Society of the Lanyard

The latest round of the national ID debate had hardly got underway before pundits and commentators were hurling insults. Particularly amusing was the sight of Lewis Goodall being community-noted on X for insulting X users' poor grasp of the subject while being married to an employee of the Tony Blair Institute. Leaving aside his consdescending tone and alledgedly offensive wife, Goodall did make one useful point, though without perhaps fully understanding it, when he accused the debate of being "insular", pointing out that other countries have had ID cards for years with little issue. This is correct, but it misses that the government, and lobbyists like the TBI, are also reluctant to actually examine the use of such schemes in other countries. One obvious reason is that they do not provide evidence for many of the beneficial claims that are habitually made. For example, we know that national IDs will not deter asylum-seekers because those camped out around Calais have already passed through multiple countries with ID regimes which didn't deter them either. Likewise, none of the countries that insist on IDs for employment have managed to do away with the shadow economy.

Deterrence is a common theme across arguments in favour of national IDs: it will deter illegal immigration, it will deter illegal employment, it will deter benefit fraud. But this is no more convincing than the deterrent argument used to justify any criminal law. Making something a crime does not stop it happening, it just clarifies the consequences. The more positive argument for a national ID, that it will improve citizens' access to public services, is nowadays more likely come with citations about how easy it is to report a collision to your car insurer in Poland using the national ID app. I'm pretty sure Poland doesn't have nationalised car insurance, more's the pity, so this is stretching the definition of public services. In other words, the boundary between a digital citizen and a digital consumer has already been erased. Across the EU, national ID schemes have been captured by commercial interests over the last twenty years, which is why they have moved online. Being able to access your bank account securely with your national ID is a greater benefit for the bank than it is for you. 

A typically-breathless report in the Guardian on the subject states that "Estonia claims e-ID saves citizens about five days a year of pre-digital administrative hassle." In other words, it was the digitalisation that reduced the admin overhead, not the national ID. Nobody in the UK is currently spending five days a year routinely negotiating public services online, and obviously the introduction of an ID scheme will not reduce the amount of time you spend sitting in a hospital waiting room or queueing for a bus. One argument you don't hear from the Tony Blair Institute, or anybody else for that matter, is that a national ID scheme will increase the take-up of benefits, by identifying people who are eligible but currently don't claim. It's estimated that UK benefit fraud (some of which is actually just DWP error) amounts to over £6 billion a year while unclaimed benefits are almost four times that at £23 billion. The intersection of national IDs and benefits is always about "efficient allocation", "better targeting" and the prevention of fraud.

The UK's feudal legacy is not to be found in the monarchy or Morris Men - both largely invented traditions of the modern era - but in its parcellised approach to public services, which is reflected in the multiple and not always overlapping identification schemes from NHS numbers to driving licences used to organise it. That may seem strange given that cars are obviously a modern invention and the NHS dates from only 1948, but the point is that the state in its broadest form has always been more fragmentary and blinkered than either its advocates or critics have allowed, and the roots of its disaggregation go a long way back. The welfare state may have offered an embrace from cradle to grave, but it was never the same arms doing the embracing over time, while the dystopian nightmare of an intrusive state ignored the reality of administrative disconnection (the totalitarian fears of Geroge Orwell originated from his experiences in the very exclusive and parcellised environs of Eton and the BBC).

The worry that a national ID scheme would lead to Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel controlling our personal data is a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Partly because of the parcellised nature of personal identification in the UK, they have already scooped up many of our demographic assets with minimal democratic oversight and zero public agreement. For them, the promise of a national ID is the ability to exploit the linkages between the datasets that they already control: the primary key to all the mysteries, if I may be permitted a techno-literate joke. But whether that will lead to greater insight is moot. It's easy enough to sell the state on the vision of making the population ever more legible, but the experience of Big Data has proved underwhelming, particularly in the area of public administration. The fundmental problem is one of triviality: that there isn't much to be learned by extending a particular NHS patient's record to include their driving licence. Even in aggregate, there is unlikely to be a statistically significant correlation between being entitled to ride a motorbike and suffering from shingles.

If the government wanted to implement a national ID card on the cheap it could simply issue everyone who doesn't have one with a driving licence. In these cases the card would simply have blanks on the reverse - i.e. you wouldn't be licensed to drive anything. In many countries, such as the USA, a driving licence is the standard form of (non-compulsory) ID and in the UK plenty of teenagers already use a provisional licence for proof of age in pubs and clubs. But this pragmatic approach, infomed by international practice, isn't what the likes of Lewis Goodall are seeking when they criticise British insularity. Their vision is of a common online identity whose utility to the state is almost incidental to its utility to business. And what particularly attracts journalists who face derision on social media is the prospect of doing away with online anonymity altogether. As they gather at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool to fret about Starmer's lack of vision, what they see when they look around the conference hall is actually their own vision: a society of the lanyard.