2020 is the reason I am very strongly opposed to digital ID. In an attempt to appear to be "beating the virus", the government brought in one absurd rule after another: rule of 6, no travelling between tiers, no buying non-essential stuff, no exercise for more than an hour (not an official rule, but everyone believed it), we might have to kill your cats, etc.
Most of this was unenforceable: the government knew it, and the public knew it. The system relied on people being sufficiently frightened to obey: and boy, did the government frighten the public. (That's an important difference between our government and others: people hold other countries up as a beacon of how we should have done it: stricter lockdowns, nothing open at all, fewer deaths, but none of those other countries frightened and infantilised their citizens as much as our government did.)
In the latter half, when we had the hugely expensive test-and-trace app, and the requirement to "check in" everywhere you went: as far as I am concerned, this was the dress rehearsal for a future digital ID, and has already made headway in softening us up for it. Nobody is saying anything about it now, because politicians are trying to pretend lockdown didn't really happen, and attention is being cunningly deflected towards "those immigrants stealing your work, doctors appointments, houses etc", but I do foresee that digital ID could be used to enforce things like lockdowns: not necessarily for a pandemic, but for a totally different cause, such as "we need to show we're doing something about climate change: quick, press the button so that people can no longer travel more than a mile to go shopping". By then, we'd be in the habit of "checking in" everywhere we go: shops, workplaces, and maybe even friends' houses, without even thinking about it, because we'd been nudged to accept it. Note the similarity with the ways lockdowns and digital IDs are being sold to us: to protect us from an external threat: the virus, and immigrants respectively. I do foresee our movement being restricted by our digital IDs to "protect" us from climate change: the seeds of fear of this have been sown for a long time. (Maybe climate change is a reality, but it's highly typical that the government would tinker round the edges to appear to be tackling it, like preventing people travelling for shopping, instead of the world targeting far more polluting causes.) And again, 15-minute cities is probably the warm-up for much bigger restrictions later. By then, the idea that digital ID was supposed to prevent "immigrants and small boats" would long be forgotten - perhaps from not preventing them.
Call me unrealistic, call me a tinfoil hatter, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I do foresee this kind of thing happening sooner than we think, and digital ID would be the first step towards making this a reality. Lots of people (including politicians) thought we could never have a lockdown: that's something other countries did. Then we did, and as the absurdity of benches being taped up to not being able to visit our dying relatives sunk in while Boris partied, we wondered "how did we get here?". This is why we must RESIST. An incidentally, lots of people probably thought Trump was bluffing when he talked about tariffs, and they would never happen. Those who voted for him are now seeing that he wasn't bluffing.
Yes, we do already have many systems which could be considered "oppressive to law-abiding people": widespread CCTV, and probably a lot of anti-terrorism legislation which theoretically allows people to be detained for a long time if the police "suspect" that they are a terrorist, with little or no evidence: it's just that we've moved on to a different scary buzzword, "immigration". Lockdown was enforced under the Public Health Act, rather than any new legislation, so the possibility was always there: it needed the public to be frightened enough to accept it. And yes, these systems could be utilised by a malevolent dictator Nigel Farage, on a whim. But what we don't want to do is to make it even easier for the government to oppress ordinary people, in the name of protecting us from some external "threat". This is why I think we need to be exceptionally careful about handing the government oppressive tools on a plate.