Any question answered...

Except Northern Ireland did introduce voter ID in 2002.

Our Driving Licences are de-facto ID cards, you could always simply issue a provisional DL to everyone at 16.

[poorly researched stats removed]

you have a card that arrives in the post that you are meant to show when you vote

No, it's just a confirmation that you are registered and tells you where the polling station is. Edit: I suppose you are encouraged to take it with you, but that just speeds up ticking you off the register.

Also, my opinion is that if you wanted to commit voting fraud, you'd probably exploit postal voting, which no longer requires any particular justification, and would bypass any in-person ID checks.

if you wanted to commit voting fraud, you'd probably exploit postal voting

That's usually how it's done, for efficiency rather than simply because it's less secure than voting in person. One householder can complete dozens of postal votes for real or imaginary members of his household, while personation at the polling station can be done only once or twice before detection becomes all but certain.

Except Northern Ireland

As I said, they have a unique culture :)
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/voting-fraud-in-northern-ireland-has-been-going-on-for-years-says-former-electoral-office-chief-35827669.html

bit late to this now...

I suppose being an island nation there is the thing that if you make some attempt control who comes in, mostly everyone you come across who's already here is probably 'allowed' to be here. So we don't need papers to prove it.

As for being who you say you are - that's not required very often. You can change your official name quite easily in the UK anyway, and lots of people go by nicknames or other unofficial names.

I read something about passports (as tied to national identity, rather than just letters of safe passage) kind of petering out as international travel became more common in late C19th across Europe, but that changing with WW1. I think basically the rest of Europe then kept compulsory ID after that, but the UK didn't. I'm not an expert by any means, but the ID that was brought in for WW1 here was maybe more to do with conscription? It isn't often mentioned, anyway. ID cards were brought in again in 1939 and hung around until the mid 1950s.

It was Labour, not the Conservatives, who brought them in again in 2006(?) and the LibDem/Con coalition that repealed it a few years later. They were trialled in Manchester and promoted to young people across the country. It was £30, not £80 - but that's still twice as much as the kind of proof-of-age ID that most young people have. And your info went on a National Register.

Beyond the issue of cost and whether the government can do large-scale IT:

• There's a long-standing libertarian leaning that means people resent being forced to prove they are who they say they are.
  
• Many of the objections were not so much around identity, as the creeping scope of the cards - that they would be tied to your ability to access all sorts of everyday things, welfare, education, finances.
  
• The database would be open to abuse and increases unnecessary surveillance and information gathering (although this is still a problem even without the register/cards).
  
• In the 2006 version it was a fineable offence to not keep the register updated with your personal details - which would tend to affect certain groups of people disproportionately.
  
• There would be too much reliance on something which inevitably can be forged or obtained by those with the inclination, and which would be prone to error whatever the technology.
  
  

Every so often someone still says we should have them, and "if you have nothing to hide" then what's the problem? But it's not like in countries that have them, all the problems they are supposed to address disappear. I don't know, that's not a great argument. But we don't have them, and we don't really need them.

you have a card that arrives in the post that you are meant to show when you vote

No, it's just a confirmation that you are registered and tells you where the polling station is. Edit: I suppose you are encouraged to take it with you, but that just speeds up ticking you off the register.

I don't take the card with me, I just remember the number on it (since the list they check is ordered by that number not by name or address). This speeds up everything, plus it helps me shrug at the tellers outside who try and collect the cards (so they can make and sell lists of people who are active voters - not all of them are doing this).

Voting in the UK isn't anonymous at first, but the records linking voter number and unique ballot paper number are supposed to be destroyed once they are happy that there has been no fraud at that polling station.

Our Driving Licences are de-facto ID cards, you could always simply issue a provisional DL to everyone at 16.

I got a provisional as a teenager so I had age/photo-ID. It eventually expired. I kept using it but it got turned down with increasing frequency (despite it proving that I was at least 27 for it to expire). I no longer need to prove my age.

re. voter fraud, I too thought that it was largely through exploiting postal votes.
I think it's a major problem for the people it disenfranchises, especially as they might otherwise have little control of their lives. But the problem with trying to get rid of it at the polling station or as part of the voting process (registering for postal vote etc) is that such measures tend to reduce voter turnout and make the problem worse.

The thing with the proof of ID and citizenship and so on, is that while in general, people are quite keen to push back against it, we 'allow' it to be compulsory for non-citizens (someone correct me but I think both EU and non-EU have ID cards).
It also leads to a kind of dilemma that if we don't regularly need proof of citizenship, what then if someone challenges your right to be here and access services?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/10/denied-free-nhs-cancer-care-left-die-home-office-commonwealth

In practice where it comes up is employers and landlords ask for proof of residency/ that you are permitted to work - which usually means a passport. Edit: just checked and they can accept UK birth certificate instead.

