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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

Why is the UK politics scene so focused on digital ID? Blair first proposed it and I feel like I've heard about it continually since with no progress. Different justifications every time too

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Because 20 years later, everyone has given their data away on TikTok anyway and we're still dealing with the same issues with different digital government ID numbers that aren't joined together at all.

I have (that I remember, probably more):

National Insurance Number

NHS Number

Unique Taxpayer Reference number

A student loan Customer Reference Number account number

A passport number

A government gateway ID number

A driving license number

An account with the land registry

That isn't too different from America, where you have a social security number, driver's license number, passport number (possibly two if you also have a passport card), and any other random identification the government demands.

In the us several of those are administered by different governments (state v federal) and at least one is literally forbidden from being used as an id number because the numbers are reused (but everyone does anyway).

Most people in the US only have the first two only ~46-51% of people in the US have passports and way fewer actually have a passport card on top of that. That's the majority of ID numbers most people have to keep track of.

Best part about gov id, there is no link between accounts. I have my personal gov ID account, I have my director of a business gov ID account and I also have a gov ID account for the business.

Why are these all separate, why am I 2 people according to gov ID. Why can't I access my director of a business gov ID from my personal gov ID???

The kicker is these are all linked, it knows they all belong to the one person, but if you log into the wrong one it tells you to use the other one.

I actually like this and don't want them to be joined up.

The Tony Blair Institute still wields a lot of power in UK politics, and they're still pushing for ID cards.

https://institute.global/insights/tech-and-digitalisation/to...

>institute.global

hubris

The real question is why do all UK politicians, no matter their party, hate people so much?

Newspapers. And the lurking pool of resentment of fellow Brits from many, especially older, voters.

The real question is "why do all politicians hate people so much?"; and the answer is power and money.

Because they have to choose between liking people and making themselves/their friends rich, and they always pick the latter.

The UK has a bunch of deeply divided issues: 40% want lower house prices and rents (tenants and would be buyers) and 40% want higher house prices and rents (landlords and owners). The same is true for taxes and immigration and crime/justice and welfare etc.

So governments are desperate NOT to do anything on most issues. And they are desperate to do SOMETHING (as a distraction) on issues seen as more neutral and less likely to offend vast numbers of people.

>40% want lower house prices and rents (tenants and would be buyers) and 40% want higher house prices and rents (landlords and owners).

I think it is more that the electorate and their agents don't know how (or disagree on how) to keep housing affordable or more precisely don't know how to avoid passing laws and regulations that have the unintended effect of raising the cost of housing.

Rising house prices are routinely presented as a good news story by the Tory tabloids. To a generation of homeowners, their house is a store of vast amounts of unearned wealth and they bitterly oppose anything that might erode that wealth.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14735531/British-ho...

Because the UK does not have a national ID system like nearly every other country in Europe, the reason it goes nowhere is that it costs money and no one wants to spend the money on it.

And entrenched (if fading, perhaps) cultural opposition to it.

I don't think so. I think it raises peoples' hackles because it is "not something we do here" - English-speaking countries seem to not go with mandatory ID in the same way as continental Europe. Maybe a Napoleonic/Common-Law thing?

(Personally, I don't object to the idea).

This seems to be a pub bore talking point... the usual seemingly-clever street-level arguments that don't stand up to serious scrutiny.

If people think that if they get ID card, the government is coming to take their precious bodily fluids, then the country has bigger cultural, political problems than a mere public safety measure.

Some of the UK's biggest industries are money laundering and offshore tax evasion schemes for the very rich. They're literally worth hundreds of billions a year.

It's not a pub bore talking point, it's an oligarch and non-dom talking point. A lot of rich people would be inconvenienced if beneficial owner information records had reliable links to real people.

The pub bores are collateral damage - people who post unironically about privacy on social media.

Pub bores might make that argument but it doesn't mean it's not what motivates most of the objectors, who may indeed be boring about it in the pub.

Governments are always looking for better ways to track (and control) their subjects. The idea of a national ID[1] has been floated by various US politicians since before it would have been digital. Many Americans oppose it because they fear a government using it to round up dissenting citizens, and others oppose it because they fear it would be used to more effectively identify illegals (some oppose it on both grounds), so between them it's never gotten started.

The UK government does seem especially keen on the idea of a digital/video dystopia, though. Weird, like they're trying to prove Orwell right.

[1] Social Security numbers aren't unique and you aren't required to carry your SS card, so it doesn't work for that purpose.

Eric Arthur Blair, perchance?

The new justification (to deter illegal immigration) is expecially obviously bogus because, as the law stands, people must already prove their "right to work" to get a job and their "right to rent" to rent accommodation. Illegal immigrants manage, they would manage, too, with digital IDs because some employers and landlords are fine exploiting them. Or the plan is in fact to be asked "papers, please" where ever you go and whatever you do.

In particular, this is already done using a digital ID for foreign residents (at least on most visas) in the UK, which was phased in over the past few years.

This is really easy to fake though and employers kind of have to take your word for it that the documentation you provide is real. I'm assuming a digital ID scheme will just bring all the data together and make it instantly verifiable for employers. I would normally be suspicious about this sort of thing but I do think a lack of a single entity bringing all the data together is limiting us technologically in the UK. What Estonia have done is awesome, it'd be cool for us to work toward something like that!

