The American writer Mike Godwin coined what’s now called “Godwin’s Law”. It states that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches”.
Godwin’s Law is probably approaching as the British government discusses whether a “digital identity number” should be compulsory for British citizens. Every time the subject of identity cards or similar ID questions are raised in the country, opponents suggest we are on the road to a police state. Nazi-like officials will demand our ID papers or else.
The truth is that every British adult already has various IDs, including a National Insurance number. The government website says “you’ll usually get a letter confirming your NI number shortly before your 16th birthday”. It gives as an example the entirely made-up National Insurance number “QQ123456B”, but you get the point.
A valid number allows the government to check whether you pay tax. Foreigners qualify if they live legally in the UK, have the right to work and are working, looking for work or have an offer to start work.
As a citizen, I also have a passport number, a driving licence number (with photo ID), a National Health Service number and countless other numbers that I don’t remember yet I need for various agencies. I write them down because no one can remember them all. A “digital ID” might change that. But historically British people do not have identity cards, and the “digital ID” possibility reopens all those old arguments about Britain on the road to becoming some kind of police state.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is moving cautiously, but if it happens – and this time I think it might – the “digital ID” concept will probably be sold to the British public as a way to check on illegal migrants.
A digital ID could also make it easier to book healthcare appointments, obtain welfare payments, local authority housing, tax refunds or other benefits. Right now, the British government bureaucracy is multi-layered, often incoherent and difficult to penetrate.
Critics of digital ID seem to overlook the fact that businesses already have our “digital IDs”, and the British state also has plenty of ways of tracking down citizens through those National Insurance numbers, passports and all those other kinds of information that as citizens we find so difficult to remember.
In the 1990s, then-prime minister Tony Blair’s government abandoned the identity cards idea after a great deal of opposition. Nevertheless, this time some government ministers are reported to be very enthusiastic.
Wes Streeting, the minister in charge of the great behemoth that is the National Health Service, appears to be a supporter. This is because a digital ID would potentially unlock a “health passport” to ensure that every health practitioner – from dentists and doctors to specialists of various kinds – would in theory be able to find the key information about patients very rapidly. Patients may be able to navigate the healthcare bureaucracy more easily, too.
Nevertheless, the Starmer government appears desperate not to call any streamlined digital identification “identity papers” or any such inflammatory term. There are obvious challenges, too. Some elderly people, or those who cannot afford mobile phones or similar devices, may find accessing any digital ID services difficult.
But the political sales pitch from the UK government’s point of view is obvious. A digital ID, the government political spokesmen and women will say, could make the vast government bureaucracy easier to navigate for all of us who legally live and work here.
At the same time, it will exclude those who arrive illegally or who are refused permission to stay and work. Right now, any initiative that can be sold to the British public about making immigration control much easier would be a boost for the government, since record figures for those arriving on small boats from France are among the Prime Minister’s biggest headaches.
Under the system being considered, it is assumed that anyone without a digital number will be almost impossible to employ regularly, excluded from the benefits any British citizen can expect, will be easier to trace, and undesirables will be easier to remove. That’s why a digital ID system seems to me to be likely and quite possibly will become inevitable, whatever the critics might say.
There are examples of political changes, once criticised as the “Big Brother” interfering in our lives, that were introduced after a row – and are now taken for granted. The introduction of compulsory seat belts in cars, for example, or breathalyser tests for drivers who drink too much alcohol and the banning of smoking in areas of Britain were all attacked as “Nanny State” intrusions of our supposed personal freedoms. These laws are now simply part of our daily lives.
A convenient ID number will, I suspect, be announced in a year or two, provoking a storm of very British outrage from some, but quietly welcomed by most. Then after a year or two, just like the seat belts controversy, we will all wonder why we didn’t do it quicker.
