> Some bars might. Others may not. In any case, you've still got to a passport in the first place, so that doesn't remove the renewal cost or the initial cost. It's also a multi-page book.
Pretty much every bar does. I know this because I have several friends that used expired passports for years without issue. It’s also frequently done be foreign students, because most bar staff don’t recognise any form of foreign ID except a passport. So there’s no need to ever renew the passport.
> It's also a multi-page book.
So what? It no more difficult to carry than a small wallet or purse.
> If we're going to run a provisional DL as a de-facto ID card, why not just have an ID card?
Because the DVLA don’t want it to be an ID because it’s a pain in the arse for them. Which is good, because they go out of their way to make accessing the data difficult for any reason that isn’t driving related. Creates a nice little natural firewall against abuse.
> If you're verifying someone's ID at all then those issues are going to exist. That's not a problem with having an ID card, that's a systems problem - if you use a DL, there's a URN. If you use a passport, there's a URN.
The URNs change on each renewal or replacement, strictly limiting how long they can be used to track an individual. Additionally people can choose which document they use with each entity, and make it harder for different entities to match their IDs.
> Not having a national ID card is, frankly, Stone Age. If you want to avoid the spectre of Papiere, Bitte then that is a legislative problem and not a technical one.
Yes it is, just like paper voting. Thats a good thing, it shouldn’t be easy for future governments or corporations to track individuals without their consent.
With regards to Papiere, Bitte legislation solves nothing. It can easily be changed at a whim, our executive government almost always has a majority in the legislative house, make it trivial for them to amend legislation on whim as it suite them. Surely your not blind? You must have seen the numerous abuses of this powers from Boris’s Tory government over the past year. Just look at anything Priti Patel has worked on.
Throwing away natural defences against abuse for convenience is stupid and short sighted. There are plenty of innovative ways of working within our current ID system, while still offering a high level of convenience, without making it easy to abuse the data. Just look at any recent neo-bank to find half a dozen examples.