The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.

Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation.

In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account.

The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live.

It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.

In all fairness, the “immigration” story is likely just a convenient spin on a more realistic goal of state surveillance on it’s own citizens.

I don’t think so, no. This is how it works today: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work

If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.

If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.

Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).

Of course a digital id doesn’t prevent illegal immigration.

Proper border checks prevent illegal immigration.

The digital ids are introduced for other reasons - this is something Tony Blair has been pushing for a long time.

If anything it could help legal immigration. There's a bootstrapping issue where you need a utility bill to open a bank account and a bank account to get paid and get paid to pay the utility bill. And also need all 3 to rent a property to live in. You can choose the right providers to work around that with just your passport, but that involves a bit of work and research.

No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem

It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke).

It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke.

Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior.

Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself.

Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.

Every job I’ve worked in the last 10 years has asked to see my passport so they can check I’m allowed to work in this country. I expect employers who aren’t checking don’t care, and digital ID isn’t going to change this.

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?

Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.

> I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true?

Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.

I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system.

> If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.

Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?

It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.

I’m not sure how about illegal immigration but, coincidentally, it’s really handy for tracking people’s online activity when combined with the Online Safety Act.

You know, coincidentally.

(Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)

I can think of several, which problem were you thinking of?

In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work.

Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem.

Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system.

So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad.

And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle.

Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc.

So yeah, which problem did you have in mind?

It doesn't solve any immigration problem at all. It's just a dumb excuse for a bunch of bullshit.

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Very well said

As an American it seems to me that the UK government insists on finding a way to upset all sides on any given issue like illegal immigration. If anything it's the singular and unique skill of Whitehall.

The small boats crossing are a small fraction of immigration. Some Google number claims 37k people got in this way in 2024. With net migration hovering around 0.8-1m people per year, arrivals must be well above this number (surely some people are leaving, making the net number smaller). But even then, this is less than 5% of the legal immigration, and probably a lot less than that.

I'm not saying it doesn't need addressing or isn't serious, but I think it's a convenient topic for politicians. It's a lot more media-friendly than the arrivals queue at Luton Airport. And the illegal immigrants aren't the ones putting pressure on NHS, housing market or train driver unions.

“Nothing much seems to be working” because the government is completely unserious about stopping the boats and is unwilling to do any of the things that might actually work.

They could stop them in a week if they actually wanted to.

And "become customers" means it will become mandatory to sign away your rights to a foreign corporation by agreeing to their terms of service. This kind of abuse of power is a clear example of why the UK needs a real constitution.

Hah this is the UK. No, it'll be optional to begin with to make people like you asking important questions seem like a whacko. Then once they use propaganda to make people opt into it, and it reaches mass adoption, then it'll quietly be made mandatory - or extremely annoying not to have it

There was a big backlash and they eventually caved in and cancelled the scheme when the government changed.

I lived in South London at the time and sent a letter to my MP to protest about the creation of a database state and increased surveillance, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state.

About two months later I got a form response that started "Don't worry, it's not just an ID card, there will be a huge database behind it!"

Thanks. Way to show you didn't even read what I wrote.

I think in the intervening years that relationship has already fundamentally changed though. Privacy from government in most western countries seems to be something of a fading memory, it would be hard to make those same arguments in 2025.

In the UK it has never been compulsory to carry ID, even when driving.

At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy.

And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive and don't travel, some folks just get by without.

So if there is a requirement to have a Britcard, and to present your 'Britcard' when stopped for any reason, then it is definitely a change.

I look forward to Parliament’s long-worded “no.” These petitions often seem more about managing dissent than enabling meaningful change.

When the cops stop you on the street and ask for your digital ID and you can't show it to them, they'll take you to a deportation center. #PapersPlease

The same way other things "help" migration. By making life very difficult for you if you aren't a proper citizen. I imagine the outcome for this would be to make it nearly impossible to do anything with the government or doing anything you might need an ID for, especially online. Some citizens will probably suffer too, but it is a price the government is willing to pay.

IDs don't help because the moment the ID is useful the government will find a way to hand them out to migrants.

Glory to Arstotzka.

You appear to have buried the point you’re trying to make here

My prediction is that it will soon be a requirement for all websites and apps with user-generated content to require authentication with the UK government's Digital ID OAuth provider and that requirement will include linking the user's username to their Digital ID. It won't require websites and apps to pay a third-party provider to check users' identity, so the UK government can argue that it doesn't place a disproportionately burdensome cost on smaller websites and apps.

After the UK implements this, other western countries will follow. For example, here in Australia, it's a simple solution to the under-16 social media ban which is about to come into effect. The bill was given deliberately weak verification requirements so it didn't seem too big-brother, but I'd bet real money that there's already an amendment in the works to tie it to digital ID after they discover what everyone already knows (i.e. that it'll be easily bypassed), followed by another amendment to tie the digital ID to site/app ID, for online safety reasons of course.

In time, websites/apps may offer your government's digital ID as an alternative to their in-house identity provider. If this becomes globally ubiquitous, many of them will stop maintaining their own authentication and rely solely on government ID providers. The identity provider you use will depend on where you are, so VPNs will become useless.

This was all inevitable from the day the internet opened up to everyone. Governments have an insatiable desire for power and limitless paranoia about threats to their power.

"But it’s not just “online comments” as Yaxley-Lennon seems to imply. A police officer quoted deep within the article explains that these acts include “any form of communication,” and can relate to “serious domestic abuse-related crimes.” "

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...

Yeah, not really online posts though is it.

Administrative detections live and well.

You aren't required to show your social security card to your employer. You aren't even required to have the physical card for almost all purposes. It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.

https://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/assets/EN-05-10553.pdf

They have a couple “numbers”, but not a id “card” besides a passport (which only citizens get, not permanent residents). ID cards are pretty standard across EU.

We have a “national insurance number” used for tax purposes but it’s just a number that you fill in in forms; no-one asks to see the cards. I’m not sure they even issue the physical cards anymore? I lost mine a long time ago.

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Andy French and I applaud you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3H_peKI6R0

Right wing are against this.

ID cards were already brought in under Labour about 20 years ago - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10164331.

They would have allowed EU travel without a passport, but sadly didn't take off. Initially they would have incorporated driving licenses too - lots of people already carry a driver's license.

Ironically I've of the reasons for not having them, back in the noughties, was because it would target minorities.

Now, the right wing are beying for blood over immigration, national IDs do seems like they would reduce the ability of illegal immigrants to work/collect benefits. Tories left a massive immigration problem, exacerbated by Brexit.