So .. back in the day I was active in the no2id campaign against UK identity cards. Since then the UK has introduced mandatory ID and immigration status check r

So .. back in the day I was active in the no2id campaign against UK identity cards. Since then the UK has introduced mandatory ID and immigration status check requirements for banking, renting, employment, and voting .. but not issued any new forms of ID, apart from the short lived immigrant-only "Biometric residence permit". The ID question splits into two halves: 1) ID requirements: situations where you cannot proceed without presenting ID 2) ID issuance: issuing an ID to comply with (1) People here, and the thin liberal/libertarian side of UK politics, are quite against (2) because they think it will lead to (1). But it turns out to be very easy to impose (1)_in half-assed and inconvenient ways even without (2). We just got "identify yourself to use social media"! That's already happened, except the people you are identifying yourself to are random non-GDPR US data broker services which are almost certainly cc'ing US intelligence on a copy of all the faces you show them. (2) is where the real fight is, and now we've mostly lost that (because the public wants authoritarianism so long as it's used primarily against The Other), not having (1) becomes a matter of dealing with an inconvenient and broken pseudo-ID system where "utility bill" is a valid form of ID and organizations may require things that no longer exist like "original printed bank statement".