Mandatory Digital ID

[RedToothBrush]

Anyone spot the U-turn?

Digital ID would have meant a show down over sex / gender amongst other issues....

It has nothing to do with it.
The compulsory digital id is something that Blair tried and failed to bring in when he was PM hes also the same person who put the idea in starmers head. What has killed the digital id is the same arguments about draconian government overreach and abuse of power as last time. Blair/Stammer thought that they could put it through and use the boats crisis as a shield thankfully he was wrong and there's been even more push back than last time

This
plus cost would be 1.8 billion

It seemed sensible to me to go ahead but this country is embarrassing when it comes to anything like this when other countries see the benefits and happily accept

Red didnt say that the u-turn was anything to do with the sex, just that a controversy has been avoided.

Although, have they abandoned it completely or said it isnt going to be mandatory?

Anything this govt announces is likely to be u turned on, they seem to be incapable of making properly thought out decisions in the first place.

They would have tried their normal bollocks of 'mandatory ID but your ID can be whatever the fuck you feel like' so like the census it would have been performative and fantastically expensive and no fucking use of any kind.

Very like Labour in fact.

Yes I think they already did say that pretty much.

They've said that you wont need 1 to work they aren't going to be mandatory and basically scrapped it without directly admitting as much

It's also been a good example of this government's reverse Midas touch.

Yes, I know Blair has been pushing it for years, but I think the bigger selling point was that digital ID polled very well, and the government wanted a popular policy.

Then, as soon as Starmer announced it, support for digital ID went from +30 to -14.

There's probably a way to sell the policy, but not as a way of Labour expanding the surveillance state, because there's no way they would restrict themselves to the right-to-work stuff.

@Hoardasurass It's coming & the colour of the rosette won't matter at all. Pretty much the whole infosec industry is behind it & dislike it though I may on a personal level, I can see why.
Have you ever heard of Accelerationists? Not the kooky bloggers, the ones who are involved in eg; online animal torture rings, the extortion of sexual images from children, & IRL violence. Their desire to tear down Western civilsation makes the Queer/ Critical Theory crew look like a 1950s Conservative Association. Threats like those are only increasing.

This country doesn't take kindly to being made to prove their identity by the state. This is the third time (I think) Labour have tried this one (the first was an attempt to continue ID cards after WWII - the government was taken to court over it and lost). I am a social democrat/socialist economically but I know perfectly well that parties like Labour want to be able to control the population and this tendency has been worsened by neo-liberalism.
Digital ID is also open to hacking and I really don't want all my information in one convenient place so I can have my identity pinched.
Denmark has brought in digital ID by stealth, making it necessary to access government services and selling it as 'convenient'. But Denmark has ID cards anyway, so the population has already lost the war on that one.
Beware anything governments sell as 'convenient' for their population. They are alwasy after control.

I am of an age where ID is associated with war films, ive never been asked to prove my age and dont carry id around. My children are used to being id, even in shops. So digital id makes sense to them. So i can see it being a generation thing.

I think Starmer's excuse for digital id was unconvincing and the threat of not being able to work without it unreasonable given we have national insurance numbers.

He does have a gift of putting everyones backs up with everything he says.

Pretty much the whole infosec industry is behind it

Pretty much the whole of the free and open source software community is against digital ID, as are many information security professionals and pretty near every IT worker I know. We know how likely this crap is to be broken into and subverted.

You know the Post Office Horizon scandal was buggy software? That can and will happen again.

[Edit: it might not be easy to break into, but it's likely to be broken into. Data about your enemy's entire population is a really juicy prize for a hostile state-level actor.]

Passports don’t ask for sex

So nothing to indicate an ID card would have asked for sex

Red didn’t say much at all

On one hand the risk of ending up in a "papers, please" situation is not to be underestimated.

On the other hand, this is not the 1960s anymore. We do not live in an isolated utopia where we proud Brits never need to show any documents, like our pesky European cousins do.

