The ghost of ID cards past

To get to the root of the recent backlash, you have to go back nearly 20 years. 

In 2006, Tony Blair’s government introduced the Identity Cards Act. The proposal went beyond issuing plastic cards to create a centralised government database called the National Identity Register. This register was designed to hold dozens of categories of information on every citizen, from fingerprints and iris scans to current and past addresses.

For many, this was a bridge too far. It felt less like a convenience and more like a tool for state surveillance, a fundamental shift in the relationship between the individual and the government. The project was criticised as intrusive, expensive, and a honeypot for hackers.

The opposition was broad and cut across political lines. When a new Tory government led by David Cameron came to power in 2010, one of its first acts was to scrap the entire scheme and destroy the register. It was a symbolic act that cemented a deep-seated scepticism towards state-run identity systems in the national psyche.

This is the ghost that haunts the current debate. When people in the UK hear "digital ID," they aren’t imagining a convenient app. They’re picturing the National Identity Register.

Framework ≠ database

The current proposal, known as the Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework, is built on a completely different idea than the National Identity Register.

It is not a single, government-run ID system. Instead, the government is trying to create a regulated market for identity. The plan is to set rules and standards that private companies must meet to become certified identity providers. Think of it as the government setting safety standards for cars, but not building the cars itself.

Under this framework, you would choose a certified provider to create your digital identity. Then, when a website needs to verify something about you, you use your chosen provider to share only the specific piece of information required. This is what the framework calls an "attribute. 

In practice, this is rather simple. To buy a lottery ticket online, you share the attribute "I am over 18", rather than your name, address, and full date of birth. The end goal is to minimise data sharing and give users more control.

The European norm is Britain's nightmare

This is where the UK reveals itself as a fascinating outlier. In almost every other European country, a central population register and a unique, state-issued ID number are boring administrative realities.

Whether it is the PESEL in Poland or the Personnummer in Sweden, the model is the same. The state acts as the single source of truth. It issues a root identity, which then allows citizens to access decentralised services, from healthcare to taxes, seamlessly. 

To a British civil libertarian, this standard European model looks dangerously authoritarian, almost like a "Big Brother" infrastructure. To the rest of Europe, it just looks like efficiency. The UK is treating standard administrative tools used by democratic neighbours as if they were mechanisms of a totalitarian regime. The British system prefers to keep the citizen fragmented across different silos (NHS, HMRC, DVLA) rather than allowing the state to connect the dots.

The privacy conundrum: state surveillance vs Big Tech overreach

There is a final, bitter irony in this resistance. The British debate is frozen in 2006, a time when the state was viewed as the primary threat to privacy.

The world has moved on. In the two decades since the Identity Cards Act was scrapped, the threat landscape has inverted. Global tech giants have built psychometric profiles of citizens that are far more intrusive than anything the Home Office proposed twenty years ago. We have effectively lost our anonymity to the private sector in exchange for free apps and convenience.

We willingly carry a tracking device in our pocket (a smartphone) and feed our biometrics to social media algorithms, yet the British public reserves its fiercest scepticism for a government-issued digital ID.

Moving the conversation forward

The British debate is suspended between the ghost of the past and the reality of the present. The current Trust Framework is a market-based attempt to navigate this minefield without falling over the old tripwires of a national database.

But until the UK overcomes its historical trauma and realizes that digital identity is a standard utility in Europe (and that privacy has already been reshaped by Big Tech),the conversation will remain stuck in the past.