits. Tories left a massive immigration problem, exacerbated by Brexit.
UK's (and USA's) aversion to state ID is quite amusing... and then solving everything that not-having-national-ID causes requires absurd solutions... but hey "ID is the worst thing ever"
In the UK, the individual never used to interact with their government at all. We value our privacy and lack of government interference, and everything was legal unless it was explicitly outlined as illegal. It was a high trust society.
Since being forced into globalisation and the concept of a border being essentially abolished (of course unless you talk about Ukraine, in which case billions can be spent on enforcing it), everything is flipped on its head. The terrorism act means that you have no right to silence, no right to legal representation and you are compelled to provide your passwords. The government now gets further and further involved with private matters, such as what content you engage with online (online safety act) and have plans to force ID to be linked to social media.
In my area, you cannot walk into a GP and request an appointment, they tell you to go away. You have to install an app, link it to your details, provide evidence of who you are, go on video, wait a few days, and then you are allowed to request an appointment (in a few weeks time). Bare in mind that healthcare is denied to nobody in the UK.
This year the Legal Aid Agency had a large cyber security breach [1]. People's names, financial information, and the fact that they apply for legal aid was breached. One of the few reasons you can get Legal Aid is being a domestic abuse victim.
> This data may have included contact details and addresses of applicants, their dates of birth, national ID numbers, criminal history, employment status and financial data such as contribution amounts, debts and payments. In some instances, information about the partners of legal aid applicants may be included in the compromised data.
This same government wants to collect and centralise the private details of all citizens in the UK. It makes me sick.
You mean the time when the UK concquered the whole world and formed "The empire on which the sun never sets"? Yeees... UK was forced into globalization xD
Alas, any country where "doing anything unless it's forbidden" results in a clusterf* that the USA is today, and it has nothing to do with trust or being "civilized"
As for breaches - you are aware that the civilized society can have national IDs - plastic one, issued by the state that are used for... well... IDentification that don't require uber-surviliance and centralizing data worse than in China? Just because UK does something stupid (and it's on a record roll past decades) doesn't mean that the concept of ID is wrong... For example in Poland and in Spain you can easily get doctors appointment just by showing up and waving your ID…
I don't know what western countries are thinking. The concept of an isolated nation state is fast approaching obsolescence. Very soon, it will be clear that it is meaningless to put strong restrictions on the free movement of people. And history shows that an emphasis on keeping people out is a precursor to the decline of an empire.
One thing I never understand: if people want to come to your country, that is a vote for the idea that you are doing something right. So, why not use for good? Why not designate a area of the country for the immigrants to initially settle in, using your laws and structures to provide them a better way to live? They are usually very hungry to work. Or, why not band up with other countries to establish refuge cities where the immigrants can initially settle and build new lives?
You never hear of the US etc investing in infrastructure in African countries, for e.g., it is always about a militarization effort to contain supposed terrorists.
Keeping people out betrays that your "success" is built on the back of exfiltrating resources from around the world and concentrating it in your countries, thus keeping the rest of the world poor.
There are many legal routes to immigration and seeking asylum. People choose to move illegally because they won’t succeed on the legal routes and know that once they’re in the country the chance of them being deported is pretty low.
The legal routes are also often strenuous, far too long lived, overly strict, and obtuse.
If you barely speak the language, it's not easy. Unfortunately many countries have made immigration so hard, in an effort to combat it, that they've done the opposite - people immigrate illegally because it has a higher success rate than doing it legally.
If I apply for X, Y, and Z and I'm denied, I'm fucked. But if I just move... And then figure it out later... That might work better.
And that's how we got into this mess. A lot of this anti-immigration legislation actually increases the incentives for illegal immigration.
Exactly, and one more thing: because of draconian immigration regimes, once people sneak in, they are extremely unlikely to move out until they get some sort of residence, which may never come. If it was easier to get in, people will come and go as needed, and you wouldn't have massive numbers of people coming and not leaving. There are many irregular immigrants that are stuck in their new countries for decades, unable to move anywhere else at all; many even die without seeing their homeland again.
In all countries there are posh, elite, nice areas, and yet you don't see everybody moving into those areas until there is no standing room. There is a natural equilibrium that is effective.
So overly tough immigration policies actually exacerbate the problem of illegal immigration in this way as well.
Wow, this statement is so out of touch I don't even know where to begin to rebut it.
I, a software engineer with decades of experience, and now an entrepreneur having a small startup, with funds to live for years without burdening the public purse anywhere, specking virtually native level English, and having previously lived in the US for years, would still have a _very_ hard time immigrating to any western country right now, partly because I'm from the global south (I'm Ghanaian).
If you know of any western country where moving there, even temporarily, is as simple as applying with my information, let me know.
A secure, optional digital ID could be useful. But not in today’s UK. Why? Because the state has already shown it can’t be trusted with our data.
- Snoopers’ Charter (Investigatory Powers Act 2016): ISPs must keep a year’s worth of records of which websites you visit. More than 40 agencies—from MI5 to the Welsh Ambulance Service—can request it. MI5 has already broken the rules and kept data it shouldn’t have.
- Encryption backdoors: Ministers can issue “Technical Capability Notices” to force tech firms to weaken or bypass end-to-end encryption.
- Online Safety Act: Expands content-scanning powers that experts warn could undermine privacy for everyone.
- Palantir deals: The government has given £1.5 billion+ in contracts to a US surveillance firm that builds predictive-policing tools and runs the NHS’s new Federated Data Platform. Many of those deals are secret.
- Wall-to-wall cameras: Millions of CCTV cameras already make the UK one of the most surveilled countries in the world.
A universal digital ID would plug straight into this ecosystem, creating an always-on, uniquely identified record of where you go and what you do. Even if paper or card options exist on paper, smartphone-based systems will dominate in practice, leaving those without phones excluded or coerced.
I’m not against digital identity in principle. But until the UK government proves it can protect basic privacy—by rolling back mass data retention, ending encryption backdoor demands, and enforcing genuine oversight—any national digital ID is a surveillance power-grab waiting to happen.
I'm certain it's worked well in other countries, but I have zero trust in the UK government to handle this responsibility.
The ID cards as realized in many other countries are comparatively benign, because they are a physical credential in the possession of the person concerned. The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire. Distributed storage in action.
The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database. This database is the definitive record of what you are allowed to do or not do (like reside and work). Which can be changed or deleted at the stroke of a key, through human error or malice. Then what?
When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary. The "digital ID" as set out today can't work for its ostensible purpose. Therefore its actual purpose isn't being declared. Not hard to connect the dots.
> The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire
This is not true. Government agencies generally look up your ID as necessary to check if it's still valid.
Stopped for speeding? The cop is going to look up your driver's license.
Leaving the country? They're running your passport number.
Starting a job? They're checking the status of your SSN.
The physical ID is good enough for low-stakes stuff like renting a car with a driver's license, or proving your age to get into a bar. But it's already not trusted on its own for any of the serious stuff you're talking about, like where you can reside and work.
Which means they are already a "pointer" to a record in a centralised database.
Even for renting a car these days you need a verification code that you can request from the DVLA using your national insurance number.
No the proposal is in line with your first paragraph. 'Attribute level proofs' (cyptographically signed data) stored in the user wallet, with those signatures coming from verification companies polling an API in front of government departments. The other side of it is a trust registry holding verification service public keys for signature checks..
I'm against the ID, but the more good faith reason for a database entry is it should eliminate fake IDs.
The op is incorrect. The 'database entry' is the one that exists right now at the DVLA for driving licenses or HMPO for passports. Private sector verification services poll that data to verify the data entered by the user in onboarding. That's it.
"Just one more bit of regulation will solve the problem" is how Britain became the most centralised country in Western Europe. The sad thing is that the majority of the population still buy it.
There was recently a request by the police for new laws about overpowered electric bicycles being ridden on pavements. Yes, they want a law against riding an already illegal vehicle in a place it is already illegal to ride it.
Now they want to make it illegal for employers to illegally give a job to people it was already illegal to give a job to by making them have a new ID, when it was already illegal to give someone a job without getting proof of their right to work in the UK!
You are 100% right
Good public key cryptography should make it pretty hard. Yes, rotate the IDs every 10 years, with a new photo and using a new private key.
Doesn't a physically held digital ID also do that? Assuming the encryption is strong, verifying that the data on the ID has the proper cryptographic signature should provide assurance that the ID is real, shouldn't it?
I guess, depending on how it's implemented, maybe an ID could be cloned and still appear valid, but that seems like a possibility for the UK's approach as well (the clone would just point to the same database entry).
In a good modern implementation, it should be extremely hard to produce a physical card with an authenticated pointer to the database, because that would be also signed.
But considering that they've been retiring things like biometric residence cards in favour of web-based systems, it's possible there will be no physical component.
Yes, I think you're probably right. But it still solves other problems such as "the app is a lookalike". If the app is basically an ID delivery mechanism that allows an operator to call up your photo, it becomes a relatively foolproof way to identify you accurately.
The actual reason is everyone has a phone.
We have this is NSW in Australia: the Services NSW app provides a digital drivers license which is guaranteed to be accepted by authorities as legitimate.
>but the more good faith reason for a database entry is it should eliminate fake IDs.
Really? If anything it would make them easier. Hackers routinely break into government databases to exfiltrate information. An ID attribute databases would be no exception, for exfiltration, or simply modification of data. Ie: creating a fake ID.
>When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary.
Penury and deportation are quite a bit of scope already! Maybe they'll put an "arrest" bit in there. Warrants are already a thing. I don't see the UK going in for murder just yet. What's left?
Not just that, but currently, requiring real data to register to eg. social networks (reddit, hn,...) is hard. With everyone having a digital ID on their phones, tying their identity to their real ID will be easy, you'll just "sign" (or whatever) your reddit registration with your ID and your real name will be tied to that account. Combine this with EU chat control (and UK alternatives.. and well, EU digital ID alternatives), and the era of semi-anonymous internet use is over.
>The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire. Distributed storage in action.
Not really. It's part of identity management or whatever it's called to have an ability to recall ids, because they get lost, stolen and people to who they are issued die.
>When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary.
What are the scary implication really? Most of the EU and beyond has some kind of login to the government capability. And?
What's the threat model really? The government will revoke your fancy thing to report taxes digitally for no reason and bankrupt you? They can do so without such roundabout ways.
Post something the government doesn't like, and you can no longer get a job, but you never find out why.
Was reading through your post, finding it difficult to find fault with anything you were saying, but something wasn't sitting right. And then ...
> I'm certain it's worked well in other countries
It has! In the Netherlands for example, it's just an incredibly convenient system, and if there's anything dodgy going on I'm not aware of it.
So what makes the UK so different to the Netherlands? Genuine question, because I really don't know. My only guess is that the people of the Netherlands hold their politicians to account, whereas nothing ever seems to happen to UK politicians whose corruption is so severe that they're sometimes literally criminal.
So the Netherlands may not be the best example to use as a positive example here.
Notoriously, the national identity system was used during World War II as a system for discovering and eliminating the Jewish community[1]. The lessons learned from that are a frequent topic of discussion in civil liberties groups, and the Dutch experience is often cited, both global conversations and within the Netherlands -- e.g. On Liberation Day 2015, Bits of Freedom held its annual Godwin Lecture on the risks of prioritising ID efficiency over civil liberties[2].
It may be that special protections were coded into the current system to prevent this from happening again, I don't know the details.
Certainly, the reputation for how obligatory papers have been (mis)used in mainland Europe since Napoleonic times have fed into the anglo world's suspicion around introducing similar regulations[3]. There are several recurring memes around how compulsory documents are a sign of an authoritarian environment.
[1] - https://jck.nl/en/agenda/identity-cards-and-forgeries
[2] - https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/2015/04/30/during-world-war-ii-...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Valjean
My response as to the difference is the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Something that has already been branded as the Brit Card is simply something that wouldn't work in Northern Ireland, and that the name passed any scrutiny say an awful lot.
Ireland is not Britain, and people from Northern Ireland can chose to identify as British, Irish or Both by birthright.
A "Brit Card" is not something a significant portion of people would want.
I personally am more disgusted by the nationalistic naming, but I also don't like the idea of needing a smartphone or my walle when walking.
If these aren't true details then the messaging has been poor, per form, and needs to be addressed, quickly.
You will not need to carry it around with you.
It also seems it'll actually be called Digital ID by the government, this is more a marketing tool, BritCard.
(Just clarifying if it helps, I see some misinformation out there).
Because they pinky promise? It'll be required to produce one like producing a driving license is required, but you don't need to have it with you. It'll be required because pubs/bars etc will require it. It'll not be required like giving a traffic stop breath sample is not required or like giving up your password is not required.
Imagine it was called IrishID or similar, help you to have empathy for how half of NI residents might feel about Brit-anything?
I guess it depends on its design (does it set up the dystopian infrastructure or not) and then more so on the legislation around it. It's already not uncommon to need your passport for work, making it a law to produce for any work would be the actual thing that changes this.
I get your point about IrishID, but be realistic, none of this is surprising considering the current state of things. I could make some controversial statements in this regard but I'll avoid the flames (I sympathise with you before you place me in the wrong box).
Huh? Everyone carries their phone everywhere and an ID card on an app is carried everywhere. When you stay at a hotel you might have to produce it, go to a doctors appointment,... and so on
Huh? In countries like Italy it's actually mandatory to have a form of identification on you when in public, this isn't the case.
The "brit_card" is on your phone and you will carry it everywhere. It is also a walking surveillance beacon and hacking target.
Irish and British citizenship are de facto equivalent throughout the UK: any Irish person can simply decide to turn up in London without getting any kind of visa or asking any permission from anyone and live, work, or basically do anything a British person is allowed to do. So I’m curious how this will affect Irish people more broadly, not just in NI. Will they need to apply for this card?
The common travel area + Brit_card might result in an interesting pattern where ID is by association rather than territorial location. For instance, as nationalists reject it and use only IRE/EU equivalents where possible. The passport is somewhat similar already. Would people reject services and jobs in N.I.? Completely possible and it already happens with people working "down south" aka down the road.
The civil liberties concerns, particularly in N.I. (historically speaking), are also important to consider. There is quite a high capacity for discriminatory practices in the region from all angles.
On the other side. The British government are lowering themselves to the position of "just another app on my phone". A system riddled with viruses, cyber attacks, etc. Further, what is to stop groups simply setting up and alternative ID system running on btc or something in the future...if this becomes the norm? At first it would be useless and a farce. Later a complete separate system.
Anyway, horrible idea all round. They clearly have not thought this through. Paper ids and loose associations are things I am a fan of in the anglophone world.
When I moved to the Netherlands I was shocked to find out you have to maintain a registered address with the government.
The government also decides how many non-family members can register at an address, so in Amsterdam it is common for people to remain registered at there parents while subletting a room in an apartment.
You also get a DigiD which very convenient but also terrifying, especially when I walk around my neighborhood and see plaque’s in the ground for the victims of the holocaust who lived here.
My Dutch girlfriend does not believe me when I tell here that you don’t have to register where you live with the government in the anglophone world. It’s just so engrained in the society that anything else seems absurd.
Here in New Zealand, you're required to be enrolled to vote, even if you never intend to actually vote. Enrolling requires an address. I imagine it's similar in Australia, where actually voting is required by law.
I believe in New Zealand other government agencies aren't allowed to access your data without your consent though.
The Electoral Roll is quite different though
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_roll
I don’t think the current ID structure has any field for religious or racial history. It’s simply a unique number assigned to a person at birth.
The census form in the UK requires disclosure of religion and ethnicity. It would be relatively easy to merge census data with ID.
I might trust this government not to do that, but I don't trust a future government (because I don't know who that will be).
how would the existence of this card make it easier to pursue you if you're let's say, Jewish? Doesn't passport/driving license already have thisv
Maybe it doesn't make it any easier but your question does remind us that cataloguing and categorising people can be dangerous. I accept that there are good reasons that the state could use this information, but we should also be alert to possible abuses.
Without looking, I honestly don't know if the passport and driving licence lists this information. But the census certainly does.
It's the difference between proportional voting vs winner takes it all. In the latter case you can't really hold politicians accountable, as you will have to choose between effectively throwing your vote away or voting for the one opposition candidate, that often will be just as bad.
While the UK have some level of representativeness, each circuit has a winner takes it all structure, making change quite hard to achieve on a larger scale.
This might be a "grass is greener" thing. Do elected representatives actually have higher approval rating, or enact policies that better fit with public opinion, under proportional systems? Sure it'd probably make things a little better, but it won't actually solve anything hard, I think. All Western countries are struggling (and mostly failing) to deal with the same problems regardless of details like electoral system.
With proportionate representation you get what _should_ happen, in my opinion, which is sometimes nothing. If the coalition can't decide on something, then it doesn't happen, which is the correct outcome because not enough people agree about it. It represents the people (who also can not agree on it).
The alternative is a decision that most people don't agree with.
That sounds like kind of a mirror of some of peoples biggest complaints regarding bureaucracy and committees. Deadlock can not only be worse than an imperfect solution, it can be weaponized by a minority to exert outsized power and extract otherwise unthinkable concessions. We see this sometimes in the US House, where more fringe or radical groups within parties can block the literally functioning of the actual country, safe in their assumptions that the two parties will not form a majority coalition and that the parties as a whole will take more damage from the fallout than the radical groups.
I'm not saying that that makes the system worse, mind you. I'm not even saying you're wrong that it's a better system. I just think anyone who thinks any one system is the easy, obvious fix to fair and just representational government is either shortsighted, or has different priorities than I do.
That's ironically just something the British government used to pride themselves on, Pragmatism.
If it's important enough or dysfunctional enough a quick decision will be taken. There's clearly deadlock in first past post too, look at the US, if neither party advocates for it at all, it gets nowhere.
My view is it's always organised elites making the decisions, no matter the system. Nominally left-wing parties often make brazen right-wing moves, and vice-versa. The votes that matter are those of the MPs, Congress members etc. which are always influenced by a range of factors and organised factions. That's the actual decision-making mechanism.
It’s the organized elites, true, but they aren’t a monolithic block either. In a proportional system they also must spread their influence on many parties. This is a good thing. With a single party there is a greater risk of a cordyceps infection taking over, see Republicans.
IMHO the simple change that would have the biggest effect on the American political system would be to require Congresspeople to live full-time in their districts and conduct all official business over videoconference and e-mail. Lots of behavioral science has shown that the biggest generator of trust and allegiance is physical proximity and face-to-face interactions. Make all reps have their face to face interactions with their constituents and maybe they will actually start representing their constituents. It also makes lobbying a lot less economical (instead of hiring one lobbyist that can have lunch with 435 representatives, you would need 435 lobbyists, or at least 435 plane trips) and gerrymandering a bit less practical (there's a decent chance the rep would no longer live in the district and be forced to give up their seat).
That and ensuring a bidirectional feedback mechanism between the executive and legislative branch, so that laws that aren't enforced by an administration fall off the books, and presidents that don't enforce the laws lose their job. Right now, the legal corpus of the U.S. is a constantly-accreting body, which means that no matter what the President wants to do, they can find some law somewhere to justify it, and then anything they don't want to do, they just say "We don't have the resources to enforce this". This gives the President all the power. They should be a servant to the law, not its arbiter.
With a Supreme Court like this one, what’s on the books don’t matter. They’ll find the interpretation.
It's the opposite of what you say. Proportional representation isn't accountable because you don't know what coalition you're voting for - coalitions are done in backrooms after the election. Winner takes all is more accountable because the coalitions are done before the election (aka political parties). Parties are made up of different factions and they're agreed before the election.
I guess you don't live in the UK, because winner takes all is far worse for backroom deals. The deals just end up being between factions within the same party!
Deals and bargaining all happen AFTER a party takes power and completely hidden until a government can't pass their own bills like the Labour attempt to reform welfare.
With proportional representation the deals are made in order to form a government, BEFORE it has power, and are between separate political parties.
Sure there may be agreements that are not all made public, but these are much harder to keep in the "backroom".
You take what happened in the two elections previously (and I know technically we don't vote for PMs, but they drive the agenda of the party).
2015 we voted for Cameron, ended up with May then Johnson 2019 we voted for Johnson, ended up with Truss(!!) then Sunak(!)
This time everyone voted for Starmer and got friend-of-Epstein Mandelson via McSweeney as a cut-out.
PMs don't drive the agenda. The UK is one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. The people driving the agenda are billionaire and multi-millionaire donors.
PM is a sales job, not a strategy job, and increasingly ridiculous PMs have been selected because the donors have had enough of liberal democracy as a concept. If it stops working - which it pretty much has - there's going to be less resistance to removing it altogether.
Which is why there's resistance to Digital ID. There's widespread distrust - with reason - of the political establishment right across the divide.
Slightly different point really - every leader has someone behind them (which is why we have the term Thatcherism, not Josephism).
The point really was about parties themselves being coalitions in all but name.
I think he's right, actually. It rings true with what we see here in the Netherlands. People don't feel like they're "throwing their vote away" if they vote for a minor party, so politicians can't have a laid back attitude.
There are efforts to make this happen in the us starting locally and working up. The states are left to decide how they implement elections on their own with a couple of exceptions. There is a tragedy of the commons aspect to it though, as if some states adopt proportional representation but not others the ones that do not adopt it gain advantage. Ranked choice voting is taking hold much faster than pr in the us, and it is pretty slow too. It can happen though. Both are viewed as being left leaning, which doesn't really make sense to me.
Yep and the coalitions are famous for exemplifying the concept of "poldering:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
If their minor party doesn't end up as part of the governing coalition, there's no sense in which people feel like their vote wound up having no effect?
That's not really true. It just means there is a gradient of success rather than outright success or loss. Particular portions of what you voted for may be successful. First past the post means you take it all or leave it all, policywise, small things are likely to fall through the cracks.
Don't vote. By voting, you partake in a system unable to give most people effective representation. By voting, you ostensibly accept your own alienation.
This is bad advice. By voting, you accept nothing. By not voting, you merely lose the small power that voting grants you. (Why do you think people are working so hard to disenfranchise voters in the US?)
Construct better systems, by all means, but don't just ignore the system that exists.
Mandatory ID cards are a cultural no-no in the UK. They were required during WW2, then discontinued in peacetime. People burned them in the street. You are not required to show ID to a police officer. Even when driving you don’t need to show a license on the spot, though if stopped for cause you have to present it at a police station within three days. At least those were the rules when I was a young driver there.
The UK has an idiosyncratic relationship with freedom. Technically you have little because (formally limited) monarchy. In practice there’s this aversion to IDs, things like freedom to roam which gives a lot of access to private property, and the ability to get citizenship elsewhere and keep UK, which republics like the US and India won’t allow.
And yet there’s massive camera surveillance from the recent nanny state. And libel laws mean you have to be careful what you print about people. Odd place. Maybe the weather inspires it.
Yes, and this cultural attitude really goes way back, like since pre-1500s for England. Then throw Scotland and N.I. into the mix and there is absolutely no interest in this type of system...to put it mildly!
Multiple citizenships are absolutely allowed in the US.
You assert that the US does not allow dual citizenship, but that is wrong:
>U.S. law does not require a U.S. citizen to choose between U.S. citizenship and another (foreign) nationality (or nationalities). A U.S. citizen may naturalize in a foreign state without any risk to their U.S. citizenship.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...
