EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

What good reasons?

But yes agreed it's due to doing this afterwards. Still 100 million got used for a no deal Brexit campaign, and they didn't bother posting a letter about this to all UK addresses.

What good reasons?

This is something I've had a bit of an awakening on recently. When the Tories tried to bring in compulsory ID cards we all pushed back against it - Orwell, big brother, etc., and they backed away. That felt like a good reason at the time.

However those cards would've enabled quite a lot of the nonsense that Farage and his ilk talked, especially the stuff about 'open borders' and 'not knowing who's here' and so on, to be challenged effectively.

Same reason there was so much opposition to ID cards. There's a real "civil liberties" streak amongst Anglos that you often don't see elsewhere. There are benefits to this (access to the health services is much easier here than other places) and negatives (it becomes the duty of individuals to prove things rather than the state's duty to keep records of them).

Sorry to hear that.

It's been very stressful for many people. I hope they feel ok now.

thanks. yeah, i think they are ok now.
she now has a physical card which says she is entitled to live in the uk (which is part of the windrush thing as i understand it)

we have so many europeans working in our office - i feel like apologizing to them daily for this fucking shitstorm (i voted remain obvs!)

my wife can get dual uk/italian nationality so we're looking into that currently as well.

You can have a registration system where you get a government services number with very limited information recorded without mandatory ID

The irony is that civil liberties in the UK are quite poor in some aspects, I do disagree myself with mandatory ID.

You can have a registration system where you get a government services number with very limited information recorded without mandatory ID

Of course you can. There are many versions of this already implemented on a per-service basis (NI, Passports, NHS, council tax). But requiring people to register their residence within n months of living somewhere for a centralized database is seen to be something less about services and more about surveillance by many.

However those cards would've enabled quite a lot of the nonsense that Farage and his ilk talked, especially the stuff about 'open borders' and 'not knowing who's here' and so on, to be challenged effectively.

Would they though? Wouldn't the implementation of ID cards have been just as incompetently handled as settled status and everything else. I think a lot of the resistance was because people did not trust that they wouldn't be mis-used by government, but also because they didn't trust that they wouldn't become some public-private commercial interests nightmare. Anglo civil liberties or not, there would be a lot less issue if people thought it would be done competently in a carefully limited capacity.

Aye. Civil service/institutional culture has a lot to do with this. There are countries where the population trust administrators with this kind of thing and even some countries where the administrators deserve it. In the UK, both public and private sector have a pretty shitty attitude with regard to information, protective of information that should be shared, careless of the information/privacy rights of individuals.

Seen is the word here.

The government already shares data freely with little oversight, facial recognition trials don't get oversight but when this gets brought up its panic time.

The NHS England is planning to sell all data to companies, anonymisation is probably not accurate.

I'd be all for much more oversight, in Estonia where the government is quite far in e-government there is a lot of oversight and trust.

Here trust is very low, they'd need to start by fixing the lack of control and ensure proper access controls on data.

I have to put up with the crappy EUSS digital system one of the reasons to attempt citizenship.

It sucks, I think it's important to spread the word everyone must apply and there is help, the non xenophobic brexiters may be happy to do that took?

Good luck with the dual! Plenty of paperwork from what I heard.

They (Farage etc) would just have insisted that the ID cards only told you who that person was - verified / sponsored by the govt. That they didn't confer or confirm citizenship.

They might have been right - I can't remember originally whether they were meant to say any more than ID of the holder.

Seen is the word here.

That's why I used it.

I'm not making a normative claim one way or the other. BUT, without saying it's the better system, and moving beyond issues of civic trust, I will say that there is something nice about the UK system, where I don't need a "person code" to get a mobile phone, or open a bank account, or book a doctors appointment, or get a discount rail card, or collect a parcel at the post office, or... (all legit examples in Finland, which the Estonian system has much in common with).

Having said that, I'd rather people not have to worry about being deported.

I thought ID cards were a Gordon Brown thing, not a Tory thing?

There are many good arguments for them I think, but it’s political suicide to champion them in the UK for sure.

I imagine the National Insurance card could have a photograph and an address added to it, in order that it resemble the driving licence - which is the UK's de-facto ID card.

It predates Brown from memory - a bit hazy but wasn't it was after 911 they became an idea that Blair went after.

Initial attempts to introduce a voluntary identity card were made under the Conservative administration of John Major, under the then Home Secretary Michael Howard. At the Labour party conference in 1995, Tony Blair demanded that "instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat in our local communities."[13] It was included in the Conservative election manifesto for the 1997 general election, but Labour won that election.

Then they did it anyway in 2001 after 9/11

In response a federated digital identity system was created where commercial organisations could vouch for your identity and the government would pay them for saying you were who you said you were in order to access various government services. A good chunk of those companies were not domestic. It was technically and organisationally complex and got a bit of a panning by the public accounts committee. Some of this was fair, some less so but the upshot of it all is it never really took off for a whole range of reasons and cost us many many millions. Meanwhile, ID cards exist in the form of the biometric residence permit issued to foreign nationals.
Basically it's all fucked up and I could rant about it at length.

Nothing compared to the IT consultants on well over £1k a day working on universal credit. As far as I'm aware, most of the people working on that are contractors working to a day rate that would make your eyes bleed. Welcome to tech in government.

The national ID card thing was EU in origin. The main objective being compatibility with the new border control systems that were being built at the time.

If we'd gone with ID cards, Brexit would have been a tiny bit easier from a border control perspective.

When the Tories tried to bring in compulsory ID cards we all pushed back against it

Yeah, as a forrin I always saw the left and liberal resistance against the ID card scheme as a collective case of the genetic fallacy; if the Tories want it it must be bad.
A centralised citizen registry would have been a perfect baseline against which one could measure any number of social ills. The ones that immediately come to (my) mind would be homelessness and unemployment. In the UK, it seems perfectly possible for a homeless person to gradually fall out of every registry and eventually not exist in an official capacity at all.

A centralised citizen registry

Yeah what could go wrong.

Yeah, as a forrin I always saw the left and liberal resistance against the ID card scheme as a collective case of the genetic fallacy; if the Tories want it it must be bad.
A centralised citizen registry would have been a perfect baseline against which one could measure any number of social ills. The ones that immediately come to (my) mind would be homelessness and unemployment. In the UK, it seems perfectly possible for a homeless person to gradually fall out of every registry and eventually not exist in an official capacity at all.

When they tried to bring them in I would've argued vociferously with you on everything you've said. With the benefit of hindsight, I agree with it all.

if the Tories want it it must be bad.

Blair favoured it and also encountered push back. The core opponents have been against it no matter which party is in power.

it seems perfectly possible for a homeless person to gradually fall out of every registry and eventually not exist in an official capacity at all.

True. For some people, being largely off the grid and their interactions with it not all being joined up is part of the point, or at least something they prefer. I don't think you'll find the core of protest against ID cards among rough sleepers, but you won't find universal approval of the idea there either.