Boring request, but is there a timeline anywhere of all the times that Tony Blair has intervened to say bro just one more ID card bro, bro I swear just one more ID card and it'll fix society bro please bro. And did it start in 2006 or was he saying this in the 90s?
Blair's government was absolutely mad for the idea of ID cards. Jack Straw, Blunkett, name the new Labour ghoul and name a problem (or "problem") and compulsory ID cards were the solution.
Voter fraud, floods, the threat of cats one day becoming sentient and able to speak, ID cards will fix it
weird how the focus is never on 'we need to help people get all the documentation and funding they need so they can have ID cards given having them could help them a great deal', it's always punitive
Do I recall correctly that they were actually law, had just come in on a voluntary basis and a few people already obtained them before the coalition scrapped the whole thing? I have a memory of a news story about people who'd spent £80 to get one only to find it was wasted
I still have a copy of all the HO consultation docs for that one.
What they did instead was tighten up the passport and driving license databases to produce 99% of the same outcomes.
At the same time there’s part of me that doesn’t understand why we have such an antipathy to it when most of social-democratic Europe have always had them. And we end up with some weird proxy of having to use driving licences/passports/two utility bills for everything.
But… why are ID cards still felt by many in England to be objectionable? Carrying photo ID is mundane here in the Netherlands. ‘Just curious where the thinking is at back at home.
Quite a lot of it (see this ORG briefing from 2006 www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/trustgu...) was that people didn't trust the British state to build an ID database that didn't leak like a sieve. I suspect that view has shifted a bit for various reasons 18 years later.