I know absolutely tons of people with US + one or more other citizenships. You are misinformed. IDK if there is technically some law against it, but if there is, that law is totally unenforced.
I don't understand why Americans hold freedom of speech / the First Amendment in such high regard.
What does it buy you?
Major corruption, abuse and misconduct still happens. Being able to criticise your government doesn't seem to matter in the social media age. Look at the state of politics in the US right now.
Seems like it's slightly redundant these days – a bit anachronistic?
Kind of odd the obsession with it.
(p.s.: All the social media companies being from the US, of course – thanks for all the misinformation, disinformation and hate speech platforms along with all that 'free speech'!).
>What does it buy you?
Well, for one thing, it's not a transactional question of what it "buys". It's a matter of principle and defense against future repression or manipulation by politicians on a power trip.
For example, given Trump's current and blatant attempts to crush free expression against his own policies and bullshit, or even those who constantly insult and criticize him (whining about it like a little kid actually) imagine how much easier he'd have had it if there were no U.S 1st amendment to use against him.
There's an example of its value. It's just one of many.
If you think being able to protect free expression and the ability to speak out freely against power and its abuse is anachronistic, then I don't know what else to say except that you're a naive or dishonest fool, and possibly part of the very problem in places where péople just don't seem to care that under pretext X or Y, they can be stifled at any time.
Yes, the social media companies produce, or facilitate the production of, vast amounts of misinformation, disinformation and even hate speech, but guess what? All that shit gets produced en masse anyhow by repressive authoritarian regimes with narratives to construct and agendas to maintain. Free speech certainly isn't at fault for its existence, given that such things have existed since there's been propaganda or a perceived need for it.
At least, in a place like the U.S, where free speech remains protected (for now at least), any misinformation, disinformation or whatever speech by those in power or outside of it who create it, can be countered by others trying to speak more truthfully.
Try doing the same against misinformation and disinformation by government in Russia, or many other countries where "anachronistic" free speech is curtailed right to hell.
In essence, when governments can legally censor speech they decide is misinformation, disinformation or "hate speech", they can create all sorts of um, interesting, rubrics for deciding what fits under these labels, and then oops, by coincidence it can be anything that goes against their agendas. Going back to the Trump example, just pause for a moment to think about all the uncomfortable facts and opinions he loves to label as "fake news" or "misinformation" or even as hate speech. Now imagine him having the legal authority to sweep them away.
Nothing in any state guarantees against a future leadership with similar authoritarian proclivities from forming to use anti-free speech laws in similar ways.
There, my good faith response to your completely absurd line of rhetorical questioning.
My point isn't that you should wash it down the toilet because it serves no purpose (of course this is a useful strawman to employ when anyone criticises it); rather, perhaps, that obsessing about it and fully believing it can protect you against eg a Trump presidency isn't very healthy. A bit too much tunnel vision?*
> Well, for one thing, it's not a transactional question of what it "buys"
Let's not play semantics. It's just a phrase
> defense against future repression or manipulation by politicians on a power trip.
Why hasn't it defended against current or past ones? It's not a new amendment, is it?
> For example, given Trump's current and blatant attempts to crush free expression against his own policies and bullshit, or even those who constantly insult and criticize him (whining about it like a little kid actually) imagine how much easier he'd have had it if there were no U.S 1st amendment to use against him.
What has all that criticism gotten you? He's still President right? And there is a worrying number of people talking about a '3rd' term
> when governments can legally censor speech they decide is misinformation, disinformation or "hate speech"
Your government via its plethora of agencies absolutely does this
> At least, in a place like the U.S, where free speech remains protected (for now at least), any misinformation, disinformation or whatever speech by those in power or outside of it who create it, can be countered by others trying to speak more truthfully.
How's that working out?
> There, my good faith response to your completely absurd line of rhetorical questioning.
Wow, Americans really think they are protected from criticism like 'civis Romanus' were protected from harm.
I think your opinions are exactly those I was questioning. Maybe it isn't as useful as you think it is
* another phrase, not to be interpreted literally
First, I'm not an American nor do I live in the USA. My mentioning the 1st amendment is because it's the best known example of free speech protection enshrined in the constitutional law of a country.
Secondly, your logic is well off. I never said the 1st or any similar sort of legal protection for free speech is a guaranteed tool against bad government, repression and censorship. Instead it's ONE tool against these things, and better than its complete absence.
Other efforts still matter and in the U.S, we'll just have to see how they pan out, or not. That still doesn't mean that the 1st or any equivalent to it is irrelevant.
By your apparent reasoning, it's worthless because it doesn't guarantee results and that's sort of like having a fireman throw away their fire axe because it's not a sure fix against a house burning down.
Yeah, the UK's goverment does seem to be always be run by extremely unserious people. And yeah, I also don't know why this keeps being the case. It's not unique to the UK at all (actually I think it's mostly the norm, worldwide) but perhaps not quite as much the case in the Netherlands?
I assume the main difference is the timeline of events.
It would be ignorant not to fear the ID at this point with all the other mechanisms described by OP.
The ID in itself can be a good thing. There is no evil in itself. The context however is very worrisome as it may become a tool of evil.
Classic human.
>> So what makes the UK so different to the Netherlands?
Id say it’s not a difference in the politicians but the citizens. Pessimism and paranoia are rampant in the UK. We already went through this ID card debate 20 years ago and the fear-mongering won. So the idea just reignites that debate with a lot of baggage.
The UK has various systems in place to ensure people are legally allowed to work, rent, etc but in reality they inconvenience people without actually catching “the bad guys”. This system would make life more convenient and make the chance of catching the bad guys higher.
In truth though the problem is dodgy employers on a large scale. Take Deliveroo or Uber Eats. The accounts are rented out to illegal workers. You could literally catch one for every order you make. But for some reason the government isn’t actually going after the obvious hanging fruit.
Because the government doesn't actually care about illegal workers. Otherwise, like you said, they would spend 1/100th the money and go after low hanging fruit.
Which begs the question - if that's not the purpose of this law, then what is?
Spying has always gone on, however, in the UK there is a lot of it. WW1, WW2 and the Cold War was all about spying. Considerable infrastructure was built to support this, culminating in 'Five Eyes'.
Furthermore, the former empire was built so that all of the telegraph and telephone lines went to London. If you wanted to make a call from one African colony to the next, London would be in on the man in the middle.
As well as this vast international capability, there is also the domestic front. During the Miners Strike in the 1980s the secret services were tasked with spying, notably on the leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill. Allegedly he used to pick up the phone and just give them a few words, either to misguide them or to tease them.
This spying continued with Northern Ireland being a 'training ground' during 'The Troubles'. There was also considerable opposition to cruise missiles in the UK during the Thatcher years and all of the people active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were under surveillance. This was not the end of it though. Eco-activism was also of interest along with a few high profile problem people.
As well as the secret services, there is also Scotland Yard. They infiltrate every anti-government single issue pressure group as a matter of course, placing people in deep cover. Two Guardian Journalists brought this to light in 2012 or so.
Then, on top of that, there are the capabilities of the big companies such as British Aerospace. They have their spies too.
Hence, on the domestic front, surveillance is vital to cut anyone down to size if they might challenge the establishment at a later date. Everything just gets nipped in the bud.
The 'Special Relationship' is the spying arrangement at the heart of 'Five Eyes'. In the USA, surveillance of the population is not allowed, so the workaround is to get the Brits to do it for them. This is how it works and has been working for decades.
If the UK secret services want to spy on someone in the UK then they will have the manpower to do it without getting caught. They will be able to get school reports, attendance at political demonstrations and much else regarding a person of interest.
There is nothing new that I have said here, Snowden and The Guardian brought all of this to light, in broad strokes. Both HUMINT and SIGINT is world leading. Compare with the USA where they have the dragnet but are not so capable when it comes to the HUMINT needed for monitoring a small group of individuals such as the leadership of a trade union.
It is for these reasons that spying has to be made easy for them, for instance by banning Huawei 5g routers on the pretence that China is using Huawei backdoors to spy on the UK. The problem was not that, it was different. With the likes of Cisco et al, the secret services can specify their own back doors, however, that is not so easy with Chinese owned companies.
There is much in the way of law that has gone along with this, for example the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 and the Terrorism Act 2000. The latter was definitely to target eco-activists, not anyone else. At the time there were eco-activist groups such as Reclaim The Streets that organised things such as rioting in the City of London with no identifiable leaders. They also did not book their protests with the police or organise security for the day, hence they needed to terminated.
9/11 brought new challenges and that brings us on to where we are today. I personally do not think this digital ID is a big deal. Any British citizen can already be easily identified even if they don't know their National Insurance number, and even if they have no photo ID in the form of a passport or a driving license. Name, date of birth and hospital of birth are the three bits of information needed. As well as the police, the NHS can work with that. As for employers and their needs to hire only people legally permitted to work in the UK, this is just for due diligence reasons from their part. If you speak with an accent that can only be British then you can meet the employer's checkbox requirements easily, with no photo ID. Just a bank statement should do.
So, where is this coming from? What plausible reason could there be for a fresh attempt at identity cards, for the umpteenth time?
Brexit...
As you know, Brexit happened and it was ugly. Due to the way that 'The Troubles' ended with the Good Friday Agreement, the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland (The Irish Republic is just 'Ireland', not any other name) has to be kept open.
What this means is that the EU is not a complete fortress, there is this imaginary border in the Irish Sea that can't be closed.
Immigration post-Brexit
A major selling point of Brexit was an end to immigration. However, due to the open border with Ireland, immigration has become a problem to the authorities, not least because working class people despise losing their jobs or getting paid less because there is a constant stream of people that will undercut them in the employment market.
What happens is that some country ends up being regime changed, as per the goals of The War Against Terror. Syria was particularly notable for the refugee situation. However, there is also Afghanistan, Iraq and everything in between up until Ukraine. What happens is very sad. People walk, hitch or smuggle themselves into Europe to arrive in one country such as Greece. Here they are looked after but they are unable to work or escape the refugee camps to buy a house, start a family and all those good things.
So they escape the cage of the EU country they first entered to try somewhere else. Maybe they get to Germany. However, in Germany, they will be asked where they came from, for example Greece, and get sent back to Greece. Maybe they try another EU country, to get sent back again. And so it goes, until someone advises them to go to Ireland, where they can walk over the border to the UK, as in Northern Ireland.
Since the UK is not in the EU, they get a fresh start at claiming asylum. This gets granted and the local authority is then likely to put them up in temporary accommodation.
Next they get 'dispersed'. What this means is that they get sent to another British town or city. Here they get temporary accommodation and a ridiculously small amount of money to live on. This money does not meet their basic needs. The asylum process leads to refugee status, which is not citizenship, however, they are permitted to work, legally. At a guess it takes two years to get to this second hoop. To get past refugee status takes even longer, if successful.
During this time the asylum seeker is not allowed their passport, the government keeps that. They can get a travel permit, however, if they return to their home country then they get banned and are not allowed back.
So that is the general process. To say immigration is out of control is an understatement to some and 'fascist' to others. It is a topic best not talked about, and the practicalities of it are not well understood. A boat crossing the English Channel full of asylum seekers are going to make the headlines of the gutter press, but this Brexit loophole situation is not something that the journalists appreciate fully, particularly if they voted for Brexit, then they are just not wanting to know.
Plausibly, the compulsory digital ID checks for work can be used to make the UK unattractive to asylum seekers that know the deal in the EU.
Currently the biggest threat to the main political parties is Farage and his Reform party. In recent polls, Reform (or whatever they are called) would sweep the board, taking seats from both the Conservatives and Labour. Due to how it works with no proportional representation, the exact outcome of this does not necessarily mean Reform would have a majority, however, it would be the end of the Conservative Party.
Hence, compulsory digital IDs would provide convenience for everyone, when dealing with the government, whilst giving the spies the primary keys they always wanted. However, for reasons of holding on to power, due to the threat of the Reform Party, there may be extra urgency.
> And so it goes, until someone advises them to go to Ireland, where they can walk over the border to the UK, as in Northern Ireland.
This is absurd. The problem is the exact opposite, nearly all IPAs in Ireland come from the UK via the common travel area. Ireland is not in Schengen and is not reachable from the continent by small boat, so there is negligible migrant flow in the opposite direction.
If a State can't be trusted with data of its citizens it can't be trusted with passports, birth certificates, or any numerous other instances of identity. Being able to identify citizens is basic and essential to the functioning of a State whereby the failure to do means the total failure of the State.
In effect the State is no longer a State and is in fact entirely dysfunctional.
I accept all these valid points, but don’t they already know exactly who we are and have a digital file on us already? I mean, I have a drivers licence and a home address and an internet connection I typically don’t use a vpn on. There’s no way they don’t have all this already right?
They do but it's all disconnected, migrants don't have it, and it makes delivering government services a massive pain.
Doesn’t seem so bad then
Italy has got an ID card since forever. Of course it was a piece of paper, it's a piece of plastic with a chip now. There is some experimentation to move that into the state app.
Everything accelerates when it becomes digital, for the better or for the worse. One thing that an ID does not do is preventing crime and allowing only legal jobs. People find a lot of ways to circumvent the rules as long as there are money to earn.
do those state apps use Play Integrity on Android? will you be required to lock yourself into Apple or Google's walled garden in order to be a citizen?
No idea, I never installed it. I can do everything from my web browser.
With all the cameras and phone tracking you've brought up, what does the ID give to the government that they don't already have? I get where you're coming from; I think about this myself. However, I usually come to the conclusion that concern around this is being penny wise but pound foolish, considering both the point you've brought up and also that I have a tracking device in my pocket with me at all times that already keeps track of where I am, what I'm doing and what I'm thinking. I don't really trust Google, Apple, etc. any more than the government. I've also seen governments punish people extrajudicially (or just trump up charges) when they want to, without this.
Once its there it will almost certainly never be rolled back.
Freedom is incompatible with the UK.
Hard agree.
Also, is the data secure? Who else has access to that data? Will I be protected if I am in this system?
If they were open about the system, it would be one thing, but they never are. It is funny how this has cropped up gain after the recent pow wow with the yanks and the tech companies.
The fact is that no government can be trusted because they are not permanent. If a previous government had instituted, the current one would not be rolling it back. The loss of rights is like a ratchet: it only goes one way, click by click.
> Why? Because the state has already shown it can’t be trusted with our data.
No state can ever be trusted with this amount of data. Governments change. Someday, there will be a government in charge that you will disagree with.
more concerning is they will be contracting the project to a private company, with links to the previous PM
‚ A secure, optional digital ID could be useful.‘ but never in the hands of a state.
I wonder if zkSTARKS could help here. Prove that the validity of a statement (like "I am a citizen that is authorized to receive benefits") without revealing your precise identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge...
Whizz-bang cryptographic solutions to this class of problem (digital ID, electronic voting, etc) have at least three major problems that I consider fatal:
1. The contract to build the thing will go to the lowest bidder, who is all but guaranteed not to do any of it correctly (cf. the UK Post Office scandal and Fujitsu's role in it).
2. The public has no guarantee that it is implemented in the cryptographically secure way, or that is is ONLY implemented in the cryptographically secure way (e.g., either by accident or through malice the system leaks info it shouldn't).
3. The overwhelming majority of the public are not trained in nearly enough computer science to understand "no actually this system isn't a total privacy nightmare" (assuming that it's actually implemented securely).
That's basically how the existing share code system works for non-citizens. You the worker ask the government for a share code. You provide that to the prospective employer and they can check that it is valid. The same or similar system can be used for driving license validity.
The digital ID is presumably (this is my pulling a guess from my rear end, but if I had to implement it, I'd use the existing system) an extension to cover citizens too. In fact, in principle of that's how it works, it will marginally improve privacy because current status quo is basically that citizens provide their passport to the employer to demonstrate right to work via citizenship.
I also assume that the universal use of a single system means that spot-checking any workers status becomes easier. Currently if police, say, to use a common example, stop a food delivery rider and ask for their right to work they can say they're a citizen and just don't have ID on them. The UK has long derided the idea of everyone being expected to have ID with them with phrases like "papieren bitte", but it does mean that the authorities basically cannot check working statuses unless there's a physical workplace they can raid. Which is a weakness app-platforms and many people without the right to work have figured out.
A cynic might think that that kind of problem sounds a lot like a problem the government could already have solved in several other ways, but by letting it fester might finally garner public acceptance for the universal ID system they've always wanted.
This is the proposal for the UK system right now. Zero Knowledge Proofs. The technical side hasn't been adequately explained to the public.
How do you know that?
There's a full section of the government website dedicated to this subject, and also a recent act of parliament which in part prepared legislation for it, the Data Use and Access Act 2025 [1]. See my other answer in this thread for the links.
The Digital ID scheme isn't new. The only change is from it being optional to mandatory.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/18/enacted
Thanks for the link - I was aware the government was preparing voluntary ID. I meant the zero proof element specifically as this is the first time I have heard mention of it.
> This is the proposal for the UK system right now.
Is it? Nobody knows if it’s going to be an app, or a virtual card, or a real card. So speculation and rumours are flying.
Whoever does comms for the government must be asleep.
You're not correct in saying nobody knows. This has been in discussion for several years, and the standard is outlined in detail on the government website [1], and also discussed in a blog [2].
But I fully agree if you mean it hasn't been adequately explained to the public [3].
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-digital-identi...
[2] https://enablingdigitalidentity.blog.gov.uk/
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-id-scheme...
Can you spell it out further from that document? There's only one mention of zero-knowledge proofs in there, mentioning it as one thing that could be used in verification. The rest of the document is similarly simultaneously dense and vague, so it's really not obvious to me that the actual implementation will be cryptographically privacy-preserving.
I couldn’t find anything in that document or the blog that answers the most basic question - is it going to be an app?
It literally contradicts itself at one point:
“It will also be stored directly on your own device - just like contactless payment cards or the NHS App today.”
An app has totally different capabilities from a card in a wallet.
> Prove that the validity of a statement (like "I am a citizen that is authorized to receive benefits") without revealing your precise identity.
but... why? the agency that gives out benefits has to mint this credential and has to assess your dossier. Or they can assess your dossier, write you a snail mail with a result and wire the money.
What's the use of this fancy crypto other that finding a but in this token-minting service and getting those benefits without actually being entitled?
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.
(Repost from 2021: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560821>)
It's worth designing a system of government that works for everybody, if only for the simple reason that we will very shortly (if we don't already) have a system that works for nobody, and likely everybody shooting everybody else will follow soon after that. A utopia at least gives people something to shoot for, and if you get very lucky you might end up with an idealist in power who's willing to give it a shot.
Uk has a lot of cameras sure but the vast majority of them look like 360p tech frankly
> I'm certain it's worked well in other countries, but I have zero trust in the UK government to handle this responsibility.
This commenter may sound like a paranoid person (and may very well be, I don't know them) but read about the way the UK government handled an IT error in post office accounting software. Someone living there has good reason to not trust the powers that be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Horizon is the cherry on top.
Very well said
But don’t you understand, it will be so convenient. Just imagine the convenience! Are you opposed to convenience?
Frankly, you’re just being paranoid. It’s possible that mandatory digital ID could be abused, but officials haven’t yet announced their intentions to abuse it. So why are you so worried? You’re already tracked everywhere you go, and many countries already have this system. It seems to work well there for keeping people in line. Do you have something to hide? Seems a little suspicious, no?
(Did I miss any talking points?)
> officials haven’t yet announced their intentions to abuse it.
This one is my favorite. I don't know if it's just unthinkable naivety or a misunderstanding of how bad actors work, but it boggles my mind that this type of reasoning is often one of the top arguments I hear.
The post office scandal wasn't that long ago, even. How can you blame people for doubting the ability to keep integrity of the system and that it won't be abused and that any abuse or incidents won't be covered up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
>(Did I miss any talking points?)
Silently pointing out to the whole world that does this already and nothing scary happened that can't happen otherwise.
The only reason we have ids is the borders and codified inequality anyway. I can't go to certain places with one id and can go there with the other. In some specific places I can go in, but would not be able to get out.
Somehow I haven't seen a lot of intersection between people who believe we should not have borders and people who believe we should not have ids.
> but officials haven’t yet announced their intentions to abuse it
That one is perfect lol. It speaks to the baffling immense amount of trust people still have in institutions.
I mean, people are still outright alarmed that the BBC resort to clickbait or quietly change articles after publication. I mean, it's been a good 10-15 years - stop trusting them.
Get a grip. Everybody in the UK already has a National Insurance number and NHS number, and most have either a driving license or passport — all the elements of national identity are already in place. This is just FUD.
So why is another form of ID needed?
Before the election I was approached by a bubbly young woman who tried to persuade me to vote Labour: "No thanks, last time I did that they tried to introduce ID cards", "But that's not in our manifesto" she replied, "It wasn't the last time I voted for them either".
It gives me no pleasure to be right on this.
It was introduced by the Tories, supported by both parties, and you live in a place with FPTP voting. Not voting for labour isn’t going to help anything except give more power to the others who are worse.
Could you explain what it is you find so distasteful about ID cards?
I mean if you have a passport then you already have an 'ID card', but I certainly don't want to take that out with me to prove my age.
It all depends on exactly when they're mandatory and what tracking is associated with them.
My own personal thinking has evolved on the subject since I campaigned against ID cards under Blair ("no2id"). It is a question of trust and purpose. Things like the Estonian digital identity scheme do not seem to be bad in practice. The problem comes from identity checkpoints, which serve as an opportunity for inconvenience, surveillance, and negligence by the authorities.
Remember the "computer is never wrong" Fujitsu scandal? The Windrush fiasco (itself a story of identity and records)?
And anything born of an immigration crackdown is coming out of the gate with a declared intention to be paranoid and authoritarian.
> "Remember the "computer is never wrong" Fujitsu scandal?"
For anyone outside the UK who doesn't know this reference, the UK Post Office (originally the state postal system, privatised by this time) paid Fujitsu to build a computer system. It had bugs which made it look like money was going missing. The bugs were reported, and ignored. The Post Office prosecuted employees for theft and fraud over sixteen years, ruining hundreds of lives and reputations, sending hundreds of people to prison, and causing some suicides.
It eventually came out as an investigative journalism story that the system was at fault, the people were innocent, and the Post Office knew about the bugs right from the start and had been hiding them from the police/courts. "In 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the scandal as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history" that's almost 10 years after it ended and 25 years after it started, rather too late to undo all the harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
I've had a very similar journey. I also campaigned against them, rejoiced when the hard drives were shredded after the election. I am now less worried. The devil is in the detail, and the issue last time was in the database rather than the cards. That said, I think since then we have bigger concerns, and if an ID app alleviates some concerns about immigration then I'm fine with it. One big thing that has happened since then is GDS – the various GOV.UK apps tend to be actually good. I recently used the new GOV.UK One Login app to renew my driving licence and it was impressively good.
> and if an ID app alleviates some concerns about immigration then I'm fine with it
It won't.
The US border is now locked down far tighter than it ever was when I was a kid, and the cries for locking it down even more and violently apprehending suspected violators are at a fever pitch. The UK too - like many countries in the recent rightward lurch - has gone from a country where I can just show up to visit to one when were I need to request permission beforehand.
