I don’t find what either side is saying here very convincing.

Anti-ID “it will change our relationship with the state, cause irreversible damage to our civil liberties and fail to deter illegal immigration”. They say it will lead to “frequent identity checks as we navigate our daily lives”. That last part isn’t true, for sure. I’ve lived in a country with a digital ID and you had to verify your identity a few times a year at most - submitting taxes, opening bank accounts etc. They’re exaggerating here.

The pro-ID group is even less convincing, if that can be imagined. Tony Blair, former PM has been batting for this for ages - Digital ID is the Disruption the UK Desperately Needs (https://institute.global/insights/tech-and-digitalisation/to...). And it all sounds like snake oil to someone who is even a little tech inclined. He’s promising all kinds of things, like the UK will see dramatically higher growth. I’ve seen India before and after Aadhaar. It helped, but it didn’t fundamentally remake the economy. UPI did do that, but it’s not dependent on Aadhaar.

And the government wants to show they’re cracking down on illegal immigration so this is an easy win. But it will take more than 5 years to roll out and by then the PM would be out of a job. Even if it could be rolled out to 70 million people in 2 years (that’s 100k people per day), it wouldn’t have all these incredible benefits. As for illegal immigration, it would catch a few but not all.

The technical issue is that while you can issue everyone an ID, it would take much, much longer to make that ID the primary key in every database. The NHS ID has existed forever, and it is still not possible to query all the healthcare information associated with an ID. (This is why the NHS can’t estimate how much a patient costs). Adding a second ID doesn’t make that nearly unsolvable problem solvable.

Almost no one is being realistic or well informed. I just don’t know how you can have a political discussion when everyone is exaggerating like this.

If the UK rolled out a system like Aadhaar, it wouldn’t be earth shattering. It would take many years, it would have several hiccups along the way, take way longer than expected, but it would get over the line eventually. And it would make a few admin tasks smoother, certainly. It would reduce some kinds of fraud slightly. And that’s about it. No one’s civil liberties would be destroyed.

To end on a lighter note, the political comedy Yes Minister covered the idea of introducing a universal ID in the 1980s. Political suicide, the minister was advised. https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE. Thank god the UK is no longer in the EU, so Brussels can no longer force a compulsory ID on British people. Downing Street can take all the credit for this one.

Perhaps the recent Banquet of Oligarchs in the UK, the recent age verification (tracking) law, and the recent deals with Palantir, etc, suggest what this is really about.