The Existing Digital ID

It’s rather funny, isn’t it? The government already has a perfectly decent digital ID system — the GOV.UK ID Check app - that does everything anyone sensible could want. It proves who you are, does its job, and then has the decency to forget you exist. It’s the digital equivalent of a butler who takes your coat without rummaging through your pockets.

So naturally, they’re planning to replace it. Not because it’s broken, but because it isn’t ambitious enough. What they really want is persistence - a permanent identity framework linking your tax records, health data, benefits, bank accounts, and possibly what colour socks you bought on Amazon. All for “convenience,” of course. And if you don’t like it, well, what are you trying to hide?

Yet here’s the rich irony: the loudest critics of a National Digital ID are the same mob cheering to scrap the European Convention on Human Rights - the very safeguard that stops governments from turning such a system into an instrument of surveillance and abuse. They’ll rant about “freedom” while campaigning to remove the legal protections that actually guarantee it. They’ll call digital ID a step toward tyranny, then vote to bin the very treaty that would stop a tyranny from forming. You couldn’t make it up.

The GOV.UK app already strikes the balance - confirm, comply, delete. It’s a one-off handshake, not a lifelong digital leash. But that won’t do for the power-hungry technocrats or their authoritarian cheerleaders. They want efficiency, which in bureaucratic English means control. And they want sovereignty, which they confuse with impunity.

So, while the government busies itself reinventing the wheel into a tracking device, and the populists howl about their “freedom” while dismantling the laws that protect it, the rest of us are left wondering: how do you protect liberty from people who don’t understand what it is?

Perhaps the simplest answer is to keep the system we already have - the one that knows when to stop watching. Because the true test of freedom isn’t how loudly you shout about it, but whether your government remembers to look away once it’s seen enough.