It sure seems like the "concerns about immigration" in the UK mirror those in the US, which in my analysis is a reaction towards the loss of white privilege combined with the loss of economic power. Putting stricter id checks may assuage abstract xenophobia, but the concrete details don't fundamentally change the concrete details.
It's not like Brexit fixed those concerns about immigration.
> It's not like Brexit fixed those concerns about immigration
If anything, Brexit has exacerbated control over immigration as we can no longer access shared information with e.g. France.
Exactly. Before Brexit people wanted it because they thought, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit:
'Opinion polls found that Leave voters believed leaving the EU was "more likely to bring about a better immigration system, improved border controls, a fairer welfare system, better quality of life, and the ability to control our own laws"'
Doesn't seem to have helped, has it?
So a justification based on a premise of alleviating some concerns about immigration has a long historical trail of failures behind it, as I'm sure the Windrush generation can share. The US and Canadian citizens along what was once pridefully called the world's longest unprotected border have also their misgivings.
As I read here, the UK passed the law that required employers to check employee eligibility. I'm sure that was meant to alleviate xenophobic concerns. Why wasn't that enough?
I dug up some antique privacy anxiety from Duncan Campbell in 1986, about the National Insurance numbercards introduced in 1984.
https://archive.org/details/onrecordsurveill0000camp/page/88...
It's an interesting museum piece.
> Through this new network, much personal information which the individual has to provide, for example to claim a benefit, or to an employer - will be routed through successive computers to wind up on a ‘central index’. Even if no new law is passed, the effect of the system will be to create a national population register which each individual is obliged to inform of changes of name and address (and often a great deal more). Moreover, by the same time, the majority of adults (on present plans) will have been issued with a National Insurance (NI) ‘Numbercard’, laying an easy basis for the future introduction of a national identity-card system.
> Since the start of 1984, a NI Numbercard - resembling a standard plastic credit card, complete with signature space and a magnetic strip encoding the bearer’s name and number — has been issued to everyone reaching the age of 16, and to anyone else registering in the NI system for the first time or applying for a new card.
> Eventually, the cards could be used in automatic readers, similar to the present automatic telling machines (ATMs, or cash dispensers) installed by most banks.
> Despite government claims to the contrary, the Lindop committee concluded that the British NI number was already close to being used as a personal identity system. Although no further government proposals have been made for the use of the NI Numbercard, it is fairly certain that - for benefit claimants at least - its carrying will become obligatory. It did not take long for suggestions about compulsory carrying of NI cards to creep into public discussion. In August 1984, in what NCCL called the ‘thin end of a nasty wedge’, the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons suggested that casual workers should be issued with the new Numbercards and required to produce their cards when being paid - so that information about payments made to them could be collated successfully by the Inland Revenue.
Here's also a picture of the thing in an advert in Smash Hits:
https://archive.org/details/smash-hits-5-18-june-1985/page/n...
I think they got rid of the magnetic strip at some point, and it never became mandatory to carry them or show them.
Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number -- oh, and you'll need to install this app on your phone which I promise will never be used to monitor your location, purchases, friends. Then I'll explain.
Also, please authenticate with your digital ID before posting on social media.
Not even a joke, but only a question of time.
And we never heard from then again. Case in point of how someone likes something in theory but in practice it's distasteful.
That is not a requirement though. And if it came in I would be against it. So what is your point?
Like they wouldn't bring it in to combat "mis-information" i.e. viewpoints they don't like.
Yet. This slope looks very slippery in the year of the Online Safety Act.
With your logic, everything can be used, or change to be used in a bad way, so nothing should be changed. There is never a guarantee. Seriously, is there anything which cannot be changed to be shit, in the best case to be a worthless money pit?
Edit: btw this proposal already has something which can be criticised: ID on mobile phones… so probably they’d lock everybody into a duopoly.
Yes, let's build the nuke and then put it in the center of London with a big red button. But don't worry, nobody will push the button.
Or, proposal B: don't build the nuke.
Yes? They can kill half Europe with a single nuclear power plant if they really want. They are safe only for accidents, and external sabotage. They are absolutely not for intentional internal fuck ups. The whole system is built on that most workers there don’t want that. The whole system is built on trust.
You're arguing that the installation of a literal surveillance apparatus should be tolerated because technology can almost always be used for evil.
No, I’m arguing that it can be used for good, and it shouldn’t be dismissed when it cannot be used for evil things by law, especially not because of future possible evil usage, because that’s true for everything. Btw, why do use the internet? It’s quite contradictory to argue about this here. And that is the case since almost its inception.
What do you have to hide? Why are you against adding just a little more to the law to protect the children?
What does any of that have to do with an ID card?
Many countries have had ID cards for decades, yet don't have any digital ID system whatsoever.
Nothing but I thought we were talking about digital id.
At least three comment levels up from mine are about ID cards, not digital ID.
> Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number
The police can and will request this information from you, digital ID or not. If you have actual beef with digital ID, present it.
They can certainly ask, but at the moment can they jail you simply for not answering?
yes. yes they can.
They'll invoke one of the more ambiguous sections, it's usually the anti-terrorism one, but sometimes is the anti-drugs one (i can't remember the numbers), and they'll detain then arrest you and haul you to the police station.
You can complain later, and maybe get some pounds out of it, but make no mistake: if the uk police wants you identified, they will identify you.
there's a difference between "the police can request this information from an individual" and "this information will be automatically gathered from everyone at all times and stored by the state". for one, there are circumstances in which the police are allowed to request that information and you can say "no", and there are also practical limits to the number of police that can be out requesting. The central equivalence you're trying to draw here is simply false.
Especially when they drop NFC into it and put up observation posts around the city
No, police cannot.
The government is pushing Digital IDs on rubbish claims (obviously won't do anything about illegal immigration). Everyone can see that.
So what does this mean about their actual aims?
Reductio ad absurdum.
Interesting. We could turn it into a logical argument just so we can see if this is the case. The course of the argument is:
> Could you explain what is so distasteful about ID cards?"
which is roughly how humans say "ID cards are okay" (P0)
> I mean if you have a passport then you already have an 'ID card', but I certainly don't want to take that out with me to prove my age.
which is roughly how humans say "We already collect information that would be on an ID card and store it against a passport" (P1) provided only for completeness because it is not used later
> "Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number -- oh, and you'll need to install this app on your phone which I promise will never be used to monitor your location, purchases, friends. Then I'll explain."
which is roughly how humans say "If (ID cards are okay) (P0 again) then (there should be no problem sharing that information with me, a stranger) (P2). But (there should be no problem sharing the information with me, a stranger) (P2 again) - is absurd"
Therefore, if all of these were logical, then indeed this is a valid proof that ID cards are not okay by reductio ad absurdum, a valid proof technique.
I suppose the gap in the argument is in the logical statement P0 => P2. If some chain of argument could provide P0 => P2 then this would indeed be a valid proof of the falsehood of P0 by reductio ad absurdum to P2 an absurd conclusion. Of course I wrote it out to illustrate, but it was obvious it was reductio ad absurdum.
It just strikes me as curious that someone would point that out. A bit like saying "syllogism" when someone makes a one-step logical conclusion, which is not something that humans usually post on web forums. Then again, if you say "Knowledge is power" someone will inevitably say "France is bacon" ;) so there's a bit of an ability to prompt things out of human beings that only has phatic purpose. Perhaps Latin, in particular, draws this out of someone but I'd think it odd if people went around saying "quod erat demonstrandum" in replies to someone who proved something.
I suspect this particular human was trying to say "straw man fallacy" but ended up with "reductio ad absurdum" instead, which is pretty much the opposite. If you think the first thing entails the second thing then you've executed a successful absurdum, if you think it doesn't then the second thing is a straw man. These are both annoying ways to wrangle about perceptions.
Not really. British governments have always been increasingly authoritarian.
The stated reason is to stop illegals working.
Unfortunately we have an ID for working, called a national insurance number. We literally can't get legally paid without it.
So a National ID card ... Is irrelevant. You still need this number for benefits, etc.
I've got an NI number, a driving license and a passport. Not to mention a NHS number.
I don't need another form of identification to link together everything about me so my government can leak everywhere.
NI is not ID for working. It's a tax identifier.
The ID for working system is https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work , with its digital ID "share code" https://www.gov.uk/view-right-to-work
(what does the digital ID scheme add to this again?)
Yes, and to be paid via PAYE you need a NI number.
The prove right to work is a slightly newer thing thats additional
The nuance is that you can have a NI number, then have your visa lapse for whatever reason - you still have the NI number. Hence the requirement to prove your right to work through another means.
Previously you could use proof of British nationality or a physical biometric residence card - but they've been replaced by the digital share code system (which tbh hasn't been too bad)
No, those are still the ways of proving you have the right to work, it’s only if you’re not a national that you need the share code.
Sorry I worded that poorly - I was trying to make the point that citizens prove their right to work using passport/birth certificate, and until recently visa holders used a physical BRP, and now a digital system (which oddly enough uses your expired/redundant BRP number as a username)
The share code stuff is not for nationals. It’s not clear to me exactly how it works and whether it’s scalable.
>I mean if you have a passport then you already have an 'ID card',
So why do we need this digital ID then?
Technically, they could indeed upgrade passports with an online verification feature and make them mandatory and it would work.
I am sure by now it has been explained by others. But basically - an ID document is like a bearer token that does not need to call a central authority every time it is verified. I am sure there are cases where it is, but a digital token that is linked to location every time it is verified is a quite different thing. Currently in the UK the law states that ultimately only a court can force you to identify yourself - by which time hopefully the purpose for which identification is being done is quite a serious and valid one. Making it cheaper to track people is not exactly a goal worth pursuing in my (not so humble) opinion.
To add to this - there is very rarely in my mind a need for someone to actually identify themselves - there are plenty of examples where it's useful for *audit* purposes to have a record, or to have a role-based credential to be able to do a thing, but *identity*?
Should be used for basic things like driving a car or signing up for a government service. Should be used to determine if you can make money to survive on or walk down the street without being stopped to very that you as a brown person are legit. "What are you doing in this part of town? Your sort isn't usually around this area"
> to prove my age
If you want to prove your age, there are a host of *voluntary* forms of identity you can carry if you wish to do so. Please tell me how a new *compulsory* scheme (with privacy invading overreach) is going to help you.
I mean most pubs only allows passports and driving licenses. the latter has a compulsion to keep it updated.
And even then you're never asked for it if you look over 25. Which is fair - if in doubt, verify, but usually you don't need to give over your *identity* to a place that serves alcohol.
What I find distasteful about them is the lies and prevarications that surround them.
It’s not an ID card.
I am quite confused by this point:
> A new digital ID scheme will help combat illegal working
If you are an immigrant you already have to prove your right to work with a share code:
https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...
And if you claim to be a citizen you must show a passport or birth certificate:
https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work
So how exactly will this new digital ID help "stop those with no right to be here from being able to find work"?
Showing a birth certificate isn’t a particularly hard bar to pass if you want to fake that you’re a national to be fair. You need just that and a printed letter and there’s nothing an employer will do beyond copying that (afaik you can’t look up a birth certificate and check it’s valid)
You can sort of look up a birth certificate but the service isn't designed for that. It is here: https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/
This is where you get certified copies should you ever need that for interfacing with foreign governments that want them (the European country I live in very much wants a copy of my birth certificate).
It's not an identity check by any means but a legitimate birth certificate ought to be findable here.
But yes birth cert + utility bill is a very, very weak binding to identity.
But it would need to align with the records associated with their NI number no?
Not if you aren’t PAYE and I’m not sure there are any identity checks if you are.
Ni number isn't associated to a photo, and selling or trading them is piss easy
Is this a real thing? It would be essentially identity fraud and having more than a couple of jobs linked on PAYE at the same time would likely raise a flag somewhere in the government
Yes - people are getting tax bills from HMRC after selling their national insurance numbers to dozens of people for them to work illegally, not realising they will be on the hook for the tax which will the affect their benefit claims (child tax credits, etc.)
But then the government should also know where to find all these unauthorised workers, I can't imagine how could anyone pull this off for more than a couple of months without getting arrested (or at the very least losing their job)
More than one job at a time is entirely legal though.
Because this is a straight up lie Starmer says to try to win at least one Farage supporter and get printed in the Torygraph.
This is my thought exactly. Don't they already have something like SSN to identify people in Britain? I don't see how a digital ID would be any better.
You are correct and this won't help. The government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this proposal but I think people can see through it. That should really raise a red flag.
Just like people saw through Brexit, eh? Sorry, I say this from Trumpistan.
Easier to check during a raid? There’s no requirement to have a birth certificate or passport or other ID on your person. If they currently check national insurance numbers and names you can give someone else’s (no photo).
1) Cause a problem 2) Introduce a 'solution'
The same thing is happening in Greece. The new mandatory digital ID replaces and unifies everything about citizens in one place, "to make it easier for government services to share information between each other". It can indeed be useful, but the privacy implications are enormous. Just imagine that a policeman, employer or anybody else with access to the information linked to the ID can instantly view our medical records, tax status and even simpler things like if we've ever been caught driving while drunk. Nobody knows what other information could be attached to it, but it's certain that it can be used to discriminate against us.
The worst part is that we no longer have any power to do something about it. Eventually, after it goes through the testing phase in the UK and Greece (and a few other countries where it's being implemented), this will probably roll out on a global scale, making privacy impossibly. I'm starting to get this feeling that in the next decade, we'll be living in 1984...
> Just imagine that a policeman, employer or anybody else with access to the information linked to the ID can instantly view our medical records, tax status and even simpler things like if we've ever been caught driving while drunk
Why would I imagine that? There are privacy implications, but a unique ID doesn't mean everyone has access to all your data at any time for any reason.
All it takes is one breach or vulnerability and then yes, they DO have access to all your data.
Imagine someone steals your driver's license. No biggie.
Now imagine they steal your identity which is linked to everything you ever do.
> All it takes is one breach or vulnerability and then yes, they DO have access to all your data.
No they don't. If they breach the health system, they don't have access to tax returns.
Just because people are identified by a single ID number doesn't mean all their data is being stored on the same server. And for purely organizational reasons, that's incredibly unlikely to happen.
And I don't know what you mean by "steal your identity". People's names are date of birth are generally a pretty unique identifier already. It doesn't really matter if systems use that or a single ID number to identify you, or if hackers look you up by your name.
When a credential is stolen, its validity across multiple unrelated services is often checked by credential stuffing. That's just one type of simple attack.
Has cybercrime been rendered obsolete with a government credential? Why is this master account immune to theft? On the contrary, it appears to be a credential that once stolen, could be more impactful than having your primary email account and phone compromised.
It's reasonable to be concerned even just from an infosec perspective.
Is this a _could_ happen or _has_ happened type problem?
I'm trying to understand if it is speculative or if we have a base-rate for occurrence.
What master account are you even talking about? That's not what this is.
The subject was a system being breached.
And the account you set up for a driver's license is generally different from the one for your health care. If you're reusing the same password for both it doesn't matter if they're linked by the same digital ID number or the same email address or just the same name and birthday.
A digital ID number isn't changing anything here.
In the UK's own post linked below (also in the OP), they describe what's more than a digital ID number. It's credentials. Which humans are bad at handling. And there are always implementation flaws, because we're humans.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-digital-id-scheme-to-...
I think you're misunderstanding the article. When it says:
> Digital credentials will be stored directly on people’s own device
This is a credential you show. It's visual. It's not a login password.
But that’s already the case without a digital id. It’s not like those accounts aren’t already linked together.
The accounts generally aren't linked together. Everything about the UK government IT is a huge group of independent systems all pretty much isolated from each other. You can argue over whether that's down to incompetence, organisational turf wars, or good security design.
Which is why you have completely separate account to pay the same government for crossing one specific brige in East London than you do for vehicle tax.
Most government websites do use the same frontend toolkit (a rare win for UK governmental IT) but front completely separate systems.
I mean they could be more tightly integrated but any agency could match one account with another any time they felt like it
Breach = data for all citizens.
Card = one person, limited use.
But most importantly: a Hitler rises to power = opposition is screwed.
Ah, good old Godwin's law...
If a Hitler rises to power you will be screwed with or without an ID card, so please don't use such a silly argument.
Doesnt have to be a Hitler, imagining the worst case scenario for laws is absolutely apt.
Consider the Australian Access and Assistance bill. Among other things, it permits ministers to issue TCN's verbally. As far as we know (theres no oversight) this hasnt been done. But its concerning that the government can verbally require a corporation to (open endedly) change app functionality.
It would be better if Jim Hitler, had to fight the existing democracy to erode our freedoms, rather than just having to ask a minister to make it so.
Its absolutely better to assume the worst case than the best.
But that's -likely- what it means in the near future, along with 24/7 tracking via observation posts along streets and highways. I wonder when people will start realizing a smaller government is a better government and vote accordingly. When things make a task "easier for the government" your ears should prick up and you should start paying attention. Today's "more efficient democracy" makes for tomorrow's "more efficient autocracy" when everything is already in place
??? do not rely on incompetence for privacy.
anyway, privacy is dead - longer conversation, but even if you don't carry your cell, there's cameras everywhere with face/gate recognition.
It doesn't have to be dead, that's a choice we made as a society. It's an artificial limitation if people wake up and vote against it while they still can
How can they do this? The next election in UK is in 4 years.
Do you mean gait recognition?
Lol yes, bad auto complete :-)
> The worst part is that we no longer have any power to do something about it.
Perhaps it is time for the Greek to dust off their guillotines.
>The worst part is that we no longer have any power to do something about it.
That's not true. If a large enough mob of citizens went to the capital, burned down the government building and harassed MPs on the street (and followed them to their homes), as recently happened in Nepal and before that in Bangladesh, things would change very quickly.
In the UK, if this comment could be traced to your ID/address, you'd be arrested likely on terrorism charges.
Not if I was a Labor supporter: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/aug/15/suspended-l...
He was acquitted by a jury. Do you think Keir Starmer is bribing juries when the defendant is a Labour supporter or something? I'm sorry if that sounds flippant, but what exactly is your assumption about the underlying mechanism here? If there were some sort of Labour cabal controlling the justice system then this person would never have been arrested and tried in the first place.
With no privacy though, how do you even talk about it with enough people to organize?
The same way people did before the internet? The American revolution didn't require E2E encrypted communication, nor did the French one.
No, but the government also didn't have the communication and organization ability either. Imagine if the British generals could have communicated in real-time with London, or had spy satellites that could watch the revolutionary troops in real time, or had the ability to fire missiles thousands of miles with extreme precision. There would absolutely be no USA if they had
Exactly! Creativity is dead to so many people.
Maybe I'm too cynical but from where I'm sitting Google and Apple already have all the info about citizens in a giant database that they use for their own purposes. Why are we upset that the government might create a more limited database?
The cows are long since out of the barn on "don't collect a giant database of everyone's personal information"
Because Google and Apple can't use it to control where and with whom you work, live, play, etc., but the government can.
a) The government can subpoena Google, Apple etc. for whatever information they want - or not even subpoena, often they ask nicely and the companies hand over any data requested.
b) Many people are extremely angry about immigration. They very much want the government to control "where and with whom [certain other people] work, live, play"
I'm upset by all of it, which is why I've de-Googled.
>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK.
How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited in several years. If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation.
In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account.
The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live.
It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.
> In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular.
The circular issue is quite similar to Spain. Where in order to obtain residency you need an address. But for being able to rent, most likely you’ll need a bank account and ideally a Spanish identification number. But for having a local bank account you need an address.
Similar to the above. This needs to be broken in order to get residency.
In Portugal it gets even worse, because many landlords still ask for a guarantor willing to take responsability over the rent.
My experience in a few European countries was also circular, the only thing that helped was that I could use the work contract and a letter from HR to break the cycle, however this naturally only works when the job is already secure before coming into the country.
There is a way to get into the Spanish bureaucracy quite painlessly! Its NIE blanco. You can get it in any Spanish embassy, before even getting to Spain. With that you can create a bank account or job hunt.
That won’t work entirely. The NIE blanco is a PDF so it does reduce complexity later as you have a number predefined.
But many services and people might ask you to show physical NIE. And also without address you’ll be able to open a foreigner bank account which is different than local.
>But for having a local bank account you need an address
Bunq solved this issue for quite a few Western European countries, thankfully.
Ditto for France, except that it's de facto illegal to rent a place without having a bank account.
AFAIK the recommended way is to open a bank account through smaller banks (aka neobanks). They just send you a card to address specified and once you activated it you (first) get a bank account for payments and (second) can use it to prove address for others. Also, if you legally rent then you get the council tax documents, though it takes roughly a month for them to send. This is another proof of address. And the bills of course, but again it takes a month or so to receive the first letter.
So it's unclear how a digital ID solves anything in regarding the proof of address.
> The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
They already ask you for a "share code" which they then verify on the Home Office website. What does the Digital ID add to that?
>Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them
"Once we chewed them up we spit them out"
> Most of EU and many other countries have something like that
And no EU country has any illegal immigration thanks to the ID card
/s
In all fairness, the “immigration” story is likely just a convenient spin on a more realistic goal of state surveillance on it’s own citizens.
Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries. It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west".
Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad.
At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades. Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients.
So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on.
A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs.
So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases.
I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.
Never waste a good crisis
You are correct. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 was brought in by Blair’s Labour Government under the guise of preventing terrorism, the hot topic at the time. It was repealed by the incoming Tory/Liberal coalition under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Lobbying for Digital ID cards continued by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” amongst others.
While there is almost guaranteed to be an aspect of this, the UK is going through a period where immigration is in the news constantly and the populist party "Reform UK" are on the rise.
The Labour government has realised that whatever their own feelings are about people coming to the UK by irregular means and claiming asylum, they need to be seen to recognise the popular narrative right now that the boats must be stopped, and be seen to be taking action.
So I don't think the immediate state goal right here is likely to be anything deeper than desperately trying to head off Nigel Farage, who is capturing a lot of public discourse about this 'crisis'.
… except that trying to out-Farage Farage (by being bastards to asylum seekers) will lose them many of their traditional supporters (who are not big on being bastards to asylum seekers) and seems unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters (why would they take some half-hearted populist bastardry when they can have the real deal?).
The ‘small boats’ narrative is ludicrously over-reported here. It’s such a clear case of those with most of the resources scapegoating those with none of the resources as the cause of everyone else’s problems.
It’s amazing to see Labour fall for the same trick that the Tories did with Brexit, and also incredible that Farage is still a political force after all the Brexit lies.
That's not a trick, it's how third parties have influence in a two-party system: the two main parties are compelled to steal any popular policy from a third party before it becomes a credible threat.
What Brexit lies?
350m for the NHS.
I don't think any of that matters any more, the issue is so firmly in the public eye that Labour need to show that they've solved it whether it's a 'real' problem or not.
> unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters
Farage is polling ahead of both major parties at the moment. That support came from somewhere. To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue. Why have they turned to someone like that? Most likely they feel their own lives and prospects getting worse and in their dissatisfaction have turned to an easy answer, someone who promises to change everything and blame the outsider. To put it starkly, reductively even, you don't get nazis when everyone feels like their life is on the up and up. Well not many anyway.
