Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

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.

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.

At the same time, I wonder how will they deal with people wearing burkas, masks, balaclavas etc

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Welcome to your future.

This ignores the fact that most of Europe and Asia already have national IDs

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...