UK Politics

You also suggested productivity as a benefit. That’s basically doing the same thing while hiring less people. Firstly, only useful for CEOs

Productivity increase is the basis for all improvements in standards of life. Industrialisation was not "only useful for CEOs"; it brought millions out of poverty by lowering the amount of labour required to produce food and other basic necessities to the point where the poorest in society could still afford them. Doing the same thing while hiring fewer people means those people can do something else.

Commitment to equality is needed to ensure the benefits of productivity increases aren't only reaped by those already wealthy, but you will notice that neither China nor Russia decided that they'd better not industrialise so as to avoid the wealthy getting all the benefit; they recognised that the benefit could ideally be shared amongst the population.

secondly, what actual gains are even going to be from this? You can get on NHS or government stuff without a digital ID. There is no demonstrable way this will make the process any better.

You don't see the advantage in having a single thing which allows you, without filling in any ID forms or uploading/sending off any documents, to:

• Register for a GP
• Renew a passport
• Apply for a driving license
• Open a bank account

And besides that would open the way to having a uniform way to prove your age to buy alcohol and otherwise prove your identity in person. That is before you get to any of the advantages that do exist but which come from the requirement to have ID, such as having a way of reliably identifying people the police suspect of a crime. It's not the 18th century any more, and the power to require someone to tell you their name and address has the obvious problem that they can lie.

Maybe you haven't done any of these things recently, but filling out 3 years of address history and uploading 2 forms of ID for each new account for something with real-world significance gets old quickly. If you're older than 40 you might not have to do it much any more.

Gun ownership isn’t controversial in the US. It is unthinkable in the UK.

So this should inspire is to look to the US to see what the effects of gun ownership might be, rather than dogmatically sticking to our opposition to it. Of course, what we see there is mass shooting after mass shooting so we'd quite sensibly go "no thank you."

What do we see all over Western and Northern Europe? Are the population being ground under the bootheel of state surveillance made so much more effective by convenient and mandatory identification? No. But their health systems, government, banking systems and police don't have to spend nearly so much time and effort identifying people, because there's a uniform way of doing it.