The mainstream of UK politics needs to get to grips with (perceived?) worsening standards of living and failing services, and actually take action that makes people's lives better. Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air. It's not really a wonder to me that a sizeable minority are looking outside of that, or are getting frustrated that they can't get a doctor's appointment or the roads are falling apart. It's all too easy for Fartrage to say - look over there!
Any ideas how leaving the european convention on human rights, deporting some barbers, takeaway owners and illegal construction workers, and stopping small boats in the English channel will reinvigorate Sunderland, fix South Wales after coal mining stopped, restart British Steel, bring life back to coastal holiday towns in the aftermath of cheap flights to warmer places, fire up the tired overworked Londoner on the crowded tube, bring European finance investment back into The City, tempt foreign industries to open factories in the UK, cause more doctors and nurses to be trained and paid better, and give little Sally and Timmy something to look forward to in life?
"Freeze Non-Essential Immigration. Essential skills, mainly around healthcare, must be the only exception" - Reform manifesto page 5.
The main thing Farage supporters are voting for is to see fewer Muslims and brown people and Pakistanis and Africans, and the main thing Farage is doing is stirring up is racist hate and division; Reform's own manifesto tells their supporters that they will still be seeing an awful lot of foreigners under a Reform government.
Of course it won’t help. Never claimed otherwise. That’s my whole point - while everyone’s lives and the state of the country seem to get worse, people blame the other and look for the person offering them easy answers.
If their lives were looking good, if government services weren’t a mess, and if they perceived the government was actually changing things for the better, reform would have a hard time finding suckers to vote for them.
The small boats issue is enough in the public eye it’s going to have to be tackled. But beyond that, reform need to be beaten by the UK government fixing things and making the UK optimistic about the future, rather than just same-old same-old and the whole place feeling like it’s in managed decline.
> Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air
Speaking from the other side of the pond, we can say quite confidently that the solution is not electing someone who will make reckless, bold moves. The brain trust here voted against “ambitionless, measured improvements” and for that, we got a chaotic circus.
we spent decades dying to "measured improvements". I don't like what my peers did about the fact that they're angry or what in particular they demanded but I don't begrudge them being angry or demanding something. You can only bullshit people about their basic living conditions for so long and long ago our political class gave up on the idea of working for people as their raison d'etre and decided instead that their job was to give us as little as it takes in order to get our votes and then use the power we give them to funnel money back to their donors. The mistake wasn't in realzing that the "left" wasn't on their side, it was in thinking that the right was just because they were the ones who pointed out how feckless, entitled and self-absorbed the center-right elitists that pass themselves off as the left had become.
Agreed, but unfortunately at times when things seem not to be going so well in general, people are prone to electing the person that promises them large positive changes by throwing out the stale old rulebook. Even if it’s not credible. Even when large parts of what’s apparently going wrong have been invented by that same bad actor…
I think this is part of why Brexit got through as well, some people felt it was a way to shake up a crusty, unresponsive establishment. That didn’t go so great!
Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.
For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.
The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.
The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window.
What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration.
I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not.
Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street.
Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats.
Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back?
Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.
Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.
I don’t think so, no. This is how it works today: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.
If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.
Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).
Except there's no obligation to have a passport.
That says if you don't you need a birth certificate and an official letter showing a national insurance number. I guess the new thing would substitute for that?
> Except there's no obligation to have a passport.
No but if you don't have it then you can't show it.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem
It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke).
It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke.
Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior.
Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself.
Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.
Of course a digital id doesn’t prevent illegal immigration.
Proper border checks prevent illegal immigration.
The digital ids are introduced for other reasons - this is something Tony Blair has been pushing for a long time.
Proper border checks don't do much if people enter the country legally but overstay their visas
IDs (along with verification laws) discourage employers from hiring unauthorized immigrants, and without access to gainful employment, many will opt to return to their country of origin, or choose not to come in the first place.
You are describing the current system. Employers can receive business-ending fines (at least in theory) for hiring illegal labour. I’ve never worked a job in the UK that didn’t require me to prove my right to work here, eg by showing them my passport. Digitising the IDs will make no difference.
And frankly, if you believe this is actually about immigration then I’m embarrassed for you. Everyone can see that they’re just using the current crisis an excuse to ram through the unpopular thing that they've wanted for decades.
It won’t stop the boats.
I have never seen a report of a business ending because of a fine. I have seen reports of hospitality business having to close because they lost their alcohol licence, where the licencee employing illegal immigrants was deemed not to be a fit and proper person.
On paper, the punishment for hiring illegal labour is £45k per worker for the first offence and up to £60k for repeat offences[0]. That's enough to ruin a small business.
Whether or not these laws are actually enforced is another matter. [Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops]. But I've been asked to show ID at every job I've ever had, so companies obviously care about it even if the risk is low.
[0] source: https://www.irwinmitchell.com/news-and-insights/expert-comme...
> Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops
Is the implied assertion that the majority of Turkish traders are operating illegally?
It's a popular stereotype in the UK (although it only seems to have arisen in the last year or so) that "Turkish barbershops" are a front for money laundering.
They're certainly suspicious: all across the country, high street retailers are going bust, and yet somehow all these barbershops, nail salons, takeaway joints etc are staying in business, able to afford prime commercial real estate even though you never see anyone in there getting their hair cut or their nails done.
I don't know why the Turks in particular are being singled out, but that's the meme. The "American Candy Stores" in London are another famous example.
> barbershops, nail salons, takeaway joints
There's an old saying where I'm from that the barbershop is the safest line of work because everyone needs their hair cut.
Where I am, admittedly in the Netherlands but I grew up in the UK and haven't noticed a huge difference, nail salons are always quite full when I pass, and I see food delivery drivers almost every time I look out the window. Similarly the barbers always seem to have clients. Could be the time of day you look?
Just going to throw it out there that it's a bit disconcerting to see these kind of criminal stereotypes associated with a certain people on HN.
In the town I live there are 3 (or 4) barbershops - one Turkish and the rest are British - I don’t notice any difference, they all have a long queue on Saturdays but empty in the middle of a working day.
My understanding is that it makes checking job eligibility easier, so enforcement of non compliance is easier.
A big source of illegal immigration is visa overstay (https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/un...), which ID can solve by tracking the visa status.
There are benefits to UK citizens, such as being easier to open a bank account and to comply with Voter ID laws.
What a lovely framing that is. Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever. Then, finally, in one of these inevitable spasms of authoritarianism, they do away with it and we're now turned away from the polling station unless we can show our permission slip.
Then they come up with even more papers for us, and the argument for it is that it's now a benefit that we can more easily comply with Voter ID laws.
Bugger off with that. Don't talk to me about any "benefit" in relation to voter ID that isn't abolishing it.
> Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever.
I don’t disagree at all, however we are where we are. The laws were introduced by a different government in a failed bid to maintain power by disenfranchising voters less likely to have ID.
That being said, we are where we are and having government-provided ID is a benefit in that context.
Only a day or two since this was announced and a petition against ID Cards has already reached 1 million - way beyond the 100,000 required for a Parliamentary Debate. I wonder what the petition's growth rate will be over the next couple of weeks or so.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
It doesn't. The kind of employer who would employ an illegal immigrant is certainly not going to ask to see ID of any kind. They would surely be especially wary of any electronic ID because that would make it easier to associate them with the immigrant. ID cards are only of any use to legal workers and honest employers.
If the UK wants the benefits of a solid ID it should look to Scandinavia. In Norway everyone has a unique number in the population register and this ID is your user ID for all state services. Employers can ask for this number and look you up. Of course it still doesn't prevent people working on the black for cash in hand but neither will an ID card or ID app.
There is no appetite for ID cards in Norway either, yet successive governments keep pushing the idea despite there being no compelling reason to believe that any problems will be solved by them.
Every job I’ve worked in the last 10 years has asked to see my passport so they can check I’m allowed to work in this country. I expect employers who aren’t checking don’t care, and digital ID isn’t going to change this.
Yeah, and they'll accept any document you buy from the internet for 5 quid that vaguely resembles a passport.
If anything it could help legal immigration. There's a bootstrapping issue where you need a utility bill to open a bank account and a bank account to get paid and get paid to pay the utility bill. And also need all 3 to rent a property to live in. You can choose the right providers to work around that with just your passport, but that involves a bit of work and research.
No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.
Presumably most legal immigrants already have bank accounts overseas and do not suffer from this bootstrapping issue.
Most companies will not pay a local employee to an international amount. You're also going to pay quite large fees for any transfers if you wanted to pay bills. Also, the account abroad is not a proof of address in the UK which is the thing you want from statements.
Good luck paying rent/utilities in the UK, or proving a UK address, with a foreign (especially non-SEPA) bank account
I have been doing so for years, never had a problem.
You have not been proving your UK address with your account abroad. You may have used it for other purposes, but not that.
I have done that once too, just changed the account address to my UK address and printed a PDF statement. No problem whatsoever.
But anyway, you can just get utilies and pay with foreign account. This gets you an utility bill.
Long time ago when I came to the UK I had that exact problem, there was only one bank (HSBC I think) that agreed to open an account for based on passport only. Even though I'm an EU citizen and UK was part of the EU at that time. Otherwise I would be stuck, because my employer (no employer I know of) would send my wage overseas.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.
> I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true?
Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system.
> If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.
> anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I don't get this. Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like? I imagine that tax authorities and immigration authorities don't actually cooperate together (and for good reason!) but my impression for places like the US is that you really do have to provide some sort of number provided by the government for most kinds of employment.
Unless of course you're just not trying to pay payroll taxes I guess?
> some sort of number provided by the government
There are countries where each citizen has one unique identifier (Sweden's "personnummer", Denmark's CPR).
The UK is definitely not one of those! [yet]
Instead there are many different identifiers, each for a different purpose, and stored in different systems which almost certainly don't talk to each other.
Just for starters: NHS number for healthcare, National Insurance number for social security and pensions, Unique Taxpayer Reference for tax, Passport (with a number that changes when you renew your passport), Driving licence (with a "number"[alphanumeric] which stays constant even when you renew)...
Multiple overlapping identifiers... and I may have missed some :)
> Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like?
There is, but it's not tied to any strong identity verification process, and so there's a thriving fraud where unemployed citizens will rent out their numbers to working illegals. It's not something that the tax office has ever really worried about, since if anything it tends to increase the amount of tax paid (if several people are sharing the same tax ID they'll pay a higher tax rate), and while they might bat an eye at someone with 5 different salaried jobs it's not particularly suspicious when it's gig economy work.
To work, you need to provide a National Insurance number, which is unique and tied to certain state benefits like pension. The idea is you work, pay "national insurance" contributions and accrue "contributing years" to get a state pension later.
The wrinkle is that it doesn't seem to be tied well to identity. Someone working illegally can provide an NI number that's legit but not theirs. Their work accrues to someone else's NI record, but the person getting the extra years probably never notices and the person working under their NI number doesn't care because they aren't entitled to a state pension anyway, they just want to work now.
OK, this makes sense to me. Clearly I lacked some imagination on this whole front
There is a number for this but it’s not tied to your right to work. We have a mash of different systems.
Here’s what employers need to do currently: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
Tax numbers have no bearing at all on your right to work. If you work legally in the UK for a while then you get a national insurance number but if you then leave and your work visa expires, your national insurance number remains as an identifier.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents?
Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working.
During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/
Checking for right to work has been legally required for over a decade. Checks in the formal economy are now routine. Can sometimes be a nuisance, like for my friend who doesn't have a passport and his driving license was issued before those went photographic.
> Checks in the formal economy are now routine
Someone who is prepared to pay people smugglers to help them cross a border illegally may not choose to restrict themselves to working in "the formal economy".
"Illegal working and streams of taxis - BBC gains rare access inside asylum hotels"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy8ee2w73jo
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents
For criminals it is already essentially impossible to forge new polycarbonate documents. Acquiring them by defrauding the application processes remains easy however.
Of course, if the person checking doesn't know what the real document feels like in their hand, whether it's real polycarbonate or a shit laminated TESLIN fake makes little difference.
But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.
So a forged or stolen id card will be impossible?
That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip.
So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them.
I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.
Can't say until the implementation is revealed, but the person you replied to pointed out that fraud at the application stage is a problem.
But illegal immigration, like bicycle theft, is a demand and not a supply driven problem.
I’m not sure how about illegal immigration but, coincidentally, it’s really handy for tracking people’s online activity when combined with the Online Safety Act.
You know, coincidentally.
(Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)
I can think of several, which problem were you thinking of?
In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work.
Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem.
Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system.
So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad.
And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle.
Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc.
So yeah, which problem did you have in mind?
It doesn't solve any immigration problem at all. It's just a dumb excuse for a bunch of bullshit.
And, of course, that digital ID will require an "approved app" (blessed by Apple and Google) running on an unrooted phone. Don't want spyware running on your phone? Too bad.
Is this conjecture (I don't doubt it) or do you have a reference?
Huh? Spyware, ransomware, etc. is a dangerous problem on rooted phones. It's the unrooted ones that have protections against it.
They're talking about government spyware. Why not install a little bit extra into that digital ID app
But as long as the phone is unrooted the all can't spy on anything. Your phone restricts it.
If you root your phone and install apps, your apps can do anything and spy all they want.
So the comment still makes zero sense.
Apps on a rooted phone can only do anything if you give them the root permission. Otherwise, permissions the same as always.
That's the point. You're able to give them that permission. That's a vulnerability.
OP was arguing that unrooted phones are somehow less safe, which is absurd.
So I currently have;
A National Insurance Card (needed to get a job), drivers license and passport, one of latter is also needed (in practice) to get a job.
Why would a brit card help us reduce the number of people working illegally?
The only notable 'employers' of illegal workers in the UK are American tech firms Uber and deliveroo (doordash) because they allow driver substitution without verifying that the substitute is legit. That should be made illegal and then fine them into the ground for anyone who slips through. Brit card doesn't help and is a distraction.
It has nothing to do with cards and everything to do with data.
But the person you're replying to, just explained to you, how the government already have the relevant data. So it's clearly not about data, because the government already issue his NINO and passport
Edit - I mean, just play it back in your head. The PM is probably watching small boat arrivals and reform polling numbers like a hawk. And here's his idea to fix both problems, and you're saying, actually no, the PM is just doing this to get data on where I go to work, even though they already have my PAYE details
I think it's 100% about the data.
I beleive that Labour see this new ID system as the solution to all the age verification questions now required by the Online Safety Act. e.g. access to things like Reddit, BlueSky messaging, Spotify.
With that in mind I think new data you're talking about will be enhanced tracking and monitoring on everyday online activity of UK citizens.
I don't think it is only online. It is really a distopean future in US and UK right now.
I honestly understand the problem with immigration, but at the same time, I think this way of approaching the problem is just to create "the enemy" from 1984.
It seems that immigrants right now move something between 4B-10B a month in UK which is not a small number. Considering the costs elsewhere altogether, it seems quite small win for the risk.
>It is really a distopean future in US and UK right now.
This ignores the fact that most of Europe and Asia already have national IDs
We all have national ID’s. It’s about having digital ID’s in a system they control.
The digital id is not the reason for that comment, or not solely. I mean having AI cameras, legalised racial profiling, attack on vessels in international waters without proof (likely killing innocent civilians too when it could be intercepted easily on the coast), we have politics talking about cultural incompatibility of their own people because different religion, we have a post truth media, etc
I tend to agree, that or a big distraction/white elephant/dead cat.
I guess the guy above is right. It is about the data and the right to use your face and track you everywhere. This can be easily paired with that UK bonkers camera ai thing. They might not need to know who is illegal, but if the camera does not know you, you might need to explain yourself and show an id.
At the same time, I wonder how will they deal with people wearing burkas, masks, balaclavas etc
Government already have my photo for passport and driver's license, I struggle to believe that there's people here working who don't have at least a provisional license or passport of any kind.
Maybe they plan to ask Uber and deliveroo to authenticate the workers via facial recognition?
In order to drive a motorcycle or car you need a driving license which has photo ID?
Ok maybe you deliver by push bike.. but if you arrived here legally you will have a passport? If you didn't you ergo don't have the right to work here?
Outsourced to companies that don’t share data, which is why the government is requiring you to submit more data. How hard is this? Eventually they’ll have your DNA, Fingerprints, photos, family trees, employment history, money, spending habits, vices, travel locations, conversations, and your comings and goings via license plate readers.
Welcome to your future.
It is happening already. Some insurance companies in my country wants to demand DNA testing and to withold that information for indeterminate time and to be able to sell that info.
Thankfully, although not even close to EU data protection there is some and this was deemed irregular for now.
Attention for the word "irregular". They will take maybe few more years to turn it onto regular. It is not illegal which is bonkers.
What new data does another ID card give the government?
A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - a paper birth certificate is also acceptable (and paper can be lost, damaged, forged), as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
A NI number is not ID, it's a reporting number.
Lastly, a national ID is a tried and tested scheme in many, many countries and brings a lot of positives. The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work
A birth certificate is not proof of citizenship or legal presence in the UK for anyone born after 1983.
Anchoring proof of citizenship is going to become a very obnoxious problem going forward if there is not a population register or universal ID system introduced, as you'll have to go back however many generations it takes to reach birth before 1983.
I think the UK and Ireland are the only countries in the entire world that have non-birthright citizenship and no citizenship register, which is a less than ideal combination.
The vast majority of countries do not have birth right citizenship, and amongst those that to only about half have it as unrestricted.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
I don't exactly know what you mean by citizenship register but I can't imagine it's hard to workout who is a citizen and who isn't.
The UK has no notion of a person number or national ID number that is tied to citizenship. Therefore it is not possible to prove British citizenship except with a British Citizen passport, naturalisation certificate or pre-1983 birth certificate.
It’s therefore a lot harder to prove citizenship for an initial passport application in certain circumstances than you might expect. You need to prove that you have an unbroken link of people born in the UK to someone born before 1983, and as time goes on that will mean even more generations. Right now you typically need to provide your birth certificate, up to 2x parents birth certificate, and up to 4x grandparents birth certificates.
In many other countries the birth certificate will have the person numbers of the parents, which will mean there’s essentially guaranteed to be a record of the citizenship of the parents that the state can check. Alternatively there’s a national ID scheme that helps bootstrap this information early in life.
> A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - paper birth certificate is also acceptable, as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
This policy would absolutely sail through, with no controversy at all, if it had just been "free passports for all" reusing all the existing rules, existing IT and existing bureaucracy; and "Optional digital passport on your phone" for those who want that.
Why they're doing this in the most expensive, unpopular way possible - I have no idea.
How are the consulting companies supposed to make money with that kind of attitude?
I appreciate that, I decided to exclude it for simplicity because obviously not everyone working here was born here :)
I don't really understand why I need a Fourth (or Fifth)! National ID?
I don't really get the point on reporting number, true, but it's also a UID linked to a passport or birth certificate.
You don't currently have any National ID. You have forms of ID, which others might not have, but none are national mandatory ID that every citizen and resident has. As such many benefits in streamlining and simplifying processes cannot be achieved when everyone has a UID as such. Imagine making a system where you used various ID formats, and you couldn't guarantee anyone had one in particular, and some people had none.
Your NI card literally says it's not identification. A NI number is not linked to a passport as it's not mandatory to have a passport, so that would not work for many people. It is just a number used for tax accounting.
Ok then 'Government issued [photo] ID' so what if it's not a 'national ID'? They have all the data they need to tackle this. You can't get a NI number without proving who you are, if the government don't trust NI numbers (which they are minting?) then they could simply re-issue them? That would be far far easier than a new national ID.
>You can't get a NI number without proving who you are
That's not true either. You're sent your NI number just before 16 years old without providing anything.
Also, an NI number is just a number. There is no photo. How can you look at it and say it belongs to the person presenting it? And no you can't look up a passport or something in another system based on the NI number, because those other IDs aren't mandatory so the person might not have them.
The only way to really ID someone is to have mandatory photo ID, whether that be digital or not.
How do you think HMRC know to send you a card? If they're giving them out like smarties to foreigners then they could simply... Not (a British person gets one as a function of having a birth certificate)
Now that ID is required for voting, it's reasonable that the government provides a form of ID, for free, to all citizens. Passports cost money and not everyone has one. Same for driving licenses. It should also streamline other government services.
I think it would be simpler to repeal the ID requirement for voting. I don't believe there is any evidence of widespread voting fraud, so it adds unnecessary cost. I certainly wouldn't try to sell the ID as preventing illegal work, which is obviously ludicrous.
Passports cost money yes, but introducing a Brit card won't?
> The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
This is an exaggeration. There are countless examples of how this has played out in the past, a quick google search will yield many of them[1][2][3].
The point is that any kind of data collection by a government can and will (eventually) be misused and abused. The UK government is currently abusing its powers to access Facebook and Whatsapp private messaging to arrest regular people for words (i.e not CSAM)[4].
This particular national ID introduction has about as much to do with illegal workers as the Online Safety Act has to do with protecting children.
1. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/the-dark-s...
2. http://www.preventgenocide.org/edu/pastgenocides/rwanda/inda...
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/04/24/s...
4. https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
Because your NI card has no photo?
>A National Insurance Card (needed to get a job)
You don't need the card itself in order to get a job, just the number. In this respect it's rather like an American social security card. (I know some US employers will ask to see the card, but that's not a legal requirement: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/SSNcard.htm)
"Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said ID cards were not in the party's election manifesto and added: "That’s not our approach.""
– July 2024
"Asked about the possibility of introducing digital ID cards, Mr Reynolds [then Secretary of State for Business and Trade, now Chief Whip] told Times Radio: "We can rule that out, that's not something that's part of our plans.""
– July 2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87rgj4e0rzo
And yet people still stare blankly when you explain that the civil service and cronies run the country, not the politicians.
I'm not clear if this is digital ONLY or if I people can choose to carry a physical card when required, instead of a smartphone.
If it's the former, then it means it's now mandatory for all British citizens to become customers of the Google/Apple duopoly LOL
And "become customers" means it will become mandatory to sign away your rights to a foreign corporation by agreeing to their terms of service. This kind of abuse of power is a clear example of why the UK needs a real constitution.
And if Google bans you for some reason (which they have been known to do sometimes), I guess you'll be kicked out of the country unless you buy an iPhone.
Well, maybe the app will keep working and you can update it from Aurora Store, or maybe you'll be fine as long as you don't change your employment or residence. Pretty vague so far.
The UK has a real constitution. A central side of it is HRA 1998 which Tory/Reform want to do away with because it curtails power of government.
A real constitution is not a vague collection of traditions. Every other country understands "constitution" to mean a written document. A collection of traditions cannot meet the primary aim of a constitution, which is granting people clear and unambiguous rights.
Furthermore, a constitution is generally more difficult to change than a law. The Human Rights Act can be repealed by a simple majority of MPs voting to repeal it.
It's been mentioned that you will be able to get a physical card with a chip in it for those who want it
thanks, do you have a source?
> Stored on mobile phones, the ID would contain details including a name, date of birth, residency status and crucially a photo - which would distinguish it from National Insurance numbers.
Surely it will be possible to also store it on some government-issued, GCHQ-vetted digital device, and not rely on foreign companies (Google/Apple) and their locked-down mobile platforms?
