> Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo. That can definitely be a problem, but it'

> Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo. That can definitely be a problem, but it's also a problem with more strict identity systems, where certainly in my experience slipping in "legal limbo" can be just as easy if not easier, albeit under different circumstances. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 – there's a lot more detail to that by the way I won't bore you with, but eventually the easiest "solution" was to just leave the country. While British-style systems are somewhat chaotic and messy and clearly imperfect, on balance I think they're profoundly better than strict registers. What was it again, "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"? If you try to be air-tight about these sort of things you're going to end up excluding a lot of non-fraudulent people, and it's better to have a bit of fraud. Another important factor is that a lot of the Windrush generation weren't immigrating so much as British citizens moving from one part of the country to another part of the country. I believe that was more or less the situation legally, but that's also how many felt as they were raised to be British; if you listen to people talk about their childhood in Jamaica and whatnot then they were raised and always thought of themselves as British (whether the white people in Britain also saw them as such is a different matter – rivers of blood etc.). A bit of a pedantic point perhaps, but I do think it matters and is an important reason why people didn't have much documentation, because would you keep detailed documentation if you were moving from Glasgow to Bristol?