A passport is the universal identity document. It's way too valuable to carry around and expediting a new passport is costly and slow. Checks need to be done in person and the passport holder needs to be told in advance about the check (so impromptu checks don't work and expired passports get through, also catching fake passports and the like is hard).

A digital ID as its name says is digital, checks can be done remotely (as often as you want) in a secure environment with physical checks possible in addition to that. Regular and unscheduled checks are possible with a digital id after the initial check both presential and remote. Online checks especially can cover for things like the same id being used in multiple places, it also means employers cannot fudge it as the actual repository of truth lies online. None of this is possible with a passport.

Citizen IDs and more recently digital IDs have been used in Europe for decades now. Having a redundant piece of ID is incredibly valuable.

This means when you want to implement things like the Online Safety Act you basically have to implement alternatives to ID verification like age estimators which isn't ideal (for the government anyway).

With a digital ID anonymous age estimators will no longer be required, so when someone is trying to watch porn or view footage of a political protest they'll have to identify who they are instead of using a fake AI face.

They don't have any real benefit over passports expect for the fact that a passport is a selectively issued document which not everyone living and working in the UK has access to or has applied for, but with digital IDs everyone will have one so there will no excuse to not identify yourself any time the government wants you to.

I will be very surprised if the app does much more than dish up a pre-signed chunk of ID data, much like an e-passport does now. It won't actually need a secure device.

(Which isn't to say they will support anything except android and iphone.)

He'll have to live with the consequences as will the rest of us.

A harsh lesson in believing the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Though mostly in the UK it's usually just apathetic "well time for the other party to have go" (due to 14 years of the last lot) more than anything more educated

But yeah, this abandonment of the issues they traditionally represented to try and attract the soft centre right voters might not cause their traditional base to vote for the Tories. But it might send their centrists to the Lib Dems, their lefties to the Greens/SNP/etc and their "I just want change, any change" supporters to Reform. Along with increasing apathy and reducing turnout on their former core. Polling certainly seems to indicate that this is happening.

A NI number is not ID, it's a reporting number.

Lastly, a national ID is a tried and tested scheme in many, many countries and brings a lot of positives. The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.

https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work

And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.

Recall that Iran cut off the internet for university exams, and the volume of posting by Scottish pro-independence accounts on Twitter/X dropped 98%. Food for thought.

This effectively blocks development of mobile Linux as an alternative in the UK. It is already enough of a challenge to get people to try Linux phones without support for their favorite apps, and now it’s a requirement to own a US big tech pocket spy device? Absolutely absurd and Orwellian, and from the birthplace of Orwell no less.

So, you want to sell your freedom for 200 quid. That's fine, people have done it for less. Just be honest about it.

Your card literally says, "THIS IS NOT IDENTIFICATION"

Like it or not, our high-trust society is devolving into a low-trust society as the world opens up. Our defences must evolve -- and the current free-for-all needs to end.

This minimises the problem. The UK voters have consistently voted for reduced immigration, with polls showing the preferred number to be somewhere between 0-100,000.

In the last few years, the UK had around 1 million people net per year. 1 million people is bigger than most cities in the UK for comparison, so imagine a new city of people, every single year. The infrastructure could not, or did not keep up and has contributed to worse living standards through overly-subscribed national services, increased living costs, etc.

>for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.

The NHS is already the single biggest expenditure of the UK's taxes. I remember it being more than 25% of the total budget. How much should be spent on the NHS? 50%? 90%?

The cost of defending democracy and freedom from a tyrannical Russia is also barely a drop in the bucket, while having huge meaning for many. Only 2% of the budget for the entire Armed forces, let alone just some support for Ukraine, compared to the 25+% on NHS. It's nothing.

Wow straight out of the Tory playbook (see eg Rhys-Mogg "lying [down] in Parliament" to poison search results for lying to parliament). They are so incredibly similar