Why do they have to take your word for it? if you present a few forms of id (drivers license, etc) can't those be checked against a central DB?

is someone forging physical ID cards and also getting them real numbers somehow?

The people who have to do the check (businesses and landlords) don't have access to the system to check those numbers, or any training on what a real identify card or passport looks like.

A relative had this problem when renting out a spare room. How was she supposed to verify the Colombian passport shown to her?

No, it is not easy to fake.

As @vinay427 mentioned this is most digital now so you get a "share code" from the Home Office, which you provide to your prospective employer. In turn they go to the Home Office's website, input the code, and should get your picture, details, and entitlement to work.

That's on top of having a passport to go with it.

THats only if they ask for it.

I changed job recently, and they just wanted a passport.

If you're a foreigner on a visa(or an EU settled status resident), yes. If you are a British person(or pretending to be one) then you just need to show your employer your British passport(or one of several other acceptable documents), and obviously faking a picture of a passport is pretty trivial. And since employers generally don't have access to the system that can verify passports they take your word on the document being valid.

As someone who's just got their new British passport, faking the 3 pictures on it, and the whole passport itself, does not look trivial at all...

I think it is much, much, much more common to have dodgy employers/landlords who do not carry out the checks at all because they are fine exploiting illegal immigrants, and no type of ID card would solve that...

>>As someone who's just got their new British passport, faking the 3 pictures on it, and the whole passport itself, does not look trivial at all...

A lot of employers just want a photo/scan of a passport. I'm not saying making a whole fake passport is easy, it's obviously not - but modifying a picture of a passport is not exactly rocket science.

Yeah most employers just take photocopies of the ID for record keeping purposes and that's it.

Most people are paid cash in hand if they're working illegally realistically. I'm not sure that would change. But in enforcement it might since you could theoretically make it a legal requirement to produce the ID, that's the norm in many other countries.

Honestly the biggest problem is that government requires companies to verify identity of their employees but doesn't give them any means to do so. There was a recent case where a fish and chip shop owner was fined £40k for employing someone without a legal right to work in the UK, and the owner said the guy literally showed him his British passport, turns out it was a fake - but how was he(the business owner) supposed to know, if the government doesn't allow him to check this?

Articles in this case all say that the illegal worker only provided a photocopy of his alleged British passport.

I.e. the employer did not properly and seriously carry out the checks as he didn't ask for the original, hence the heavy fine.

"The business did not see the original copy of the man’s passport, which its owner, Mark Sullivan, said was a “clerical error”" [1]

As I commented previously it is hard to counterfeit a modern British passport in a way that looks genuine and obviously any checks require sight of the original passport...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/22/surrey-chipp...

I literally just got a job with a big British corporation and all they wanted was a photocopy of my passport, no one checked the original. So this practice seems at least relatively common.

This just means that incompetence, or worse, is widespread (not a surprise, though).

Then they will feign ignorance when fined 40k+.

Nah this is over come with data.

E.g. if a firm is doing better than its peer group with less employees on the books, something is suspect.

I have had many jobs and scenarios where I need to provide proof of residency and I have never once had a share code like you mention @mytailorisrich like this. The reality is that it doesn't happen like this. Usually about 6 months into your job someone forgets you haven't done the necessary checks and reaches out for you to send a couple of sketchy photos of your IDs so they can upload it to their HR system and forget about it.

You just cherry picked two examples which are not issues in other countries with ID cards.

ID cards can prove who is an illegal immigrant or not, and with the current atmosphere. I want to know and be confident that we can check people's status efficiently and correctly who's here.

Sure there might be some small process mishaps but for the safety of the nation, it is worth it.

> Sure there might be some small process mishaps but for the safety of the nation, it is worth it.

Just like that database that recognises your face and links it to your pornhub preferences is worth it, for the safety of the children?

I don't think you mean "for the safety of the Nation". I think you mean "for my piece of mind my business is unlikely to get caught in a sting operation".

I did not cherry-pick anything.

Anyone who is a legal immigrant can easily prove it and must prove it to live and work in the country. So what does that make anyone who cannot prove it?

The point is that digital IDs make no difference to illegal immigration, as can also be seen in countries that do have ID cards...

Everyone knows that none of the countries with mandatory ID have any illegal immigrants, right?

(sarcasm, obviously)

"but for the safety of the nation, it is worth it"

That's a pretty chilling phrase.

UK politics is very simple: People have a lot of economic grievances and they are frustrated. People are made to believe that the source of their problems are immigrants/non-white people. So for a lot of people in the UK, anything against immigrants, even more drastic measures, are worth it and it makes the government appear to do something about their problems. Nothing ever really gets better of course, but they have no way to think about it any other way.

Fair to add that, despite every winning party promising reduced immigration on some level, and everyone that wanted to remain in the EU rightfully annoyed that Brexiters were simply voting because of migration, nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard.

And no one will, because the UK wants cheap foreign labour. To no one's surprise, immigration rocketed after Brexit.

This allows the ruling party - the one whose names and faces keep changing, but whose policies don't - to keep using immigration for political leverage while also benefiting from it.

> nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard

Net migration in the UK dropped by 400,000/yr in the last year and they’ve toughened the criteria further so seems unlikely it won’t drop further.

It doesn't really matter, people's grievances won't go away because those have nothing to do with immigrants anyway. They will just move on to the next scapegoat.

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