This is the most alarming aspect of the proposal to me. I find it wild that the government will require me, by law, to buy an expensive electronic device I don't want or otherwise need, in order to be employed. It's absolutely amazing to me that the government is forcing me to spend money in this way.
There will be a physical card for time travellers from 1999 and elderly relatives
Hopefully there will be. That will be a good solution for people like me, who want to live uncomplicated lives in peace.
My government requires me, by law, to send it tens of thousands of dollars every year, much of it to be spent on things I don't want or need, in order to stay out of prison.
Requiring me to spend another $100 or so on a phone seems like pretty small potatoes, compared to what they intend to use the device for. I'm not saying I'd like it, but it's a detail, not the main issue.
It's not so much the money but rather being forced to do business with a company I do not want to do business with. If this were an optional activity, like driving a car and being forced to do business with an insurance company, that's one thing. But this will be a forced commercial interaction simply to be employed in the UK. That's a very novel abuse of power.
This is the crazy part to me. I want nothing to do with the iPhone/Android duopoly and I do not participate in it, at the cost of some personal convenience from time to time. If my own country were to implement this I’d honestly just tell them to stick me in jail. I can be a test case, why not? You have to draw the line somewhere.
It really is mad.
Whenever you hear someone say, "everyone has a phone these days", you must push back against that. It might seem like it to them but it's just not true. I've always chosen to point out that it isn't true because I was worried that one day, it would be become a legal requirement to own one. It seems that day has arrived, in the UK at least.
I'm a little in disbelief that I will soon be legally required to own one of these things.
> My government requires me, by law, to send it tens of thousands of dollars every year
That's only because you have those tens of thousands to give it. The same will not generally be true for people who have nothing.
There's a gov.uk wallet app and digital service in beta already. I don't think it does very much yet.
https://www.gov.uk/wallet
It's backed by gov.uk one login, which is already a database that contains a fair chunk of the populations' details.
To me, it feels like the digital id is more a case of joining existing things together than creating something brand new from scratch.
They've already said you won't need a mobile phone. They mention phones as a deliberate distraction from the fact that they will be building a huge central database.
I will be very surprised if the app does much more than dish up a pre-signed chunk of ID data, much like an e-passport does now. It won't actually need a secure device.
(Which isn't to say they will support anything except android and iphone.)
They have said it will work for people who "aren’t able to use a smartphone". Nothing is said about people who are able but unwilling. I can only assume I will forced to submit to the terms and conditions of a foreign corporation, and forced to use non-Free software.
Is there any particular reason why a UK central identity database is bad, while the French and Spanish central identity databases aren't a problem?
> There will be no requirement for individuals to carry their ID or be asked to produce it - but digital ID will be mandatory as a means of proving your Right to Work.
So it's mandatory for everyone except old people and the unemployed. It will almost certainly also be mandatory for renting, which has the same check. Then it will gradually seep into everything else: benefits and pensions, to cover the categories not initially covered. Then police spot checks and ICE sweeps.
This isn't the USA, ICE doesn't exist here.
We have the border force, and they aren't allowed to cover their faces, yet.
But to your point, its required to have some sort of ID for renting, job or voting _already_ the difference here is there is a digital version of it.
The other thing is that driving licenses are also ID, that carry a £10k fine for not keeping your address up to date.
> its required to have some sort of ID for renting, job or voting _already_ the difference here is there is a digital version of it
It's strange how last time I campaigned against ID cards 25 years ago, none of those requirements were in place. Voter ID in particular is a very recent idea imported from the US (and of course doesn't apply to postal votes, where there are actually real concerns about security and diversion).
It will eventually be required for everybody except the wealthy.
Just like nearly everybody's medical privacy has been given away in the UK.
Like nearly everybody's rights are unenforceable because they can't pay the enormous costs of a court action.
British freedom is great if you can afford it.
Please stop Americanizing the UK. ICE does not exist in the UK.
Stasi, Gestapo, ICE. You know what they meant. The UK just doesn't have the equivalent aggressive immigrant-removal operation in place yet.
And may never have. Believe it or not the UK and the USA are two different countries, thank goodness. So making an assumption that the two will adopt exactly the same policies is a little ambitious to say the least. For example please note that the UK just agreed to recognize Palestine.
> and ICE sweeps
Sorry old boy, but what have the *UK* Institute of Civil Engineers got to do with this?
Using the name of the US body to associate it with the immigration sweeps carried out in an abusive manner; the corresponding UK immigration raids are currently the responsibility of the Home Office.
Presumably they have their own British acronym and don’t need to borrow one from the US.
The best way to win an argument is to mix and unrelated match facts… I mean, unless someone notices…
okay but the best way to win a tennis match is to score an unrelated match point
Having just paid a small fortune to renew my passport. I'm not super excited about this, especially as I live outside the UK.
I also don't trust them not to make a complete hash of all this, removing all potential utility while simultaneously increasing the chances of my ID being stolen.
sigh
As an American it seems to me that the UK government insists on finding a way to upset all sides on any given issue like illegal immigration. If anything it's the singular and unique skill of Whitehall.
It's more that the average Brit finds a way to be upset about everything any UK government does. Even just the test of the cell emergency alert system was met with fierce public criticism: what if people crash their car out of surprise?!
But being critical of your leaders isn't the worst thing in the world. It's fairly bipartisan too; most of the people who voted for our current PM just a year ago now disapprove of him. A high level of public scrutiny on one's leaders' is probably quite effective at preventing totalitarianism. Whatever can be (often justifiably) said about our ineffective leadership, what we do have is a good track record for stability.
However, sometimes it's really just cynicism for cynicism's sake.
A good compromise leaves everyone mad.
A good compromise leaves everyone dissatisfied. A bad deal leaves everyone mad.
like IPv6
whats wrong with ipv6? other than square brackets
To be fair though, complaining about 'things' is practically a British national sport.
Don't be misled by the reaction on HN. The general concept of a national ID card is not unpopular in the UK:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/support-for-th...
IMO this is a gimmick and probably won't have much effect either for good or bad. I would vote against it given the chance. But there aren't that many British people who feel especially strongly about this.
> I would vote against it given the chance.
Unfortunately the British people are rarely given a chance to vote and even more rarely listened to.
In the last 10 years the UK has had 4 general elections and the Brexit referendum. Some countries have more local democracy (e.g. direct elections of DAs in the US), but in terms of opportunities to change the national government or influence national policy, I don't think the UK is doing too badly.
I didn't watch the video, but have read other reports, and it's worth noting that the context for this is the Labour Party conference, which starts on Sunday. The UK govt are under pressure from the tories and Reform to do something about people entering the UK from France by crossing the channel in small boats. Nothing much seems to be working. So this announcement is about trying to control the narrative by making a big, distracting announcement. I'd mlbe surprised if many people in the government/police/civil service expect it to make a difference.
Also, seems to be intended to be mandatory and require a smartphone. Hows that going to work?
Also, what happens when the database is inevitably stolen?
The small boats crossing are a small fraction of immigration. Some Google number claims 37k people got in this way in 2024. With net migration hovering around 0.8-1m people per year, arrivals must be well above this number (surely some people are leaving, making the net number smaller). But even then, this is less than 5% of the legal immigration, and probably a lot less than that.
I'm not saying it doesn't need addressing or isn't serious, but I think it's a convenient topic for politicians. It's a lot more media-friendly than the arrivals queue at Luton Airport. And the illegal immigrants aren't the ones putting pressure on NHS, housing market or train driver unions.
Depends on if you are looking at this in terms of numbers of people or cost. The Home Office annual spend on processing asylum seekers has ballooned from just under £1 billion to near £5 billion in the space of 5 years, which is 1/3 of the estimated £14 billion raised from the unpopular National Insurance increase.
This does indeed seem like a crazy high number.
Even then, what fraction of all asylum seekers comes via small boats, vs other means? I believe the UK is entirely within its right to send small boats asylum seekers back to France, since it is a safe country. International conventions on asylum seekers state this - you are not entitled to drive thru the whole of Europe then demand asylum specifically in the UK.
I don't want to come across as uncaring, I'm sure there are tragedies that drive people to doing this, that doesn't mean the UK has to also mismanage the process on its side.
From what I've read, about 1/3 of all asylum seekers over the last 7 years arrived via small boat crossings.
Looking forward though, about 90% of those arriving in small boat crossings are currently going on to seek asylum and the average annual cost of supporting an asylum seeker during their claim has risen to an estimated £41k, so for ~30k arrivals this year, the financial cost of not processing these claims promptly could increase that overall annual bill further still.
Also, in the first year of processing, costs may be drawn from the overseas aid budget (which was recently shrunk). This results in possibly 1/5 of the overseas aid budget being used for costs associated with processing asylum claims, which perhaps doesn't match most people's expectations as to what overseas aid should be used for.
I think that's why even though the number of people involved in these crossings is small compared to net migration, it has a big financial impact.
The UK was indeed part of treaty system that meant other states had to "take back" asylum seekers that traveled through them to the UK, but it decided it was in its best interest to quit that a few years ago, so France is a lot less motivated to do that now.
We keep getting told that these people are predominantly young men of working age.
If only someone could come up with a brilliant idea which might allow them to make a long-term contribution to the economy far in excess of the cost of processing their asylum applications...
Net migration is expected to be 200k in 2026
Uhm are you sure about those numbers?
0.8m is like on the average a whole county in the UK, and such massive influx would destroy the housing- and job market. Not to mention pressure on schools and healthcare.
Exactly, this is what I am saying. The 0.8-1m number is the legal, net migration into the UK, very significant, and adding to the downsides people associate with immigration. It's not all downsides etc etc but still.
The 37k small boats migration is very small in comparison. Plus there's illegal immigration not via small boats - overstayed visas etc.
Hence my point that the overfocus on small boats crossings seems misplaced to me.
What do you think is happening to those markets?
The actual number is like half of that because while 800k people came, about 400k people left.
I am an immigrant myself but I start to think that such policies are short-sighted. The end result is often fragmentation of the society, because immigrants rarely truly integrate, and at some point they become the majority, and then you're effectively a minority in your own country. It takes at least two generations for newcomers to become fully integrated, and that assumes things going right.
The migration numbers are net so I believe this is arrivals minus departures (or someone has a very weird definition of net).
“Nothing much seems to be working” because the government is completely unserious about stopping the boats and is unwilling to do any of the things that might actually work.
They could stop them in a week if they actually wanted to.
What are the options legally available to them? They have their own experts, but it sounds like you have a novel idea that hasn't occurred to anyone before.
> legally
They're the ones who make the laws?
I love how Brits take laws/rules so seriously but spend absolutely no time thinking _about_ the rules. How they're made, 2nd order consequences etc
The larger problem is 10 times as many arrive via Heathrow. That’s what causes the pressure on local services, from housing to GPs to transport.
Legally and morally? What is your solution?
Stick them in processing centres until they can be deported. Send a clear message to anyone who might come that it won't work, you won't get in, we won't give you anything, don't risk your life or waste your money.
Australia did exactly this (in the face of howling opposition) and it worked: illegal boat arrivals dropped from ~20,000 per year to almost zero. Thousands of people used to drown attempting the crossing, now no-one drowns. There's your moral case.
Legally, Parliament is sovereign. If the current legal framework doesn't allow it, change the law. Except they won't, because they don't want to solve the problem and they use the law as an excuse as if they aren't the fucking government.
I'm genuinely wondering how harsh you'd be willing to be to get what you want.
What would you do if an individual can't be deported because no country will accept them? Or if their country of origin is likely to kill or torture them? Or if no commercial carrier is willing to risk operating to that country? Would you be willing to deport unaccompanied children with no guarantee that they'd be cared for?
This is a perniciously xenophobic take, tbh. Who are you to decide your values are objectively better than theirs? /s
There is a village A dragon comes to the village every year. In exchange for 2% of the children, it spares the rest and promises its “magical” protection from unseen enemies. This arrangement has lasted 2,000 years. Most villagers worship it, even though the custom has left their village far worse off than others in the land.
Some villagers move away. Not all of them are dragon-worshippers, but some are and they still try to summon the dragon.
Now the dragon free villagers face a choice:
Keep them out. But that means some innocent children among them will die.
Let them in. Risk the cult spreading again inside the walls and possibly bringing the dragon back.
Go kill the dragon themselves. Accept substantial casualties including innocent dragon worshippers and some of their own people.
Killing the dragon would mean temporarily brutal treatment of the worshippers and the destruction of their culture, but it would spare future generations from an unbounded amount of suffering.
I'm really not sure what point you're making here. What is the "dragon" in irregular migration. What is the "village"?
It isn’t hard to parse. If you’re very literal minded, forget the mapping and just engage with the story on its own terms, then we can parse it.
Otherwise, I can only assume the trade offs are too uncomfortable (cognitive dissonance, you're a gentle soul!) or it’s a bad-faith feint to shift the burden while posing as “too rational” to engage.
No analogy is perfect. The question is whether the trade off it illustrates applies. Engage with that.
All the more reason for them to stay in France.
The humane option is still available. It’s not too late to take it. But if you keep refusing it, don’t complain when you get something else.
Its not clear what your "humane option" is. Care to explain?
People already work illegally. They get paid cash, off the books. New forms of ID won't stop this.
I don't think the point is to eliminate all illegal work.
But the new form of ID makes work place checks real easy and fast.
Add a real hefty fine for the owner and possibly ban from conducting any form business for a few years, that will have undoubtedly have effect.
There are already hefty fines for owners of businesses where the people are not working "legally". There's a "share code" that employers are supposed to check to verify visas. All the laws and machinery is already there and it does not look particularly high-cost to me.
[flagged]
Inability to work is going to be a far bigger deterrance to illegal immigration than any kind of border control you can put up. Regardless of all the propaganda immigrants aren't coming into the country in droves to bum around, commit crimes and get free services from the government. They want to be able to work and live a normal life. If you deny them that, they will look elsewhere.
> The other complaint I often see is immigrants' failure to assimilate to British norms, language, and culture.
I do get your point, as an Indian who migrated to Canada, it’s one of my pet peeves where some of my relatives live in their enclave only, i.e. surround themselves with like minded Indians, but this is pretty ironic when it is coming from Brits.
> living at taxpayers' expense
Presumably the form for applying for benefits has a reasonably high bar for identifying the fact that you are in fact legally present in the country? Or how else do you imagine people living at "taxpayer's expense"? Just begging on the streets?
The streets themselves are maintained at the expense of taxpayers, regardless of who is begging on them.
consuming oxygen produced by great British trees, too! when will the freeloading stop?
If they have a medical incident and go to a hospital emergency room, are they treated?
Do you know how much money the immigrants pay as taxes, health surcharge and National Insurance contributions in exchange for the right to live and work in the UK? Don't forget that the taxes, health surcharge and NI contributions of the immigrations are literally funding the NHS! I think it is fair to expect the contributors to get treatment when they are contributing so much to it.
In my experience, immigrants have low paying jobs and regularly use cash to avoid paying taxes. Most have no sense whatsoever of cohesion with the country they live in and instead make groups of similar culture that don't really try to fit in.
All my immigrant friends are skilled workers who earn more than an average citizen, contribute more taxes and pay exorbitant fees for visa, health surcharge and NIC. I am sure there are immigrants in low paying jobs too. Perhaps we need to talk about different types of immigrants rather than clubbing them all into one "immigrant" category and reinforcing the same tired tropes about immigrants.
This thread is about illegal immigrants. If your friends paid for visas, that would imply they are in a different immigrant category than what we're discussing.
Really "Illegal" immigrants are often a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction - pretty much a rounding error in budgets. But naturally blown up for Politics.
It's not actually particularly nice to live illegally.
No it isn't. This line of comments is explicitly in response to your claim:
> Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy, living at taxpayers' expense
No one has yet mentioned illegal immigrants except you.
In any case it doesn't matter, since GP was specifically replying to:
> In my experience, immigrants have low paying jobs and regularly use cash to avoid paying taxes. Most have no sense whatsoever of cohesion with the country they live in and instead make groups of similar culture that don't really try to fit in.
They were simply giving their own opposite experience on the subject of immigrant wages and taxation, which is equally as valid.
If this thread was actually about illegal immigrants, both comments would be equally off topic. I find it interesting which one you decided to respond to.
That's the abuse of my tax money I can allow according to my beliefs, religious or otherwise.
Yes, but generally a Medical Incident isn't really particularly desirable. You don't really get anything out of it other than "being healthy", which could be argued as being a right, and often a prerequisite for starting to contribute. Gatekeeping that just ensures they never will.
>The UK must surely have satellites or drones that can spot boats of migrants coming in via France
You don't really need that - you can stand on the beach and watch.
The issue is more with the laws - we have human rights laws where you can claim asylum and a very slow and expensive legal system where almost no one actually gets send back. What the government should do is change the laws to something that agrees more with common sense.
> Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy,
The bigger issue is people not contributing to the economy. Let’s not peg laziness as an immigration problem because British people are equally lazy.
> The other complaint I often see is immigrants' failure to assimilate to British norms, language, and culture.
If we forced people to conform to British norms then we wouldn’t enjoy the variety of takeaways that Brits have enjoyed for decades. Which is ironic because a kebab is now considered a British norm for post drinking meals.
Plus it’s not as if British people are particularly good at integrating with other cultures. Most Brits can’t even speak a second language and don’t even attempt to learn the customs and language of any other countries they visit.
> People who complain about these things seem to often run into the UK's limitations on freedom of speech.
I think the opposite is the problem. People have been far too vocal about the mythical problems that immigrants bring and anyone who attempts to present actual facts gets shot down as “woke” or “leftard” etc.
We need to stop blaming other people for our own problems.
Major difference between visiting a place and emigrating there. How many cultures actually learn another language just to go on their annual vacation? You seem to be arguing simultaneously that the Brits are worse than average when it comes to adapting to local norms as tourists, while also suggesting that the people moving to Britain permanently shouldn't have to?
There's nothing wrong with a culture adapting over time without losing their identity, like your example of Brits deciding to add the kebab. But a small country can't preserve their identity when they are overloaded by so many immigrants coming in at once who FORCE their ways on their new home. Think of it as Push vs Pull, there's a difference.
Every country having a unique culture makes the world more interesting. Imagine how boring it would be if you saved up for a trip to Japan/Kenya/Chile/etc, only to find that almost everyone there was a white English-speaking American living the exact same lifestyle you have at home? Leftists would in that case be empathetic toward the remaining indigenous minority who feel their historic way of life was killed off against their will. Why should it be any different if you swap the country and nationalities in this example to what is happening in the UK?
I am an immigrant myself, and a fairly liberal one at that. But I made the effort to come to my new home legally and assimilate to the best of my ability. I'm not sure why I should hold others to a lower standard.
> You seem to be arguing simultaneously that the Brits are worse than average when it comes to adapting to local norms as tourists, while also suggesting that the people moving to Britain permanently shouldn't have to?
No. I’m arguing that people who say “people change their personalities to suit mine” are hypocrites.
> But a small country can't preserve their identity when they are overloaded by so many immigrants coming in at once who FORCE their ways on their new home. Think of it as Push vs Pull, there's a difference.
Citation required — for literally every part of that sentence.
> Every country having a unique culture makes the world more interesting.
Exactly my point as well.
> Leftists would in that case be empathetic toward the remaining indigenous minority who feel their historic way of life was killed off against their will. Why should it be any different if you swap the country and nationalities in this example to what is happening in the UK?
If you think a fraction of a percentage of people coming to the UK is suddenly going to change the identity of the entire country then you need to get out and explore more of the UK yourself.
> I am an immigrant myself, and a fairly liberal one at that. But I made the effort to come to my new home legally and assimilate to the best of my ability. I'm not sure why I should hold others to a lower standard.
The problem isn’t the suggestion. The problem is the entitlement.
I do think it’s courteous for people to make an effort to integrate. But it should also be their decision, not ours.
And that’s the crux of the problem.
Most of the time, the complains about immigration are unfounded scapegoating of people who are different. It’s got fuck all to do with facts. It’s just people who the government have failed, or people who feel entitled, being fearful of other people who are different. It’s literally just an unchecked primal instinct. And we need to grow past that as a species.
>I do think it’s courteous for people to make an effort to integrate. But it should also be their decision, not ours.
If I choose not to integrate, and to instead practice particularly illiberal approaches to women, for example, is that still my decision? If my culture uses rape and acid to control women, may I continue?
I'm picking on a particularly onerous difference between Western and MENA peoples that's been a flashpoint in the UK, from what I can see.
If immigration was purely unfounded scapegoating, and we all could simply talk about our heritage and share new foods in these borderless economic zones that used to be countries, why would there be articles like these popping up:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/05/disputed-or-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvnnj301l3o
Another debate probably reduced to a single bit of information between participants. Class based analyses on immigration are probably more telling, but there doesn't seem to be much available.
> If I choose not to integrate, and to instead practice particularly illiberal approaches to women, for example, is that still my decision? If my culture uses rape and acid to control women, may I continue?
You’re now conflating culture with crime.
And are you honestly suggesting that other cultures have literally nothing to offer asides violent sexual offences?!
Ridiculous.
> If immigration was purely unfounded scapegoating, and we all could simply talk about our heritage and share new foods in these borderless economic zones that used to be countries, why would there be articles like these popping up
The first article is debunking headline claims about immigration. Ostensibly supporting my claims.
The second article is just a commentary of the government’s plans to deport.
Neither of them defend your position.
> No. I’m arguing that people who say “people change their personalities to suit mine” are hypocrites.
Assimilating doesn't mean changing one's personality. I'm still the same person I was before I came to the USA, but I respect that some things are customary and others are considered offensive. I know I'm expected to tip for services that in other countries would be considered insulting. Yet if enough immigrants refused to tip, it would become a stereotype that would create negative sentiment towards said immigrants because workers rely on that income.
> If you think a fraction of a percentage of people coming to the UK is suddenly going to change the identity of the entire country then you need to get out and explore more of the UK yourself.
I roadtripped across the UK earlier this year actually, spending time in 2 major cities and 4 small towns. The demographic shift over the last decade is immediately noticeable. It is multiple orders of magnitude more than you're making it out to be.
> I do think it’s courteous for people to make an effort to integrate. But it should also be their decision, not ours.
That's a matter of opinion, and perhaps not up to either you or me to decide whether it is right, but up to the % of citizens who will vote against immigration at the next election. Unchecked immigration is the top reason that western populations are shifting rightward. And this trend has evidently scared the Labour Party enough that they're finally preteneding to do something about it.
But let's say it is up to an immigrant to decide whether to integrate. What if their values are incompatible with the country's? If you move to the UK and take great offense over how people dress or their type of humor or their freedom of religion or their pub culture or whatever, why did you even move there? And if you then expect this entire sovereign nation (who is already doing you a favor by allowing you in) to change their ways to accommodate your beliefs, that is a hell of a lot more entitled than the other way around (the country expecting an individual to integrate as part of the terms of being let in).
> Unchecked immigration is the top reason that western populations are shifting rightward
There never has been unchecked immigration despite what various hard-right publications might say.
> to change their ways to accommodate your beliefs
Literally no one is advocating that the UK should change its culture to suit any beliefs of immigrants.