We need to prove citizenship or right to live and work here every time we rent a property or start a new job.
In theory, passports are not compulsory; in practice, good luck proving citizenship without a passport. Driving licences (which not everyone has) and national insurance number do not prove citizenship.

Those who think ID cards are an overreach should think that it was precisely the absence of ID cards which allowed the Windrush scandal, ie the deportation of people who had every right to be here, including some who were citizens, but who lacked the documents to prove it. That scandal could NOT have happened in Spain France Germany Italy etc, precisely because they have ID cards. Food for thought.

Part of the problem with the Windrush scandal was that the Home Office had come up with capricious requirements which most Brits would have been unable to meet, like providing multiple proofs of address for each year going back decades. I think that's a worse overreach than an ID card system. But to each their own. Convincing Brits of the merits of ID cards is like convincing Texans about the soundness of gun control laws :)

Other countries don't have the mega-mega database that this government (and Blairs government) kept in insisting was "needed".

ID card - bring it on.
ID card with a database of all official and unofficial records available for everyone + dog to snoop on with added "AI" and flaky facial recognition - I'm good thanks.

Well, this is the thing. Passports - there's already a database. NI numbers - there's a database. GRCs, if they're still relevant - there's a database.

This annoys tidy-minded people like Tony Blair, because it's all a bit Department of Redundancy Department, but I think government can cope with a little redundancy.

Because the plan was never really to reduce redundancy, it was to have yet another enormous database, and my hesitancy comes partly from Labour's authoritarian tendencies and partly from the history of massive government IT projects.

Y'mean the free & open source software community that wasted so much of the last several years on driving out devs with the wrong opinions about men in women's changing rooms & helped crash Cloudflare a few weeks ago? You'll understand if I'm entirely unswayed by their shrieking.

Those are fair objections, "digital ID" is open to a number of definitions & Blair's approach was very "enthusiastic Humanities graduate omits second-order thinking".

Hadn't heard about this.

Good news, but I tend to agree it's probably about the unpopularity and logistics of the idea.

The Digital ID in question is a single sign-in to Government Services like HMRC rather than multiple sign-ins to different services, which is far more costly. The plan had been to include a compulsory sign-in for people starting work, but that has been put on hold.
I don't know why people are confusing it with the identity cards that are used in European and other countries.

It's not the existing databases that is the worry. If it was we are 40 years too late. And councils already used the investigatory powers to track down householders who put their bins out on the wrong day.

It was the clear intention to create a "super" database that linked every single official (and unofficial) database into one database to rule them all and give access to that database to any and all "public officials" that wanted access.

That is the database that they wanted to build. And still do. And have never been able to explain why.

I can remember when the first iteration of ID cards in the early 2000s was that they would only be issued to immigrants and students so the police could easily see if someone was here legally by asking for their ID card.

They could have introduced that 30 years ago. Indeed were urged too.

They sneakily gave SS access to everyone’s medical records in March for any spurious reason they can bullshit (usually that handy catch all that makes Brits throw themselves down in worship of the state’s intervention in their lives: “child protection”). You have zero right to a private family life in the UK already. There was no pushback on this at all and many deluded idiots welcomed it “if it can (dabs eyes) save one child…” Just like people blindly trusted the state about Covid and started tons of “Should I report my neighbour?” threads. There’s a very pro-surveillance and pro-police state contingent in the UK now.

So concerns about privacy are largely redundant with this digital ID. You’re already in “the system” if you ever went to a doctor about anything in your life. Nothing is private in the UK when you read the smallprint.

My main concern with this new digital ID is that it would need to be so utterly secure that the average IT technician wouldn’t be able to get into their own account. Forgetting whatever massive and onerous sign in details it wants would basically be impossible to sort out. Scammers and car wash operators would have a vested interest in getting hold of lots of ID logins so it would have to be more secure than the average person would tolerate.

That’s why I’m relieved it has been scrapped.

DWP and HMRC can also trawl your bank records.

Exactly this.