by William Yarwood, media campaign manager and Shimeon Lee, policy analyst
The government has announced that it is once again pursuing the implementation of mandatory ID cards. It’s become a hot topic of debate and the TPA office has been running through the pros and cons of the policy. The following blog hashes out our debate with our media campaign manager, Will, arguing against them and our policy analyst, Shimeon, providing the case for.
Will:
If you want a good litmus test for a bad idea, you only need to look at who is backing it. In the case of digital ID, the names say it all: Tony Blair and William Hague. Two men who belong firmly in the dustbin of history, not in the business of telling freeborn Britons how they should live. Their calls for a new system of digital identification should make the country queasy, because once again we are being asked to surrender our liberties for the convenience of officials who have spent their entire careers building bloated bureaucracies.
What makes the debate around digital ID so interesting is the sheer breadth of opposition it has provoked. From libertarians to conservatives to socialists, from the Tories to Reform to Jeremy Corbyn and the Liberal Democrats, the rejection has been broad, instinctive and quite determined. One commentator put it well when they spoke of the “natural and ancient revulsion of the English against an overweening state.” That captures the feeling perfectly. At the heart of this debate lies a truth we should never forget: in Britain, the citizen does not answer to the state. It is a right for a freeborn Englishman to walk through his own country without being forced to produce papers on demand.
Supporters of digital ID know this instinct runs deep, which is why they dress up their scheme in the language of efficiency and modernisation. We are told it will make life simpler, help join systems up, and save time and money. But this is a carefully constructed smokescreen. It has little to do with efficiency and everything to do with control. If ministers were serious about efficiency, they would be cutting back the bloated quango state and fixing failing services, not creating vast new databases designed to monitor the population. What they are actually proposing is the slow creation of a checkpoint society, where everyday activities such as visiting the GP, opening a bank account or even popping down to the pub could become conditional on producing a digital pass. The borders we expect at airports would be replicated inside our own country.
Shimeon:
The debate around compulsory ID comes down to one fundamental question: Should a country know who is within its borders? If the answer to this straightforward question is not ‘yes’, then any enforcement system will be built on sand.
Here is an alarming fact. No one has any idea how many illegal migrants there are in the country. Estimates put the figure at anywhere from 120,000 to nearly ten times that. That means hundreds of thousands of people accessing public services and working in the shadow economy, while taxpayers pick up the bill.
Make no mistake, the people that benefit most from a lack of compulsory ID are not privacy minded individuals. If you drive or travel abroad or vote, you are already required to provide your information to the state. Compulsory ID is about standardising this rather than collecting new information, so that the law can be better enforced against people here illegally - who are the real beneficiaries of the status quo.
Will:
Once an ID card system exists, its reach will inevitably expand. After all, that is the nature of government power. Already, digital ID has been floated as a solution to terrorism, immigration and even fixing potholes. The idea that bar-coding Britain could solve such problems is laughable, but the temptation for governments to find new justifications for intrusive tools is relentless. Once the infrastructure is there, mission creep is not a possibility but a certainty. It will not stop with proving who you are; it will morph into a catch-all instrument of control, easily linked to facial recognition or other surveillance technologies.
The risks go beyond liberty also. A mandatory digital ID would place the details of the entire adult population on a single database, which would be an irresistible target for hackers and hostile regimes. We have already seen repeated cyber-attacks against government systems exposing sensitive personal information, such as hundreds of passwords linked to government departments leaked on the dark web, and the public is rightly concerned. Polling by Big Brother Watch shows that almost two-thirds of Britons do not trust the government to keep their data secure, and they are right not to. The database underpinning a digital ID scheme would be the single biggest digital target in the country’s history, and any breach would expose not just names and emails but the most intimate details of people’s lives.
Shimeon:
Perhaps the most important consideration surrounding compulsory ID has to do with civil liberties. With overzealous policing of social media posts and people being de-banked for their political views, there are valid concerns about a government misusing the system to persecute those that disagree. Yet this is already manifestly illegal and will continue to be illegal even with a compulsory ID system. What prevents authoritarianism is rule of law and democratic accountability at the ballot box, not the absence of an ID card.