Being inclusive doesn’t mean we have to change our own culture. Unless, that is, you consider xenophobia a “cultural” problem. And if you do, then I don’t think changing people’s attitudes there is an unfair ask.
The real reason society is shifting rightwards isn’t directly due to immigration. That’s actually a symptom of the shift, not the cause.
The real reason is poverty and greed. The wealth gap is grown, the rich have gotten more greedy and the working class have gotten poorer. So people want change. The right promises change by scapegoating people who are different. And then the the poor vote for that change, without realising that they’re just voting for the institution that screwed them over to begin with. As evidenced by the fact that the wealthy largely also vote for the right.
You see this cycle over and over again in history throughout the world. Unfortunately it’s usually followed by war.
Holy mother of [citation needed]. "Brits are just as lazy! Brits never conform when abroad! But it's YOU not showing facts!"
Immigrants take on lower paid jobs that Brits never apply for. There’s been countless examples of this reported.
Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy, living at taxpayers' expense, with many immigrants engaging in crime?
No, this is not supported by any real evidence.
They could create a polite British form of ICE
I can think of few things the UK should do less than ape American attitudes to immigration currently.
Crime is literally at all time lows
The number of rapes is at an all time high, increased more than fourfold in the last couple decades: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...
Considering that up until a couple decades ago women would be ostracized from society for disclosing that they were raped, that isn't surprising.
Thats a bold statement - certainly possibly as a factor but to 4x it that seems unlikely. It sounds like you are callously dismissing valid concerns.
Why use absolute numbers rather than per capita?
What is the link between rape and immigration?
Articles like this [1] (re: Rochdale gang) are contributing to the impression of a link in the UK. There's also the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal [2] which affected an estimated 1,400 girls specifically in Rotherham. Population of Rotherham is 265,800, for reference. In both these cases, girls were charged and the offenders are Pakistani.
There is also a recent video of a girl wielding an ax and knife to protect her and her sister in Scotland [3]. She has been charged with brandishing weapons. Interestingly, the BBC has issued an article [4] claiming that it was a "Bulgarian couple" that the girls approached, and to not "spread misinformation." I am a researcher of Slavic languages, so I can tell you from watching the video in [3] that the accents featured in this video are not Bulgarian. I am not willing to stake a claim in what they actually are (someone else is welcome to comment).
Actually, I'm quite alarmed that the BBC is claiming this, as I generally consider the BBC reputable.
1 – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdd2rld9mj2o
2 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
3 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVfpSbLgiBc
4 – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r40gylxpwo
That is a depressing chart.
It looks like this in every western country right now.
I just overlaid that with the immigration into uk with that chart (both from statista) - charts are disturbingly similar trend. I would hope that its correlation and not causation but its definitely eye opening and kind of concerning.
Assuming statista is a legit data source.
I will share with you this site, which will hopefully make a robust point about why you should not do this: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
I assume you're not from the UK?
If we wanted we could stop illegal immigration extremely fast – as you say we are an island so it's relatively easy to stop people arriving. We don't need drones. At the moment after the French have given life-jackets to the illegal migrants and their boats have set off into the British channel, the people smugglers will call the British coast guard and ask them to go pick up the migrants they're smuggling into the country. The UK coast guard then picks them up and escorts them safely to shore. From here the police will be waiting, not to arrest them, but to take them to their hotel and give them a hot meal. Shortly after this charities in the UK will give them phones (typically iPhones), clothes and bikes to get around. The government will also give them some spending money to spend in our towns and cities.
We obviously don't have to do any of this and ID cards wouldn't stop any of this. We choose to do this and this is why they come.
However between the various reports of migrant hotel stabbings, thefts, sexual assaults, and rapes of children, it's been discovered that some migrants have been working in the UK – primarily in the gig economy. All of the things I've said to this point are not deemed issues and the government has no intention in changing them, but the fact that a small percentage of the migrants coming here are working has caught the eye of our politicians who have stated very strongly that they would prefer the migrants coming here don't work. The digital ID cards will hypothetically help with this "problem"
It's hard to explain to people outside the UK how strange this place is. Most countries want a controlled immigration system and treat border security as a national security priority, and when they do allow immigrants into the country they almost always want them to work and pay their own way. The UK basically does the inverse of this. The explanation varies between some combination of letting hundreds of thousands of Afghans into the country is the right thing to do, to it's the law so there's nothing we can do about it.
Legal note:
This is not an anti-migration post. I am pro-migration.
The French have no incentive to do the British immigration authorities' job for them. In fact, Britain very recently loudly quit an multilateral alliance that involved — among other things – common migration policy.
Why shouldn't France give life jackets and boats to people who want to leave France?
I agree. I think the French are doing the right thing here. I only mentioned it because it's one of the many things governments do which encourage and normalise more coming.
British politician could try to strike a deal with the French to stop them helping individual who try to enter the UK illegally, but obviously it would only make sense for them to do that if the British were also trying to stop people entering the country illegally. Like you say, we can't expect the French to defend UK borders.
In regards to leaving the EU this wouldn't change the situation meaningfully, it would just allow for more cooperation in how illegal migrants are distributed across Europe. Like the UK, EU countries are also legally not allowed to deport Afghans. It's not as if the EU doesn't face similar problems.
The UK would arguably benefit from being able to redistribute migrants to other less-popular EU nations. For reasons inexplicable to me, many people seem keen on migrating to the UK.
Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants? How big is it compared to, for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
Or are those things somehow related? I would be crazily scared to know that immigrant care workers will leave NHS as most hospitals relies on them. The government already made clear they won't pay people more nor will give more benefits for NHS workers and I am quite sure not Brits will take those spots when Tesco express pays more for less hours of work with more benefits.
>Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants?
This minimises the problem. The UK voters have consistently voted for reduced immigration, with polls showing the preferred number to be somewhere between 0-100,000. Those elected have consistently ignored them which has raised tensions.
In the last few years, the UK had around 1 million people net per year. 1 million people is bigger than most cities in the UK for comparison, so imagine a new city of people, every single year. The infrastructure could not, or did not keep up and has contributed to worse living standards through overly-subscribed national services, increased living costs, etc.
>for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
The NHS is already the single biggest expenditure of the UK's taxes. I remember it being more than 25% of the total budget. How much should be spent on the NHS? 50%? 90%?
The cost of defending democracy and freedom from a tyrannical Russia is also barely a drop in the bucket, while having huge meaning for many. Only 2% of the budget for the entire Armed forces, let alone just some support for Ukraine, compared to the 25+% on NHS. It's nothing.
I think there's some conflation happening here (not necessarily from the above comment).
Those figures relate to general immigration, which wouldn't be affected by ID schemes since people are given approval by the government to arrive and work in the UK. If the government wanted to reduce regular immigration, it could just decide to award less visas.
The ID scheme would only affect irregular immigration which is much lower (approx 50,000 a year by the governments stats, obviously hard to know how accurate that is, but much lower than 1 million[0]).
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...
You are absolutely right to point this out. However, I don't think many people in this thread are actually confused. It's rather clear that this scheme has about as much to do with immigration as the Online Safety Act has to do with protecting children. The UK government is just getting more and more bald-faced about these sorts of things.
Thank you for the numbers. Could you please clarify how much money this translates to, both in terms of income and expenses generated by skilled workers who are legally employed in the UK?
I must say I am not doubting nor being pedantic. I am indeed trying to have a conversation based on the facts and people I know. I would happily change my mind if I find reasons for that. At the same time, I would like to share my views which might give some perspective on my opinions.
Based on government figures I've saw, the annual economic contribution from skilled workers alone is estimated to range from 4 billion to gbp. Moreover, it's important to note that these skilled workers generally don't receive government benefits. Literally. They pay double on nurseries, they pay for NHS in advance, they do not have any financial government assistance at all, contrary to what people believe.
I do not understand what kind of problems they cause. Would you mind explain it to me? I am not being pedantic nor ironic. I want to understand what is the complaint?
I agree about drug dealers, rape gangs and etc, but they in the UK before and they will remain independently of the political changes regarding immigration.
Ten years and no settlement will only put away skilled workers as they will not be able to retire on time, nor have any financial safety as the UK only provides 8 weeks for them to leave after the contract termination.It also means spending more on health, education, and living, which is already a struggle.
Refugees receive £50 per week, which isn't enough for groceries and rent. The system is broken, but attacking another unrelated group does not seem to be the answer.
While I acknowledge that some individuals are abusing the system, I maintain that the overall impact is likely positive, especially when considering the near-zero population growth among native populations.
Who will pay for pensions 10 years from now? The money you pay now goes towards current pensions, and the government does not save taxes for future generations.
So 1 million people per year was the supposed peak, right? The actual numbers are definitely far lower than 5 million, I think.
More than that, NHS workers in hospitals are immigrants because no British person is insane to work for it under current conditions.
At the same time, no Brit wants to increase taxes even more to cover the costs of paying more for health.
A short-sighted solution will be another blow to the UK economy as the Brexit was. Well, they are being orchestrated by exactly the same folks.
This also bothers me because there's a clear conflict of interest. Trice is married to an editorial lead at The Telegraph and receives funding from Lloyds.
Not sure about Sky News and others, but I would not be surprised that some digging would lead to the same people.
There is a clear financial cost related to the war in Ukraine. Whether it is a fair cost or not is a moral and ethical point, which I think is an individual opinion. But there is a cost regardless. Money spent in war is money that will never ever come back at any proportion to its society.
The NHS may lack funding, or it may not. But what is certain is that if you know how the NHS operates internally, or you know someone who does, then it's extremely evident that the NHS is severely mismanaged by administrators who definitely are not underfunded.
I think saying "the NHS is underfunded" all day is just ignoring the other major issue: even when the NHS has funds, they squander most of them.
I don't think solving just one of them will solve the whole problem, but maybe solving the blatant corruption at the NHS's administrative level might improve their financial situation by virtue of the money not lining the pockets of the rich.
Not to mention if you have suddenly have 1 million more people a year, many of whom are not in good health, you will suddenly have a lot more demand on that already broken and under-funded system.
Where do you assume they are not in good health? Or many of them are not in good health? Most of them are university students or economic active people as far as I know.
Cutting those places will put UK in even a worse place then after Brexit.
For sure there are sick people. Over any population there is a sample which is sick, but how much is it according to you or your sources?
I don't think, nor I have proof, but seems logical, that there will be many more healthcare workers than sick people.
The real mess is not about immigrants, I cannot blame them for the lack of investiment, training and planning over 20 years or more. If anything, I am grateful that if I go to a hospital they can admit me because there is AT LEAST enough people. It seem lack of character to change policies after asking people to come.
I feel like governments worldwide are perennially musing “what if we could know what everyone is doing, all the time?”
This is a natural and unfortunate consequence of crime and foreign aggression getting increasingly borderless. As the world gets smaller, and as more and more of the world's population knows about the outside world, the more badness we face.
Like it or not, our high-trust society is devolving into a low-trust society as the world opens up. Our defences must evolve -- and the current free-for-all needs to end.
Perhaps the better solution is to stop opening up and make a concerted effort to return to a high-trust society, rather than destroy privacy and go full authoritarian polite-state?
Or must we absolutely must accept eg every Nigerian, Pakistani, Syrian, Afghan, Indian etc who has a fleeting desire emigrate, else our society will collapse?
I don't understand why we can't have both - are you saying that native-born Brits are inherently more trustworthy than people from other nationalities? Or do you mean that we should also curb internal migration as well?
If your cattle had a tendency to communicate with one another and wonder about their circumstance - you'd also start 'musing'.
It's quite possible that this whole digital ID thing is a red herring, to distract from recent revelations about Morgan McSweeney - who illegally took money from the Israel lobby, to fund a fake "antisemitism crisis" in Labour, with the goal of replacing Corbyn with Israel-aligned Starmer.
Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
> Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
Wow straight out of the Tory playbook (see eg Rhys-Mogg "lying [down] in Parliament" to poison search results for lying to parliament). They are so incredibly similar
It's incredibly misleading to call a phone app a "card". This is much worse than it sounds. Am I going to be forced to buy a smartphone? Am I going to be forced to run non-Free software? Am I going to be forced to enter into a restrictive contract with a foreign corporation?
Hah this is the UK. No, it'll be optional to begin with to make people like you asking important questions seem like a whacko. Then once they use propaganda to make people opt into it, and it reaches mass adoption, then it'll quietly be made mandatory - or extremely annoying not to have it
No, it will be mandatory right from the start, and employers will be required to check it
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/digital-id-ca...
Are you suggesting they will draft the law in such a way that in order not to be fired people must download this thing onto a smartphone and show it to their employer, post-haste? Your link does not support any evidence of that (the line " will be mandatory for every worker in the UK" links to just another one of their own articles, which also does not support it). I imagine it'll be phased in for new employment.
No, it won't be mandatory in all situations all at once, for every facet of life (I did not specify employment).
Yep. It's literally always this way. It's starts with "we hope everyone will do the right thing". To, "it's concerning some people are refusing to do their part". To finally, "do it now or we'll lock you in a cage".
didn't they try that 20 years ago and repeal? and back then it was voluntary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
There was a big backlash and they eventually caved in and cancelled the scheme when the government changed.
I lived in South London at the time and sent a letter to my MP to protest about the creation of a database state and increased surveillance, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
About two months later I got a form response that started "Don't worry, it's not just an ID card, there will be a huge database behind it!"
Thanks. Way to show you didn't even read what I wrote.
I think in the intervening years that relationship has already fundamentally changed though. Privacy from government in most western countries seems to be something of a fading memory, it would be hard to make those same arguments in 2025.
The MPs never read anything. You got sent back one of a few pre-written replies by a secretary. I was stupid enough to reply to one of those replies once and never got anything back.
If you look at the countries that are lauded at having the best online government services. They all have some type of digital ID.
Having something like that is imo. a cornerstone for building out top notch digital governmental services, and I don't fault the UK for trying to get this in place.
That being said, I'm not convinced it will be that much of a blocker for illegal workers. I'm sure they will find a way around it.
If I hire someone to work and pay them in cash, then I don't need to worry about this? Yes?
In addition to all the issues mentioned in the article, this seems to mean that UK citizens will effectively be forced to accept the terms of service of one of two US companies (Apple or Google). If you must have either an Android or iOS device to run this digital ID app (which presumably will be distributed via the Play Store on Android), there's no other option!
(This was originally a comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45387509. We merged that thread hither and added https://www.theverge.com/news/786323/uk-digital-id-plans-man... to the top text.)
For me a big red flag is that the government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this: "in an effort to crack down on illegal migrant workers" is complete, transparent rubbish.
Of all the things there are to complain about these ID cards, I don’t think this is the one to choose.
Starmer has been ambivalent on ID cards (at least compared to Blair, who must think Xmas has come twice this year). Really the only reason this is being introduced is because it lets Labour look like they’re trying to tackle illegal immigration/employment/benefits-claiming.
Reform (led by Trump’s mini-me) is making political progress hand over fist by casting immigration as the root of all evil. I’m pretty certain this is Labour’s response. They don’t want the populist (otherwise known as “batshit insane”) policies Reform are proposing (“end all immigration, send all immigrants back home”) - but a more-moderate “you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits” seems on-message to me.
So for once it might just be ok to take a politicians word at face value. This doesn’t preclude nefarious use later on, of course…
If that's Labour's response to Reform UK then it is the most ill-thought-out, if not idiotic, possible:
There is a real issue with immigration in the UK.
People want actual action on immigration, not gimmicks, not lies. The Conservatives were annihilated because their voters caught up with the fact that they were lying (talking tough while actually pushing immigration higher).
Those Digital IDs would do nothing against illegal immigration considering existing right to work and right to rent legal checks. It is clear and people see it, so see previous point. "you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits" is already the case and has always been the case. He is copying the disastrous Conservative strategy to talk tough while doing nothing and in fact actually keeping immigration up.
There have been previous attempts to introduce ID cards. People have always been generaly against them and the most against them are probably those already supporting Reform UK or the libertarians on both sides. So he's only eroding the little support he has left (progressist liberals) while strengthening the opinion of those already against him. I was looking at the readers' comments on The Guardian and there are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal. So if even them turn against Starmer he is well and truly toast.
No Datadome Javascript:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/britain-to-introduce-c...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1Nmgi0...
JR-M just tore this to shreds in a very thorough and historically informed way. Not someone I agree with on a lot of things, however this hit the nail on the head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FZKkQR7MCo&list=LL&index=3
The petition against this has so far managed to surpass the one opposing online age verification:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
I look forward to Parliament’s long-worded “no.” These petitions often seem more about managing dissent than enabling meaningful change.
I don't understand how people are able to work in the UK illegally without employers already breaking the law. Employers are required to pay payroll taxes for their employees and you need a national insurance number for the employee to do this. I'm not sure how this fixes something that should already be fixed.
Not just that but there's already the "share code" system that's used to verify status against the Home Office.
This smells a lot of "think of the children" [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
I just wonder how widespread fraud is without any form of ID. A fake utility bill is just a few clicks away on my PC.
Govt surveillance? I'm much more worried by the ever increasing number of cameras in the streets rather than something similar to having a passport to prove who you really are.
This is just wishful thinking. They're not going to make all of the farm workers, many of whom have difficulty reading ANY language (let alone English), download an "app" and install it on their phone.
"In 2024, a significant portion of the UK adult population, approximately 8.5 million people (1 in 6), struggles with reading and writing at a basic level, according to The Reading Agency's 2024 report"
Maybe they'll have an exception for people who are more migratory in nature. In that event, I think we'll get to see a nice real-world example of a cyberpunk-style dystopia. "High tech, low life". The upstanding citizens will be surveilled, preyed upon by corruption, and will be running on a social credit score treadmill designed to work them to death. Meanwhile, a plucky band of rebel farm workers, who are free to work outside the system, will bring down the establishment and bring freedom to all. Roll credits.
I’ve always lived in places where having an ID on you has been part of your “citizen responsibilities”. So reading the post my feeling was “oh cool, they’re getting a new eID-like system”. But I imagine it’s a huge step if folks could get by without an ID at all.
In this case, sounds like you'll not just be required to carry an ID. Everyone in the country will be legally required to carry an Android phone or iPhone.
Well, maybe the app will keep working and you can update it from Aurora Store. Pretty vague so far.
In the UK it has never been compulsory to carry ID, even when driving.
At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy.
And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive and don't travel, some folks just get by without.
So if there is a requirement to have a Britcard, and to present your 'Britcard' when stopped for any reason, then it is definitely a change.
One needs a "National Insurance" number (NINO) to work legally.
I thought it was also required to collect any type of government benefit too.
That NI number lives in my head. I don't have to carry a physical card or install an app.
The counterpoint to this is obviously that the requirement to present ID to vote is tantamount to voter suppression - iirc there is no “free” form of ID in the UK.
As an ex-Brit I am also used to carrying an ID and a drivers license, and I’ve always found it quite weird that you can’t get an ID card of any kind that isn’t a full-fledged passport or a drivers license.
I mean I guess this new thing is going to be free?
I also don't live in the UK any more, still a brit and not yet Australian, but I have had to adjust to it being necessary to carry your license here when driving. It means I can't really leave home without my wallet, which is odd. We're getting electronic licenses before long though, hopefully.
Australia is state by state based too, some states have more reasonable rules of "present it on request"
Others like nsw are carry always
Honestly no idea. Hopefully! And hopefully you’ll be able to vote with it.
I just have a magnetic wallet on the back of my iPhone with the two cards and my travel card, so I always have them. I don’t carry a physical payment card or cash so don’t need a wallet otherwise
The UK did have compulsory ID cards, which needed to be carried at all times, during both World Wars.
That is very surprising. In the US, you are legally required to carry your license when driving. If you are caught driving without one, expect to be arrested.
Also the US reserves the right to demand ID if you're within 100 miles of a border - which is effectively 2/3 of the population. And detain you until your status can be "verified", however long that could take.
That should only be for non-citizens, but I have no idea how you could prove that without documentation in the first place.
So for the vast majority of Americans, you probably have to be carrying ID at all times anyway, else you risk someone deciding you "might" not actually be a citizen.
If this same rule was enacted in the UK, there would be no place on the British Isles that would be excluded, as nowhere is more than 100 miles from the coast.
In France you have to carry a state issued ID regardless of your location within the country. Driving license might be asked to be provided if there is an assumption you have one. A lasting legacy of the 40s.
In practice the pseudo-crime of being "suspicious looking" also requires ID. Good luck if you want to argue your constitutional rights. Immigration status is topical for the current era. Something as benign as walking up the street to pickup takeout could involve identifying yourself to the police and waiting for them to clear you for warrants.
The UK used to be a high-trust society.
I lived in the UK for a while as a teenager. During that time I got a driver's license. I was astonished to find out that it was paper-only. No photo. My brother could use it if needed. The laws were changed around 2000. But I think you are correct. UK used to be a high-trust society.
In my state I have an app on my phone for it. I only use my physical card to get into bars.
That hasn’t been my experience, perhaps it’s state to state. I’ve been stopped without ID and had no problem. I’ve even boarded a plane through TSA without my license.
The point of digital ID might be to add more cases when ID is required in future. One thing if everyone buying a kitchen knife must fill a long form, another thing if they just must tap a phone on the cash register linking knife ID and person's ID. Half of you are already tapping a phone to pay for the items anyway.
One thing is showing a passport to enter the gay bar, another thing is tap a phone and have time, person ID and bar ID recorded. Much faster. Also the mobile application can collect other data from the phone without distracting a user. So much more convenient.
Once the ban on pointy cutlery is imposed and knife crime gives way to fork crime, you’ll be glad you only have to tap your phone at the pub instead of eating that Sunday Roast with a spoon.
The UK gov will force the ID cards on everyone, knowing full well that people don’t want them. Then china will hack the Uk and steal all the data.
What's the benefit of this over a passport? A passport is a physical thing, so you don't need to have a phone to be able to use it, proves who you are with the same details as this digital ID, and will probably require a similar amount of paperwork to get hold of
You usually don't want to carry a passport with you at all times. In some European countries (e.g., the Nordics), you have your ID, driver’s license, firearm license, etc., all in a government app that can be verified with an app used by officials. You can also sign and authenticate all paperwork with the same system
I use my passport to verify my right to work in the US during the first week of my job, and then I don't bring it any other time. So unless you're changing jobs very frequently it shouldn't be necessary to carry all the time. A bigger issue would be that many people do not have passports.
I would trust the Nordic governments to write an app to put on my phone and not slurp up all my data and spy on me with it. I can't say the same about the British government
Denmark is the largest supporter of Chat Control
Good for them, but I don't see why we need this, or indeed why that's a good thing?
Easy and cheap regular checks on the spot presential or/and online, as frequently as you want vs rare scheduled difficult and expensive checks.
Possibilities get realised such as regular remote checks (ie selfie to prove you are the id owner holder, address proof, etc, flagging odd id holder behaviour or employer, etc). Currently, you cannot do this, no visibility into who works where and where that person even resembles the person meant to be working for [insert gig company].
I do selfie to prove I match my driver's license all the time (needed for app based banks, and so on)?
The government absolutely knows where I work, are you joking? That's what NI numbers are for. You seriously think there isn't a join table in a government database with my NI number and passport number?
