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Maybe politicians ought to be asking themselves how they transformed a country in which you almost never had to show ID to do anything [unless you were going abroad from an airport or ferry terminal] into one in which apparently ID cards are needed. You could open a bank account with nothing more than a gas bill until relatively recently IIRC, and society didn't collapse as a result.

The really depressing bit of this is that the problems which all the pointless ID checking stuff portends to solve are not being solved, and indeed seem to be getting worse. It's basically a displacement activity in the "make it look like we are trying to look like we are doing something" category.

Meanwhile, my accountant tells me that an 75 year old trustee of a charity for whom they are doing the accounts has just resigned because he's unable to fulfil the ID requirements the accountant has to impose on them.

One of the big fallacies of modern politics is that laws like this don't really cost anything beyond a little bit of inconvenience; actually they are steadily strangling the country to death.

Maybe politicians ought to be asking themselves how they transformed a country in which you almost never had to show ID to do anything [unless you were going abroad from an airport or ferry terminal] into one in which apparently ID cards are needed. You could open a bank account with nothing more than a gas bill until relatively recently IIRC, and society didn't collapse as a result.

It’s not just the UK though, it’s the same all over the developed world.

The reason is step by step actions and reactions to crime and terrorism.

People open accounts to send money to fund terror or drug dealing etc so governments insist on more protections to make it harder to open accounts. Crims and terrorists arrange for people to create fake IDs and addresses to get around the new rules so governments insist on stricter checks or controls and so on.

Added to how technology had changed with everything from bank accounts on your phone to fake AI people pretending to be real people to commit fraud etc there is a constant battle to keep ahead of the baddies.

People employ slave Labour trafficked on fake IDs etc so governments get demands to crack down understandably and so have to bring in more checks and controls.

Of course libertarians could say “let’s stop these controls and checks” but then I don’t want any complaining about drug dealing and terror attacks if it in some way affects them.

If we consider the July 7th bombings in London, can you tell me how these were enabled by terrorist financing, and are now made more difficult by the various identity checks mandated by law?

It would be interesting to see the details of how this happens in practice and how law changes make it harder.

How many more attacks would there have been if it was easier for terrorists to obtain bank accounts, money, IDs etc is more to the point.

And how are you going to try and reign in drug dealers and traffickers without controls on banking and ID?

It's a genuine question. I'm willing to be convinced.

But it seems like it's plenty easy for terrorists to obtain bank accounts because they're often normal people who have been radicalised and become terrorists. And drug dealers also seem to be quite successful in obtaining bank accounts by renting them from members of the public.

If you could make this argument to the powers that be then I’m sure TSE and anyone else involved in the finance world would be delighted to have all the AML rules etc removed as they are clearly unnecessary and don’t stop terrorism and crime. All these thousands of people have been wasting their time and huge sums of money bringing in compliance teams and procedures - they should have just listened to gut feels off the internet.

I am asking to be convinced and you're throwing insults at me. That's not really a good way to convince people.

I apologise if it seemed I was throwing insults at you, I wasn’t but can see why it might have appeared that way.

I don’t have the energy today to really get into the weeds of my argument as I’ve had a shitty virus all week and bored and fed up now. Largely I’ve spent a large part of a career having to sit through courses and talks etc re AML and financial crime - it’s very very frustrating but I have to admit that I do see the reasoning for it and have had very interesting clients offered up in my career who, my morals aside, would have been filtered out by the processes of thorough ID and background info.

I am far from a big state person but I’ve experienced living in a country where they have ID cards and was never asked to show once but they were very useful for many ordinary actions such as opening bank accounts and varied other things. I live in a place with a great and growing government hub where you go in with your ID and can do most of what you need to do online from paying taxes to various permit applications. I don’t see a huge problem with having a spin off where it provides a fail safe form of ID to cut down paperwork and bureaucracy.

I also feel that if there is suddenly some totalitarian govt in power in the UK it makes no odds if this or similar govs introduce ID cards or not, the new totalitarian one will be forcing it on you and scraping every bit of info.

Anyway, apologies again if I offended you with my earlier post.

