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This is bullshit. The Tories knew exactly how many people were coming to the UK, as they were issuing visas for them to come. They also can count the number of people who’d arrived and claimed asylum.
ID cards wouldn’t help any of this.
andyp-
Hi. Prior to 2021 I believe they didn’t have a handle on how many EU citizens had exercised the right to free moment and were resident, which put successive governments on the back foot responding to right wing arguments that there was too much strain on public services because of immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Obviously ID cards can’t undo Brexit retrospectively, but I wonder if it would have happened if we had had them from the early 00s.
And you’re entirely correct that for the last 3 years almost all immigration has been under the visa regime and will have been tracked, and the right to remain process should have documented most of the EU residents still here. So the argument for them isn’t as strong now. But I think I wanted to contribute to the discussion by positing that they can be helpful in protecting things we like.
h2o
Having ID would allow for much greater monitoring and control of immigration. The Tories never had a clear idea of how many immigrants were in the country because they'd put the kibosh on New Labour's ID card plans with the assistance of the Lib Dems way back when.
Having spent some time living in France and Spain, I can't say that having to carry ID would make me overly concerned. And I think if we had had ID cards then we probably wouldn't have gotten to Brexit. Given the choice again, think I'd much rather ID cards and technocratic tinkering with immigration numbers than performative nastiness by right-wing politicians morphing into actual physical nastiness in the street like we've seen the last few days.