There are other workers in the UK aside from you. The policy affects them too not just you. You are getting the business requirements wrong. You are unlikely to be the main reason for the policy. Folks getting paid under minimum wage such as some gig workers using someone else's identity are the main target.
If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
Who exactly are we solving for?
> If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
Simple. Overstaying or/and expired passport will lead to that. Valid status is not a fixed binary state. It is better described as a function of personal id, rights docs and current time. Currently, the checks are more akin to updating a Boolean column on rare occasions. Digital id countries do checks more like function calls that you can perform easily and quickly
RTW already requires ID plus NI, but OK what about if we just said 'free passports' and then said passport or driving licence plus NI is needed to get a job here. If you have a foreign passport and no UK driving licence then yes you'll have to keep that up to date in order to work here, c'est la vie.
To the extent this is technically possible, if the gig economy companies wanted to do this, they could do it already.
When the driver signs up, check their passport or driving license in the normal manner, and take a matching portrait you keep on file. Any time you want to, compare a selfie to the portrait on file.
Reason they don't do this is it's profitable to hire people who can't legally work in the UK, if they can get away with it - and the government lets them get away with it.
One of the problems the UK has is that our two primary government IDs – driver licenses and passports – are not universally issued. Instead, these IDs have requirements and must be applied for at a cost, so not everyone has one.
This means when you want to implement things like the Online Safety Act you basically have to implement alternatives to ID verification like age estimators which isn't ideal (for the government anyway).
With a digital ID anonymous age estimators will no longer be required, so when someone is trying to watch porn or view footage of a political protest they'll have to identify who they are instead of using a fake AI face.
They don't have any real benefit over passports expect for the fact that a passport is a selectively issued document which not everyone living and working in the UK has access to or has applied for, but with digital IDs everyone will have one so there will no excuse to not identify yourself any time the government wants you to.
agree, seems pointless
Can't use your passport online. In Sweden we have bank id, its used for everything from validating purchases, logging in to banks, government or other websites, to sign documents, get a loan, etc. To get it you would need to go to a bank and present a proper ID, the ones using bank id for auth or otherwise only get your name and personal number.
Missing the point.
A passport is the universal identity document. It's way too valuable to carry around and expediting a new passport is costly and slow. Checks need to be done in person and the passport holder needs to be told in advance about the check (so impromptu checks don't work and expired passports get through, also catching fake passports and the like is hard).
A digital ID as its name says is digital, checks can be done remotely (as often as you want) in a secure environment with physical checks possible in addition to that. Regular and unscheduled checks are possible with a digital id after the initial check both presential and remote. Online checks especially can cover for things like the same id being used in multiple places, it also means employers cannot fudge it as the actual repository of truth lies online. None of this is possible with a passport.
Citizen IDs and more recently digital IDs have been used in Europe for decades now. Having a redundant piece of ID is incredibly valuable.
The fact that the UK doesn’t allow “impromptu checks”, otherwise known as “Papers please!” is not a bug, it’s a feature that distinguishes our democracy from other states and we are pretty proud of it.
There is nothing undemocratic about checking whether you are compliant with employment regulations on a regular manner anymore than it is to check whether your gas installation is compliant with gas regulations or your voting registration is compliant with voting policy. It is completely orthogonal. You might not be in favour of a policy but that does not mean that the policy is undemocratic.
And in a situation where that is warranted (e.g. a traffic violation), you should probably have some form of proof of identification on you anyway
In the UK you do not have to have your drivers license upon your person when driving a car. Usually you'll be instructed to present it to a nearby police station within a few days.
Not required by law in the UK to have ID on you while driving. Works well enough (you have to produce it at a station within 7 days). I'm sure if it's serious enough, the police can force some other method
In the UK all cars have number plates front and rear, so that's covered already.
That unfortunately can, and will change.
In times of war, civil liberties get curtailed. And in 2025 when Russian and Chinese bots are interfering in our democracy at an industrial scale to destroy our countries from within, the idea of identity being overlooked for all aspects of public life is looking increasingly untenable.
Do you believe these russian and chinese bots are walking the streets, where an 'impromptu check' by a policeman would stop them?
Or are you saying this electronic ID card will be linked to people's twitter accounts, to better police speech online?
Cheap scare tactics
Sorry but my own corrupt politicians and ruling business class are doing far more damage to my country than Russian ad Chinese bots.
The government has been able to do checks on me using my passport number etc, like when I was getting my provisional driving license, so somewhere there is a digital version of it on a government server or something. Can't they just make that information available?
What impromptu checks would you need this ID for? The use cases I've seen for it are to make sure you are legal to work, and when renting a house, both of which are circumstances that you can be told about beforehand
That is not what I mean. Doing checks using your passport number is not good enough . It only proves that you someone used your passport number for a job. It doesn't prove it's you. It doesn't prove that you didn't swap with someone else (worker proxy). A digital id is a token fully controlled that opens compliance possibilities that are not possible or financially feasible by using just a passport number because the government does not control the passport numbers of everyone (especially those for which this policy is intended).
Think: the ability to verify that the id owner's face resembles the face of the id holder. The ability to check that the id owner address matches that of the id holder. The ability to flag employers containing id owner employees regularly failing those checks. The ability to do this regularly without previous notice to the id owner at national scale remotely or in person is a level of compliance you will never get even halfway with just using a passport number.
The driving license application page pulled up my photo from giving it my passport number. That photo of me proves that I am the owner of that passport. I recently gave my work my passport information to prove that I was legal to work there. If we need a new system to prove that I am legal to work there, then how was it good enough to use my passport for that?
One step closer to 24/7 total surveillance. Once this is established, they’ll make it mandatory for using web sites, chat apps, etc…
After the UK Post fiasco, I wonder if Hitachi is providing the software.
My point: even if this was a good idea, it is easy to get the software wrong in a way that is a complete disaster.
Nothing is going to change unless you put the entire penalty of illegal employment on the employer. This could mean massive fines, shutting down the business and/or jail time. In the US hundreds of illegal workers are rounded up every day and jailed/deported while their employers get a slap on the wrist, and these employers then just turn around and hire more illegal immigrants. The overall problem goes unsolved.
I don't understand why this needs to be linked to a smartphone. No issue with a national ID, but should we really shackle everything to a phone? They're already lost on the questions coming in about those who don't have one.
Is this just going to be a cheeky kickback to Palantir given the investment last week: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-strategic-partnership...
There will be no requirement for individuals to carry their ID or be asked to produce it
Yet.
This will never happen in the UK.
Nice crystal ball you have there.
There's a lot of resistance to this because people can see this is the big pill they want you to swallow. Then smaller ones can follow.
You might need digital ID recorded to buy a house. Then a car. Then eventually pretty much anything.
Any legislation allowing the State to link systems via digital ID would be unremarkable and not newsworthy, but the end result could be the Panopticon we are all dreading, or perhaps a toolkit for more hardline governments in the future.
For now, you can sign a Petition [1] against the introduction of Digital ID. In the future, you may need to submit digital ID before signing such a petition (rather than the current email address validation). Imagine what a tool that could be for identifying dissenters and undesirables.
[1] https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
. The UK is in shambles. For 15 years, raw sewage has poured into its rivers unchecked. The government shrugs. Meanwhile, the nation wallows in self-pity about losing “world power” status, yet produces little of note. In the AI race, the space race, the EV race? Nowhere to be found.
Anti-migrant rhetoric used to push control that will only ever apply to citizens from the supposed party you should have voted for if you're pro-migration is wild.
Leveraging a central authority to issue standardised, signed tokens to all citizens, then letting the public and private sectors make use of it: that’s something I could get behind!
The government steps in solely to manage token issuance. New use cases appear as emergent properties. DebbiesDrawings.com lets you use your tokens to sign eCards. HMRC.gov.uk lets you use then to sign tax returns. RonsRentals.co.uk lets you use it to sign a new lease.
In a pessimistic world, without watching the hyenas closely we end up with Capita or Accenture or Concentrica or Syntegrico (I made the last two up) syphoning off £8bn to create proprietary tokens that can only be used with sanctioned government JavaBeans webcrap. It would also be fundamentally flawed and won’t launch until 2037.
With care, something really cool could happen.
"The new digital ID will be held on people’s phones"
Is the implication here that it will become a legal requirement for me to own a modern phone (will it have to be a google/apple blessed phone?) in order to get a job in the UK?
One of my concerns with this is the assumption that every adult has a suitable smartphone. Do the government plan to hand them out?
A smartphone running software beholden to one of two American companies.
Do you see the flaw here!
From the linked page:
> In designing the digital ID scheme, the government will ensure that it works for those who aren’t able to use a smartphone, with inclusion at the heart of its design.
The technologically inept get QR codes tattooed on their foreheads.
It won't fit on my head next to my POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattoo.
Please don't give them ideas!
I guess we'll have to wait for specifics. Unfortunately "it will have inclusion at its core" doesn't really say much.
They are considering enabling its use for more than just work, so what happens when my grandma forgets to charge her phone before her doctors' appointment?
What happens if you want to give teenagers a dumb phone because you as a parent decide a smartphone isn't appropriate, but they need the ID for the NHS too?
I guess the alternative will just be username and password entered into some online portal?
What of people like me who are able to use a smartphone but are unwilling to?
It's not just the elderly and homeless as mentioned on the page, but also those with religious objections, members of the digital disconnection movement, those concerned about electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and so on.
Should there a right to an offline life for the simple reason that you want live offline? A right which is protected in a few other places in Europe, at least to some extent when it concerns government services.
A smartphone is going to be mandatory for employment!
I think this episode of Yes Minister is rather relevant, albeit EU focused.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYqB0uTKlE
In case you are wondering if only the UK is working on this... buckle up:
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet
I don't think Kier Starmer understands that when people voted for Labour, they were, in fact, voting for Labour, not Reform / the Tories. This proposal at least has some merit (though it is not without issues) but trying to sell it as preventing illegal work is ludicrous, attempting to appeal to the right-wing votes who will never vote Labour, and giving control of the conversation to the Weasel in Chief, Nigel Farage.
Their strategy seems to be that they think their left flank is secure and they need to pull to the right to secure Tory voters who are now at a crossroads with how diminished the Tories are. Will they go to Reform? Will they go back to the Tories? The Lib Dems? It seems that Labour think some of the toughness without the undertones that Reform often has might grab them some of their voters. Maybe the implosion of Your Party gives them a feeling of more security on the left flank.
But yeah, this abandonment of the issues they traditionally represented to try and attract the soft centre right voters might not cause their traditional base to vote for the Tories. But it might send their centrists to the Lib Dems, their lefties to the Greens/SNP/etc and their "I just want change, any change" supporters to Reform. Along with increasing apathy and reducing turnout on their former core. Polling certainly seems to indicate that this is happening.
If he doesn't realise that then he probably also doesn't realise that all this dictatorship tooling he's installing is more than likely going to fall into the hands of Reform at the next election.
He'll have to live with the consequences as will the rest of us.
The voters misunderstood too. How much evidence and examples from the period of 1997-2010 did people need? All a quick google away
A harsh lesson in believing the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Though mostly in the UK it's usually just apathetic "well time for the other party to have go" (due to 14 years of the last lot) more than anything more educated
I've always associated Labour with ID cards, so this feels right for Labour. Last time they pretended it was needed to prevent terrorism as that was the issue de jour but this time it's immigration.
People vote for an idea of Labour that Labour in the last 25 years has not been able to live up to unfortunately.
Are there any Amish in the UK? In the US, they probably have ID (like most other citizens) but not the digital form that's being discussed here. I'm not against the idea of having an ID card, as like many others I have some of my own, but that's a physical, inert object which stands on its own, not tied to anything ephemeral and fragile like a mobile phone or computer would be.
It has been obvious for at least 10 years of "digital privacy" as an issue that the next time people with certain database attributes would be restricted from full participation in society or rounded up by armed men, the attributes at issue would be citizenship and immigration status.
This moment is the test for the edifice that the privacy advocates have built in all that time. We should all be watching closely.
This is totally pointless.
When starting a job you already have to give enough ID to do the home offices job for them, this adds absolutely nothing.
So this applies to sectarian areas of Northern Ireland as well as every other part of the UK, then.
You appear to have buried the point you’re trying to make here
Absolutely, calling it a ‘Brit’ card will make it wildly unpopular in certain areas let alone the headaches in terms of the common travel area and the Good Friday agreement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement#:~:text=...
>Article 1 (vi), commonly referred to as the birthright provisions, states that both governments, "Recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish, or British, or both
The card doesn’t say you _are_ British though?
This doesn't have to be scary, you can pair this with cryptographic certificates to get rigorous privacy:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44723418
You use the ID to create an IRL identify anchor certificate, then use other certificates with varying privacy profiles that are then cryptographically linked to your identity but in a privacy preserving manner.
I don’t understand what is wrong with this system:
“Please employ me.”
“OK, fill out this form with your name, D.O.B. and national insurance number, and if it matches against the government database then you can have the job.”
What am I missing here? I suppose they could use someone else’s details, but then HMRC should be able to easily see that the NI account seems to have multiple taxpayers.
You will also want a photo that matches the face presented every time your gig worker looks at his phone to see the next order, etc or better yet fingerprint
This appears to just be an extension (in free app form) of the UK government “One Login” system used to get access to most government web services. This currently has about 12 million users.
https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/keir-starme...
Leaving aside that this ID solves no problem (as noted in may comments here) the last thing already stretched budget needs right now is a new expensive project.
Digital IDs will be used to restrict your internet access.
They'll roll them out gradually. You won't need one at first. You'll still show your passport, driving license etc, until one day you give up because the digital version is convenient and you "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? Have you got something to hide?
Then they'll attack the easiest target: porn. We already have age-verification laws, implemented through dodgy third-party providers. But now everyone has digital government ID: we "might as well" unify things so all the porn sites check your age using the centralised government system. What's your problem? Why do you care? Won't you THINK OF THE CHILDREN??? You want to let CHILDREN watch PORN???
Then comes online retail. After all, the Southport killer bought his knife from Amazon — that was the front page headline on every paper, remember how organic and uncoordinated that was? It could all have been avoided with better age verification. And hey, we already have a way to verify age with our digital IDs. We "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? You want to let CHILDREN buy KNIVES?
And what about social media? Kids shouldn't use Facebook, it's bad for them. Australia already bans under 16s from social media. We already have age verification for other things. We "might as well". WHY DO YOU CARE????? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
Oh, that's handy, everyone's social media accounts are now tied to their real identities. That'll come in handy when people say nasty things that the government doesn't like. After all, those riots only happened because of "misinformation". Why do you need to stay anonymous anyway? What's the problem? Why do you care? Got something to hide? You're in favour of HATE SPEECH??
The slippery slope has never been more lubricated.
That all sounds plausible, but why doesn't it happen in other EU countries where digital ID is required?
Because one has to timelapse things in order to perceive the advances of incrementalism
I won't hold my breath. It'll take 5 times longer than planned, cost 10 times more, won't do everything it originally set out to do, then won't work on the tech that everyone will have when finished, and a future government will decide they don't like it and will start over.
I genuinely think the next move will be using it as part of their age verification check. I am guessing they want it to be your online id. No more anonymous internet usage.
It is really grim what is happening to the UK. For the most part no one gives a shit. And if you do, you are automatically branded as "right wing".
Really? I've generally seen more people on the left giving a shit about government overreach etc
Well, the left usually wants to expand the size of government and increase the number of things that it is responsible for.
> No more anonymous internet usage
And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Recall that Iran cut off the internet for university exams, and the volume of posting by Scottish pro-independence accounts on Twitter/X dropped 98%. Food for thought.
Are you thinking of the US bombing Iran perhaps? Assuming they are running such a disinformation campaign (which is the theory you are talking about) why would they shoot themselves in the foot and cut their own spooks' connection off? And you're off by almost two order of magnitudes, the study in question found that 4% of pro-indy activity was linked to Iranian controlled attacks (and I am highly doubtful of Twitter's influence in that debate in 2025...)
> And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Reddit is the most left-wing moderated, fedora-tipping regime it's possible to get.
Correlation is not causation.
Digital as opposed to analog..? Or does every adult need to have a smartphone on them all the time?? I think most countries legally require adults to be able to identify themselves with government-issued ID. Is this so novel for the UK? But I really don't get the "digital" bit...
We've seen this before and we'll probably see it again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
In the UK, employers are already legally bound to check peoples right to work.
But some don't, and they get away with it
So what will change?
If it's only applicable to citizens then how do they hope it will help on migration?
Edit: The Times says this is to include all workers:
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/digital-id-comp...
When the cops stop you on the street and ask for your digital ID and you can't show it to them, they'll take you to a deportation center. #PapersPlease
This is how things work in Japan. If you are not a Japanese citizen then the police can ask to see your residence card to confirm your status.
From Wikipedia:
"Tourism in the United Kingdom is a major industry and contributor to the U.K. economy, which is the world's 10th biggest tourist destination, with over 40.1 million visiting in 2019, contributing a total of £234 billion to the GDP"
Like the US, I think there are multiple interest groups, not all of whom are interested in seeing "aliens" on British streets. I was named a "Highly Skilled Migrant" by Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and paid a fair amount of money to the University of Liverpool and yet, never got the feeling I was in any way anything other than a foreigner.
The same way other things "help" migration. By making life very difficult for you if you aren't a proper citizen. I imagine the outcome for this would be to make it nearly impossible to do anything with the government or doing anything you might need an ID for, especially online. Some citizens will probably suffer too, but it is a price the government is willing to pay.
Wouldn't that push people into black markets for day to day living?
IDs don't help because the moment the ID is useful the government will find a way to hand them out to migrants.
Finally, a digital form of “papers, please”
Glory to Arstotzka.
The UK is absolutely paranoid about national ID cards and has been for decades. Not sure how that happened tbh seems like the US has a similar allergy.
We both have governments with a track record of technological incompetence and surveillance overreach. Unfortunately it seems pretty rational to me.
How about just making passports free to get in the UK? There is already a system for that
I don’t see why they can’t augment and phase in a new National Insurance ID which has photo on it rather than introducing some new system…
Unless of course this new system is for some other unclear purpose.
UK is taking the worst ideas from Russia.
Orwell is turning over in his coffin
I am concerned about the UK's initiative to implement mandatory digital IDs, particularly regarding scalable threat detection. This could lead to an increase in spoofing attempts and automated credential stuffing once the system is rolled out.
Kinda ambivalent about it. The eu settled system used for those that stayed post brexit is basically already this except website
Works ok
Interesting to require residents to have smartphones, I don't think they were before?
Next comes sensors in said cards, if someone walks by an digital observation post without the card on them they will now be tagged by visual recognition and documented as illegal/possibly illegal until proven otherwise. Expect the database to record it and start drawing up statistics on said undocument individual. The undocumented police will be notified and be on alert to apprehend at first opportunity. Coming to you in 2030.
Reminds me a scene in "Friends" - people boarding an airplane asking the crew "Did you fix the issue of missing Falange?"; "Yes sir, we fixed it!"
Kafkaesque doesn't mean that much anymore when reality is far darker.
Andy French and I applaud you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3H_peKI6R0
What info is on this ID that they don't already have access to?
Not from the UK so i don't know how much more they're asking for
That's not really the issue people have with it.
The issue I have is that it provides a convenient way for people to hassle me for my identity. Being able to identify myself is not a problem I've ever had and I don't like the idea of being forced to buy a smartphone just to remain an employed citizen in the UK.
I am in two minds on this.
1) I don't like centralised ID, its ripe for abuse.
2) I don't like the idea of crapita/accenture/G4S/some other dipshit company designing and running this.
However
if its an extension of the government gateway, then actually the only "innovation" here is the presumable fine for not keeping it up to date. (that and the smartphone integration, which I suspect is largely symbolic)
So long as its GDS rolling it out, and its properly designed (two big ifs) then in principle it could be a useful as the original GDS scheme to make government services "digital"
But, the problems of authoritarianism are not to be ignored. starmer doesn't have the bollocks to be a dictator, but jenrick and farage do. Our constitution has no guards against authoritarian capture, its just "good men" doing "good deeds". That was easily overridden with Boris. A decent majority in the House of commons gives you alomst unlimited power of the state.
Exactly, as I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45385512 it's a question of trust and purpose; I don't trust these people, the companies behind them, the public opinion they choose to pander to, and the stated purpose of immigration enforcement.
Something similar to Estonia would be much less controversial.
What did Estonia do correctly that UK has not?
Estonia's system was an area of some fascination for me years ago, so here's what I can remember:
After splitting from the Soviet Union, Estonia were basically starting from scratch with their telecoms system. Finland offered them their old stock to get started, but the Estonians decided to instead treat it as a greenfield project and deploy the most modern infrastructure available at the time. Compare to the UK, where most of our infrastructure is literally crumbling as it passes its 50-year predicted lifespan and we spent almost a decade of time and tens of billions of pounds on a vapourware railway line. So the technical inheritance (or lack thereof) favoured Estonia.
I don't know much about how the Estonian system was initially built, but I would imagine a post-Soviet state likely retained enough state capacity to do it mostly in-house (and perhaps they received outside funding too, as the '90s were a period of largesse). Compare to the UK, where state capacity is effectively nil and the project would invariably be outsourced to the same contractors and consulting firms that have taken on every other aspect of government, with concomitant price and time overruns (see also: train).
A crucial element of the Estonian system is that data is private by default (see https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/e-services-regi... ) If I recall correctly, any government agency can request access to specified data for a state purpose, but each request must be reviewed and approved by the data subject. All access requests are logged so a subject can audit who has been accessing what (which suggests maybe it's possible to bulk approve access in advance, or grant persistent rights to someone like one's own doctor). In comparison, the Snoopers' Charter granted unfettered access to Brits' Internet connection records to a huge number of agencies, from the security services to the Food & Agriculture Agency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#... ).
Estonia is also recognised as a global leader in IT security, following massive investment after Russia-attributed cyberattacks in 2007; they host the NATO Centre of Excellence and the eu-LISA HQ. As far as keeping one's data away from prying outside eyes, they're probably a pretty safe bet. As for the UK… (Eyes passim ad nauseam).
Lastly, I believe Estonians generally report greater levels of trust in their government than Brits. 2023 figures suggest the gap may have narrowed from when I last looked (I can't say I've been following Estonian politics, so I couldn't suggest why) but still some 37.8% of Estonians say they trust their national government as compared to 26.7% of Brits (see https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru... ). And there are certain sizeable constituencies in the UK where, in light of historic abuses, they are even less likely to ever trust the government: Scousers; northerners; women & ethnic minorities (specifically for the police, doubly specifically for the Met); environmental activists (see the spycops scandal); and people of Irish descent. I'm sure there's some skeletons in the Estonian government's closets, but there's a limit to how much damage you can do when your state is 35 years old rather than a centuries-old former world-spanning imperial hegemon.
Those stated trust figures also predate the UK government's support for the genocide in Gaza, which has doubtless had a significant impact on that figure; even people who wouldn't have considered themselves particularly political a couple years earlier are appalled at the regular arrests of protesting pensioners outside Parliament (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/09/palestine-acti... ). The incredibly unpopular incumbent government is only the latest in a long line of increasingly authoritarian regimes of both the political right and (allegedly) left (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/09/labour-needs-arrest-uks-... ), meaning everybody in the country of any political persuasion can think of recent examples of why they might not want to invite increased government surveillance. Plus, with the recent passage of the Online Safety Act, most people are now primed to associate a new digital ID with the government wanting to know their porn habits, and we're a famously prudish nation.