If the fear is of a rogue government willing to ignore the law, then consider the enormous amount of personal data the state already has, such as tax records and health information. Unless the government is barred from collecting this data entirely, risk of abuse remains with or without compulsory ID.
Instead of hypotheticals we should be focused on the practical realities of such a scheme, including cost and data security, as well as ensuring that those who are not digitally minded are not left behind. While many of the technical problems have been solved in the private sector, the government has had a poor track record when it comes to technology.
Will:
The costs of a digital ID would not be spread evenly. Mandatory digital ID would discriminate against those who are least able to cope with it such as the elderly, people on low incomes and those with disabilities, many of whom already struggle with access to digital services. According to the National Audit Office, only 38 per cent Universal Credit applicants can currently use online ID verification. Forcing such a system onto the whole country would mean large numbers of people effectively locked out of daily life, unable to fully participate in society simply because they lack the right app or the latest technology.
And all of this would come with an eye-watering price tag. While figures range from £140 million to £1bn, as we know with most government schemes the real cost will be a lot higher. At a time when taxpayers are enduring the highest tax burden in over 75 years, when borrowing is spiraling and services are creaking, ministers want to pour billions into another IT vanity project. Instead of easing pressure on households or delivering better services, money would flow to consultants, contractors and bureaucrats to build a system that erodes our freedoms while offering little in return.
We already have laws against people entering, working and living in the UK without the correct permissions. The government should focus on enforcing these.
Shimeon:
Why not simply enforce existing right-to-work and right-to-rent laws that rely on existing forms of ID? The problem is twofold. First, because no one form of ID is compulsory, employees can use any number of documents as proof, each with varying levels of security. Second, individual employers and landlords are currently responsible for checks, which means the level of scrutiny varies considerably.
This makes enforcement clumsy and slow. Immigration authorities must seek records from businesses which may keep them poorly, then verify the authenticity of whatever documents were provided, often via other agencies. This can’t be solved by simply demanding immigration authorities work harder.
Compulsory ID simplifies this massively. With a single common credential, checks are much easier and can be done more often, including physical inspections at work sites. Yes some employers and landlords will try to evade this by operating cash in hand, but businesses without employees and landlords without tenants will have much to explain to HMRC.
Workplaces are only one frontline, the other is access to public services. It should be uncontroversial that those here illegally should not be able to use public services paid for by taxpayers. Compulsory ID could be a way of enforcing this and preventing the system from being abused.
We should all like to live in a world where there is no need for such measures, where we can trust strangers and leave our doors unlocked. Controlling illegal immigration should not require law abiding people to inconvenience themselves. But that is the state of the world today and pretending otherwise does no one any favours. As the rest of Europe implements digital ID, Britain risks becoming the easiest destination for illegal migrants to disappear into.
There also remains a deeper question of trust. We can talk until we are blue in the face about how it will make public services more efficient, draft endless legal safeguards, and point to other European countries that have introduced similar measures without sliding into totalitarianism. Yet if people don’t trust the motives of the government, they will simply not comply. The last time compulsory ID was implemented was during the war, when people understood what was at stake and trusted that their government meant what it said. Earning back that trust is the true challenge for compulsory ID.
Will:
Britain has fought and won this battle before. From the post-war ID cards that were scrapped in the 1950s, to Blair’s failed attempt in the 2000s, to the rejection of vaccine passports in 2021, the people of this country have consistently said no to attempts to catalogue and control them. We are not bar codes, QR codes or risk scores to be scanned and processed. We are citizens, and in Britain the state answers to us, not the other way around.
That is why this debate matters. Digital ID is not modernisation, it is regression. It is not efficiency, it is authoritarianism wrapped in digital clothing. And above all else, it is un-British. If we are serious about defending what freedoms we have left, then fighting the imposition of digital ID is not just another policy disagreement but a line in the sand. This is a hill worth dying on.