My objection to ID cards is not what the government that introduces them can do, per se (Labour are for the most part incompetent rather than malign, though they do have their moments).

Do you want to gift an ID database to every future government that takes power though? Some of them, particularly the way the world is going, may have much worse intentions.

What’s on this database that the government doesn’t already know? Honestly?

Why make it easier for them and malign actors by collating it in one place?

Because it makes no difference

It absolutely does. Why wouldn’t it? Hacking one definitive source of data on identity is much easier than trying to find it through multiple sources.

The government already has such databases. It’s already in one place. The only difference is an API

No, but on the current foolhardy plans, they could potentially give Peter Thiel, an anti-democratic billionaire and one of the most dangerous people in the world, a huge amount of information on UK citizens

It'sJust madness, really.

I refuse to believe the likes of MI5 and GCHQ do not have such databases already. Almost everyone already gives the likes of Meta and Google more data than this almost every single day. It’s going to make no difference what’s so ever.

We’re tracked on a continuous basis , we have apps on our phones , passports, driving licences , etc and as soon as ID cards are mentioned it seems to set people off .

Not everyone has a smart phone or a driving licence. And my passport and driving licence remain at home. Can't remember the last time I used them. So no I am not tracked on a continuous basis by the state.

I used to be absolutely against ID cards until I move to Switzerland. Having the Carte des Etrangers/Ausslander Auschweiz (or something) was brilliant. Because you could only get it if you were an authenticated real person who had the right to live there it was all you needed for many things. It was better than a passport as it cut so many layers of crap when you were opening a bank account, changing your driving licence, proving who you were at the tax office etc it made life amazingly simple.

I never got stopped but had a doc that they trusted if the police and asked for my papers. I look like a typical Scandinavian so was less likely to but I was also part of a wide international group of friends and so, when the horribly racist Geneva police stopped my black or Asian (or frankly darker European friends) their ID card generally stopped it going to the point of them being arrested for looking a bit dark.

You couldn’t get a job without it, you couldn’t do anything technical without it and the only people who would have a problem with it being a requirement would be those whose interests were allied with allowing people who shouldn’t be in the country/ working to scoot around the law.

If you were an employer who employed someone without one then you got your deserts, you were a problem so deserved the punishment.

I can’t think of a reason why, if you are legally allowed to be in a country, working, using the resources, why you shouldn’t have a simple way of proving to anyone that you are ok.

Ask not what an ID card can do for you in the best of times, under a benevolent government. Ask what it could be used for in the worst of times, under a despotic government. IBM's well-documented role in the holocaust springs to mind.

Even if not appearing directly on the card, centrally collected and 'verifiable' metadata tied to your ID containing information about your ethnicity, religion, sexual identity and so forth, could be used against you in times to come, as governments have used it against undesirables in the past.

No.

Just no. Full stop. I have no faith in the state remaining, in perpetuity, a benevolent actor.

Less power in the hands of the state, not more.

My objection to ID cards is not what the government that introduces them can do, per se (Labour are for the most part incompetent rather than malign, though they do have their moments).

Do you want to gift an ID database to every future government that takes power though? Some of them, particularly the way the world is going, may have much worse intentions.

What’s on this database that the government doesn’t already know? Honestly?

They don’t have a single, easy to search list of everyone in the country.

Now what could go wrong with a list of where all the various kind of migrants live? In the hands of Reform run councils (under the Home Office plan, councils will have full access)?

Data processing by Palantir and Peter Fucking Thiel?

Strangely, every other country in the world, that has ID cards, doesn’t have that.

Incidentally, just been reading the BBC 'what we know' section on ID cards. Apparently, it'll be on people's phones.

I despise smartphones, and don't have one. At least, not yet. Maybe I'll end up being forced to get one thanks to this genius move.

I wonder just how much thought the government has given to people who are visually impaired and can't use a smartphone. None, I suspect.

A lot of visually impaired people do use smartphones, as accessibility software exists.

But it would be foolish to stop a programme because a tiny proportion of people would need some other method of accessing it. You do need those other methods sorting out though

Let's just not introduce ID cards. How about that as an idea?