So, in short:
· the Estonian government had the ideal circumstances, made all the right choices, prioritised privacy and security and are reasonably trusted by their citizens
· the UK government has doddery old infrastructure to work with, no money left, an addiction to outsourcing in spite of repeat disasters, a track record of authoritarian disregard for privacy and have little to no legitimacy amongst the populace
And, as others have pointed out, there's just no obvious constituency in the country that would be interested in this sort of thing (outside of Tony Blair and his mates) and no obvious problems that it provides a solution for; it seems like a hard sell, whether on ideological or practical grounds.
This quote from Starmer tells me that this is as much about control of its citizens as anything else:
"In the UK ... we have got a right-wing proposition that we have not had in this country before ... so the battle of our times is between patriotic national renewal ... versus something which is turning into a toxic divide."
Do they not already have the equivalent of a US social security card? (For the employment eligibility, not the program benefits.) Is this something much different from that?
You aren't required to show your social security card to your employer. You aren't even required to have the physical card for almost all purposes. It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
https://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/assets/EN-05-10553.pdf
> It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
The US tried that back when Social Security Numbers were introduced. It specifically said it was for tax-purposes (a context where it might've been adequately-secure) and not to be used for anything else.
Yet without any actual penalties against "other places", it got misused everywhere by companies trying to save a buck on primary-key choice and authenticating people.
Its the I-9 thats required, the SSN card is just one way to satisfy that
They have a couple “numbers”, but not a id “card” besides a passport (which only citizens get, not permanent residents). ID cards are pretty standard across EU.
We have a “national insurance number” used for tax purposes but it’s just a number that you fill in in forms; no-one asks to see the cards. I’m not sure they even issue the physical cards anymore? I lost mine a long time ago.
Do not worry, people. You can vote yourself out of this. Like, totally. Just vote harder.
What if you don't have a phone?
Headline (here and on Sky) is clickbait - should read that this is a PROPOSAL.
This is a proposal at a party conference, not law. Previous initiatives along these lines have not come to pass, and this is unlikely to as well.
Expect universal rejection by the tories, lib dems and reform in parliament, purely because it’s a Labour initiative, and expect plenty of Labour MPs to disobey the whip.
From the BBC this morning:
“Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch calls it a "desperate gimmick", while the Lib Dems fear it would force people to turn over their private data”
If it does somehow get beyond the commons, expect lords to quash it.
I give this about a 20% chance of actually coming to pass.
So is this like DigID as in the Netherlands? Or is this more far reaching?
I am not going to download an app to work. If they need some form of ID they can provide me a physical one, oh wait that sounds like an NI number. What's the point of this again?
>Create problem
>Provide "solution"
A story as old as time.
"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"
Illegal immigrants working illegally will continue to do so, since they don't care about the law, as demonstrated by arriving illegally.
Anyway, according to some news stories, they don't need to work, since they get everything for free anyway.
We changed the URL from https://news.sky.com/video/all-british-adults-to-require-a-d..., which is a video, to a text article that appears to give the important background info.
"Government says digital ID will make it harder to work illegally"
Today it's immigrants, tomorrow it could be dissidents.
In East Germany a common strategy the government used was to not put dissidents in prison, but make life hard for them in many ways including by denying them employment.
Of course none of this stops under the table work - which those engaging in illegal work are probably already doing.
He, this Starmer guy seems weird.
So sad for Britain. But the rest of the countries are eager to follow. Thankfully war is starting soon.
The Empire Strikes Back
In Sweden we have bank id that you can optionally use as ID (new feature). But its mostly used to validate purchases, sign things, or login to banks, government websites or whatever website might use it to auth. It does not hand over all id information to the site that uses it to identify you, just name and personal number.
"just name and personal number"
Which can be used to get everything else, thanks to ridiculous privacy laws in Sweden.
And what are they going to do with that?
Similar to e-verify?
Reminder that the UK arrests 12000/year for online posts, by far the most in the West.
The UK already has government issued ID, the proof of age card. This is about tying your identity to your online behaviour.
My prediction is that it will soon be a requirement for all websites and apps with user-generated content to require authentication with the UK government's Digital ID OAuth provider and that requirement will include linking the user's username to their Digital ID. It won't require websites and apps to pay a third-party provider to check users' identity, so the UK government can argue that it doesn't place a disproportionately burdensome cost on smaller websites and apps.
After the UK implements this, other western countries will follow. For example, here in Australia, it's a simple solution to the under-16 social media ban which is about to come into effect. The bill was given deliberately weak verification requirements so it didn't seem too big-brother, but I'd bet real money that there's already an amendment in the works to tie it to digital ID after they discover what everyone already knows (i.e. that it'll be easily bypassed), followed by another amendment to tie the digital ID to site/app ID, for online safety reasons of course.
In time, websites/apps may offer your government's digital ID as an alternative to their in-house identity provider. If this becomes globally ubiquitous, many of them will stop maintaining their own authentication and rely solely on government ID providers. The identity provider you use will depend on where you are, so VPNs will become useless.
This was all inevitable from the day the internet opened up to everyone. Governments have an insatiable desire for power and limitless paranoia about threats to their power.
I remember when the Internet was celebrated as decentralized media, allowing common citizens to criticize repressive regimes. Today it seems like the west is emulating the countermeasures already perfected by those repressive regimes.
Internet peaked too early to build any countermeasures for this.
"But it’s not just “online comments” as Yaxley-Lennon seems to imply. A police officer quoted deep within the article explains that these acts include “any form of communication,” and can relate to “serious domestic abuse-related crimes.” "
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
Yeah, not really online posts though is it.
"can relate to" is weasely. What are the actual numbers?
Administrative detections live and well.
Any digital ID not using a form of blockchain tech is doing it wrong in my view.
What purpose would that serve if identity is assigned by a centralized entity (the government)?
Fraud prevention and decentralised id verification.
In a nutshell itd give identities the same level of technological protection that crypto currencies have.
Would be very useful for voting too. Bulletproof fraudulent vote or ballot modification prevention.
I find it hard to make a nuanced take without being downvoted sometimes, but I honestly both agree this is bad/not necessary, AND that half the people in here are worrying a little too much/being a bit too pessimistic about it. Can one not hold both of these opinions at the same time?
What the hell is with these overly-draconian bills prioritizing control over individual rights being passed as of late?! The online safety act & now this. Our private right to anonymity & privacy has utterly gone out the window at this point...
I don't think this is on a par with the online safety act. That was fundamentally flawed. This isn't a huge issue and the benefits for ease of access to government services is a positive step. One thing that users of government services face is the need to provide documentation that supports their request. This can be an impediment to users accessing services that they are entitled to in a timely manner.
The biggest risk is from a data breach and this information being accessed by unauthorized parties, but that is something all online services are at risk from. The absolute worst way to implement this will be to contract it out to a third party. If it is built and maintained by civil servant developers who have already proved their mettle with a variety of govuk services then I would have confidence in it. If it is farmed out to Fujitsu or some other 3rd party then it will be an shithshow and an expensive one at that.
What’s the point of easier access if it comes at the cost of our rights?
The potential for BritCard to be used for surveillance outweighs the benefits of convenience tenfold... Privacy is not something we should compromise for easier access to services- what starts as a way to "streamline services" can quickly turn into a horrible mechanism for tracking citizens under the guise of security..
It will be fine https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366631525/Our-worst-day-...
It'll be handed to Palantir. Starmer has run out of things to sell off to billionaires and the only reason this bill exists is so he can sell off the actual citizens too.
Couldn’t agree more.
For reference:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-strategic-partnership...
Is it getting a little too obvious it’s coordinated?
https://www.ft.com/content/b8c02080-a290-4af7-9702-03230aa9c...
"Hackers obtained the details of tens of millions of British voters in a “complex cyber attack” on the Electoral Commission that went undetected for more than a year, the elections watchdog admitted on Tuesday. The body said “hostile actors” first breached its network in August 2021, gaining access to its file-sharing and email systems and obtaining copies of the electoral register, but “suspicious activity” was not identified until October 2022."
Of course such a thing will never happen in relation to Digital ID Cards, will it?
It's interesting how an idea almost nobody wants to see implemented in practice keeps coming back thanks to the efforts of the person most of the country, including his own party would rather forget.
We already have multiple forms of identification. The National Insurance number, passports and photo ID such as driving licences, which we must provide when starting employment.
If you're not from Britain, you must present evidence of your right to work or other documentation. This is already the law.
Any company that does not follow this is violating the law.
In reality, most illegal workers are engaged in cash-in-hand jobs that never require ID. A digital ID alone will not solve this problem.
Adding a digital ID won't make any difference.
We've also seen similar issues with the UK's attempt to censor adult content "to protect children." It sounds reasonable on the surface (no child should have open access to the internet!). Still, the law was written so broadly that even community clubs involving children with no relation to adult content were caught in its provisions.
Threatened by fines and bureaucratic red tape, many closed their doors. International sites that had no idea what to do - now block the UK. And did this stop access to explicit content? No. Anyone can use a VPN, or an anonymity-oriented browser like Brave and use a Tor tab to bypass the blocks completely. For the non-technical, how long before these Age ID check services, which the government wants everyone to use (private companies owned mainly by adult companies), are hacked and everyone's viewing habits are released?
How long before we're required to use our Digital ID to log on to the internet, enabling monitoring of everything we browse?
A more innovative approach would be for ISPs to by default integrated parental controls on residential connections, something that has been technically possible for decades. In fact, any mobile phone contract in the UK operates similarly. Why not home internet? This isn't about new legislation; it's about education.
Parents already understand why they shouldn't give alcohol or tobacco to their children; why not teach them how to protect their children online?
The new NHS app and driving licence app are expected to be available by the end of 2025. How long before they're integrated into a single system where the government maintains one massive database containing every individual's driving information, medical records, browsing history, banking and tax details? It's not far-fetched to imagine such overreach occurring.
Also as of this week, HMRC (our UK tax office) also now has the right to raid any UK bank account for taxes owed (leaving only £5,000 in the account). This applies to both individuals and companies. Consider a company that becomes insolvent days before paying salaries how will they pay their workers? Some companies have already become insolvent after paying wages while still owing taxes and National Insurance. Just HMRC now get their money and the employees won’t.
I realise there are several loosely connected points above, but that's precisely the problem: all these developments have emerged over the past 18 months.
So when the UK government claims these measures are "for the people," the argument falls flat.
It's difficult to believe that policymakers don't recognise these fundamental flaws.
This raises the question: what's the real motivation? To me, it seems less about protection and more about monitoring and control, implemented by people too afraid to speak against their superiors.
At nearly 50, I see a UK very different from the one I was born into. One thing I know for sure: once this process begins, it will only worsen, and a new government will maintain these systems and extend them further. We left Europe - but kept every single law! As a nation, we just allow all of this to happen. It’s the British way!
How's this going to work in Norther Ireland? They haven't thought of that have they?
zero-knowledge proofssss baybayyyyyyy
Quite ... a papers please moment.. if I recall correctly, South Korea has it where you have to register with the government to get an assigned username and password.
Unlike the NI number, which you can't legally work without...
This is not true. You can work without a NI number, you will just be given an emergency tax code. A NI number is not ID, it is a reporting number.
Your card literally says, "THIS IS NOT IDENTIFICATION"
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45381810
Gotta track those breadlines
Presenter:
>digital id will be made mandatory for all adults in an effort to tackle small boats
WTF? It's obvious when a small boat of Africans turns up they are not Brits and making Brits carry ID will make zero difference there.
Problem. Reaction. Solution.
this is corny and weird. feels like cyberpunk, government run oligarchy. however, maybe this will improve the UK and stop all the illegals. about time they clean up that country. yuck
Digital ID is the pattern of the mark in revelation.
Once you let go of God (worship of truth and love) the government or other totalitarian force will try to control people top down. The logical way is to identify them.
You go from a system of free will and distributed cognition to one of enforcement top down. New things can always be added to it as you don't control it. All the "problems" of the states will tag along.
Making it digital is way worse than anything before because it allow to control you without having to pay a cost in enforcement, you control the flow of money, of exchange, you let the computer control people allowing a system so top down the Nazi and communist couldn't even imagine.
Worse part, it's already there for sure but in shadow form, they have all the info about the people, it's just not tied to financial transactions and out there in the public.
Wanna bet lol
This is a plan so we shall see what happens...
This is widely unpopular because the idea of ID cards is unpopular in general in the UK and the people also clearly understand that the argument that this would combat illegal immigration is total rubbish. Even the comments on The Guardian's website are overwhelmingly negative, which should really tell the government something.
The proposal is also drastic because it would be de facto mandatory for all residents. It's hilarious and pathetic to see the government argue that it wouldn't be mandatory, just only needed to get a job (which probably means also mandatory to rent and to study)...
An unpopular government trying to out-do itself.
Id cards are not unpopular with the general public. That's just what the daily mail wants you to think.
https://bsky.app/profile/samfr.bsky.social/post/3lzq2w3ovgk2...
> Id cards are not unpopular with the general public.
At the time of writing, 1,017,754 British people have already signed the official petition opposing them; a petition that has only been running a matter of hours.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
This is HN, it is unsurprising that you will find complaints of people who think governments are icky. You know, the usual libertarian bullshit.
I lived in countries that have mandatory unique IDs, and countries that don't. Typically the countries that do not are more a pain in the ass to deal with, because institutions will proxy to the next best thing in the absense of an actual ID, typically documents that are not mandatory and not supposed to be used as ID, but end up being used like that anyway.
There's three separate questions:
- is it a good idea to tie various public records together under a unique ID
- is it a good idea to issue voluntary ID for those situations where people need to prove it
and the big, third one:
- where is this going to be made mandatory and under what circumstances will it be used against people?
> - is it a good idea to tie various public records together under a unique ID
Generally, yes. It simplifies dealing with government bureaucracy. Proving your identity is generally something you will have to do anyway, this is will just remove a bunch of hoops you have to go through.
> - is it a good idea to issue voluntary ID for those situations where people need to prove it
One of the countries I lived in had a system similar to this one. It worked fine - typically you only needed this ID when opening a bank account or registered for work. Originally it was a tax registration ID (which is why it was related to banking and working), but it was secure enough that it was later repurposed as the actual unique ID. Nowadays I think they issue one to every registered person (e.g. newborns).
> - where is this going to be made mandatory and under what circumstances will it be used against people?
We are talking about the government here, who has the monopoly of force. If you live in an authoritarian country where the government fucks over citizens, they will do it to you irrespective of you having a mandatory ID or not.
My actual main concern is the level of access private corporations have to the records tied to this unique ID. I am highly suspicious of corporations (e.g.: banks, healthcare providers, etc).
> Generally, yes. It simplifies dealing with government bureaucracy. Proving your identity is generally something you will have to do anyway, this is will just remove a bunch of hoops you have to go through.
This community, more than most, should understand in its bones that security and convenience are the ends of a see-saw. Convenience is five-character passwords, security is 2FA. Convenience is contactless payments, security is cash. Etc etc.
When you argue from convenience, I find it almost axiomatic that my security is going to take a beating.
Convenience and security are not opposite to one another, they are orthogonal. Inconvenient means to prove your identity may be terribly insecure, and still be inconvenient.
Ok. Well I gave a couple of examples of what I'm getting at.
So how can a convenient way to establish a digital identity also be secure? To run with the see-saw analogy, what element would of that process would make the process both more convenient and more secure? (make the see-saw rise at both ends).
This is just another pillar of fascist Britain. Developed mostly by multinational corporations in bed with government, hosted on private servers presumably under Cloud Act.
Labour has sold British citizens to corporations.
It's just so frakking disappointing for a there to finally be a huge labor landslide in 2024 then for their leaders to turn around and be ongoingly in bed just the same with right wing fascism. There was such a clear mandate for something different something better something good, and it's such a stark betrayal, such a vile repudiation than republicanism is ever going to be acceptable to see such a mass betrayal such a hard sell out. To Palantir grade fascist information overloading control that Kier would commit to. Ugly gross time line of no good. One would kind of hope winning elections might meet something better than right wing fascist over-control, but no, not here. Disgraceful.
Right wing are against this.
I hope the card will include an asymmetric digital signature from a government authority. That way, concerned members of the public will be able to verify anyone else’s Brit Card.
This would in turn enable citizen-operated checkpoints to verify the Britishness of food delivery drivers, mosque worshipers, suspected pedos, anyone who smells a bit too much like curry or garlic, or blokes what look funny like they aint from round ere.
Marvellous! /s
HARD eye-roll at the libertarian scaremongering about this basic, sensible idea to tame the identity mess.
* I have half a dozen different ID numbers for various things like NI, NHS, drivers license, tax etc
* I also have a dozen different GOV.UK logins for various services.
* When need to provide strong proof of identity to AWS to reset a root password, I have to go to a notary and pay £200 for a signature and stamp and then scan the paperwork into an email.
The antis, as always, are clutching at straws. At what point does this stop being acceptable because of libertarian vibes and scaremongering about 'Big Brother' -- especially when most of the rest of the world has had ID cards for decades?
I don’t own and refuse to purchase an iPhone or Android device. Where would that leave me? Fortunately I am not a UK citizen!
This effectively blocks development of mobile Linux as an alternative in the UK. It is already enough of a challenge to get people to try Linux phones without support for their favorite apps, and now it’s a requirement to own a US big tech pocket spy device? Absolutely absurd and Orwellian, and from the birthplace of Orwell no less.
Orwell was born in India. You should learn a little about him before saying everything is Orwellian
British India.
https://xkcd.com/927/
First they deliberately flood Europe and UK with illegal immigrants.
Then they demand that native citizens accept digital ID to solve that manufactured problem.
But truly their evil genius lies in the fact that a hefty part of natives will dismiss and mock everyone who tells them this as a conspiracy theorist.
Vote Labour respectively a "people's worker party", get this.
ID cards were already brought in under Labour about 20 years ago - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10164331.
They would have allowed EU travel without a passport, but sadly didn't take off. Initially they would have incorporated driving licenses too - lots of people already carry a driver's license.
Ironically I've of the reasons for not having them, back in the noughties, was because it would target minorities.
Now, the right wing are beying for blood over immigration, national IDs do seems like they would reduce the ability of illegal immigrants to work/collect benefits. Tories left a massive immigration problem, exacerbated by Brexit.
UK's (and USA's) aversion to state ID is quite amusing... and then solving everything that not-having-national-ID causes requires absurd solutions... but hey "ID is the worst thing ever"
In the UK, the individual never used to interact with their government at all. We value our privacy and lack of government interference, and everything was legal unless it was explicitly outlined as illegal. It was a high trust society.
Since being forced into globalisation and the concept of a border being essentially abolished (of course unless you talk about Ukraine, in which case billions can be spent on enforcing it), everything is flipped on its head. The terrorism act means that you have no right to silence, no right to legal representation and you are compelled to provide your passwords. The government now gets further and further involved with private matters, such as what content you engage with online (online safety act) and have plans to force ID to be linked to social media.
In my area, you cannot walk into a GP and request an appointment, they tell you to go away. You have to install an app, link it to your details, provide evidence of who you are, go on video, wait a few days, and then you are allowed to request an appointment (in a few weeks time). Bare in mind that healthcare is denied to nobody in the UK.
This year the Legal Aid Agency had a large cyber security breach [1]. People's names, financial information, and the fact that they apply for legal aid was breached. One of the few reasons you can get Legal Aid is being a domestic abuse victim.
> This data may have included contact details and addresses of applicants, their dates of birth, national ID numbers, criminal history, employment status and financial data such as contribution amounts, debts and payments. In some instances, information about the partners of legal aid applicants may be included in the compromised data.
This same government wants to collect and centralise the private details of all citizens in the UK. It makes me sick.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/legal-aid-agency-data-bre...
> Since being forced into globalisation
You mean the time when the UK concquered the whole world and formed "The empire on which the sun never sets"? Yeees... UK was forced into globalization xD
Alas, any country where "doing anything unless it's forbidden" results in a clusterf* that the USA is today, and it has nothing to do with trust or being "civilized"
As for breaches - you are aware that the civilized society can have national IDs - plastic one, issued by the state that are used for... well... IDentification that don't require uber-surviliance and centralizing data worse than in China? Just because UK does something stupid (and it's on a record roll past decades) doesn't mean that the concept of ID is wrong... For example in Poland and in Spain you can easily get doctors appointment just by showing up and waving your ID…
I don't know what western countries are thinking. The concept of an isolated nation state is fast approaching obsolescence. Very soon, it will be clear that it is meaningless to put strong restrictions on the free movement of people. And history shows that an emphasis on keeping people out is a precursor to the decline of an empire.
One thing I never understand: if people want to come to your country, that is a vote for the idea that you are doing something right. So, why not use for good? Why not designate a area of the country for the immigrants to initially settle in, using your laws and structures to provide them a better way to live? They are usually very hungry to work. Or, why not band up with other countries to establish refuge cities where the immigrants can initially settle and build new lives?
You never hear of the US etc investing in infrastructure in African countries, for e.g., it is always about a militarization effort to contain supposed terrorists.
Keeping people out betrays that your "success" is built on the back of exfiltrating resources from around the world and concentrating it in your countries, thus keeping the rest of the world poor.
There are many legal routes to immigration and seeking asylum. People choose to move illegally because they won’t succeed on the legal routes and know that once they’re in the country the chance of them being deported is pretty low.
The legal routes are also often strenuous, far too long lived, overly strict, and obtuse.
If you barely speak the language, it's not easy. Unfortunately many countries have made immigration so hard, in an effort to combat it, that they've done the opposite - people immigrate illegally because it has a higher success rate than doing it legally.
If I apply for X, Y, and Z and I'm denied, I'm fucked. But if I just move... And then figure it out later... That might work better.
And that's how we got into this mess. A lot of this anti-immigration legislation actually increases the incentives for illegal immigration.
Exactly, and one more thing: because of draconian immigration regimes, once people sneak in, they are extremely unlikely to move out until they get some sort of residence, which may never come. If it was easier to get in, people will come and go as needed, and you wouldn't have massive numbers of people coming and not leaving. There are many irregular immigrants that are stuck in their new countries for decades, unable to move anywhere else at all; many even die without seeing their homeland again.
In all countries there are posh, elite, nice areas, and yet you don't see everybody moving into those areas until there is no standing room. There is a natural equilibrium that is effective.
So overly tough immigration policies actually exacerbate the problem of illegal immigration in this way as well.
> But if I just move... And then figure it out later... That might work better.
Yes, that's the part that needs to be fixed.
It cannot be "fixed" without turning the country into a fortress.
Wow, this statement is so out of touch I don't even know where to begin to rebut it.
I, a software engineer with decades of experience, and now an entrepreneur having a small startup, with funds to live for years without burdening the public purse anywhere, specking virtually native level English, and having previously lived in the US for years, would still have a _very_ hard time immigrating to any western country right now, partly because I'm from the global south (I'm Ghanaian).
If you know of any western country where moving there, even temporarily, is as simple as applying with my information, let me know.