Any question answered...

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 and the LibDem/Con coalition that repealed it a few years later.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.