It gives me no pleasure to be right on this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
The police can and will request this information from you, digital ID or not. If you have actual beef with digital ID, present it.
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?
So why do we need this digital ID then?
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.
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)
Edit: btw this proposal already has something which can be criticised: ID on mobile phones… so probably they’d lock everybody into a duopoly.
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.
> 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.
Or, proposal B: don't build the nuke.
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*?
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.
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.
If anything, Brexit has exacerbated control over immigration as we can no longer access shared information with e.g. France.
'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?