This speeds up everything, plus it helps me shrug at the tellers outside who try and collect the cards (so they can make and sell lists of people who are active voters - not all of them are doing this)

For more marginal constituencies they try and collect these so they know who has voted so later in the day they can go and knock on doors to remind people to vote (for them).

It also leads to a kind of dilemma that if we don't regularly need proof of citizenship, what then if someone challenges your right to be here and access services?

The solution to this is to get the state out of the business of providing things which are the proper domain of the private sector, not further travel down the Road to Serfdom

Hmmm, I'd rather keep profits out of the providing of things which are the proper domain of the public sector.

I don't follow.
fwiw I'm against ID cards. I just think that the Brits have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the rights of non-Brits.
I was highlighting that the situation of people who have lived here for decades - either EU citizens or since the 50s/60s from the former Commonwealth - now being asked to prove something which they have never needed to prove, so have no documentation of proof - is one to note (and seemingly wasn't a significant thing 5 years ago). The solution (for me) is to get rid of the requirement for documentation - if you have lived here for a long time, particularly if you have worked here and paid taxes, it's really quite obvious.
What's the private sector connection?

things which are the proper domain of the public sector

The division in politics is over what that set consists of. For my money, Hayek is a bit too much of a socialist :) In any case, it is not necessary for private sector to mean the extraction of profit. If a not for profit health insurer (or school, or library, or bicycle factory or any other of myriad things the communists think are too important to be left to the choice of citizens) does a better job than a for profit one, the former will put the latter out of business.

What kind of good aspiring totalitarian state doesn't ID their citizens by camera recognition? ID cards, pfft

What's the private sector connection?

For privately provided goods and services, the supplier doesn't need to know who you are, he just needs to know you are going to pay the bill. When access to publicly provided goods and services is contingent on either citizenship or right of abode, the question of whether the user's bill is going to be paid becomes a question of identity rather than creditworthiness.

...but I like the NHS. I don't want to have to prove I'm going to pay the bill :/

What kind of good aspiring totalitarian state doesn't ID their citizens by camera recognition? ID cards, pfft

You have to tie the face to a name in the first place, doing it by forcing all the serfs to provide references is a good way to let them know their place in the scheme*, although with ubiquitous electronic surveillance it's probably more accurate to derive the identity from metadata than to rely on the serfs being honest about who they are when they go for their mandatory induction.

*Lunar House is where we punish people for not being British. National ID means punishing people in the same way for being British.

In any case, it is not necessary for private sector to mean the extraction of profit

True, but it almost always does, to the detriment of the majority of people and comes with a bunch of socialised costs not borne by the private companies.

I like the NHS. I don't want to have to prove I'm going to pay the bill

As long as there are people in the country who don't have the right to access the NHS but do try to do so fraudulently, you are going to have to prove that somebody is going to pay the bill. If your ID means the government will pay the bill, then the way you'll have to prove to the NHS that your bill is going to be paid is by proving your ID to them.

comes with a bunch of socialised costs not borne by the private companies

That's a failure caused by state capture by large corporations, it's not inherent in a free market

Well, that's different from suggesting that healthcare is better provided privately (or I'm still missing the link, I am a bear of little brain).
Firstly, on what should the right to access the NHS depend - citizenship alone? Or should it also extend to those who have lived here for most of their lives, regardless of whether or not they've paid taxes.
Secondly, is the number of

people in the country who don't have the right to access the NHS but do try to

significant? Reports of fraud in the NHS don't really mention that - they focus on patients falsely claiming exemptions, staff falsely claiming work done, and contractors being overpaid. Let alone PFI which is not fraud but is nonetheless a travesty. There seem to be much bigger fish to fry when it comes to paying the bills of the NHS.

I suppose - in my opinion - 'tightening up' on who is accessing the NHS is pretty irrelevant if you care about the cost of national healthcare.

that's different from suggesting that healthcare is better provided privately (or I'm still missing the link

The link is that if you don't want National ID, you need to stop expecting the state to provide everything. Things which are the proper remit of national government are provided to everybody who is here, regardless of their status - things like defence, courts, environmental protection. As soon as you restrict a service to only certain classes of resident or visitor, you need to identify them.

I suppose - in my opinion - 'tightening up' on who is accessing the NHS is pretty irrelevant if you care about the cost of national healthcare.

The amount lost to what is popularly called healthcare tourism is, as you intimate, easily lost in the noise within the NHS budget. It's not necessarily the case that it would continue to be a financial irrelevance if you threw the doors wide open to all-comers, since there must be some deterrent effect provided by the limited checks we do now and the pursuit for payment of those caught defrauding the NHS. Even if the economics say healthcare tourism is irrelevant, the politics might say you have to do something about it if the small losses have a material effect on the willingness of taxpayers to keep funding socialised healthcare.