Weekend Thought — jumping on the treding topic bandwagon — I just can't help myself 🤷‍♂️:

Weekend Thought - jumping on the treding topic bandwagon - I just can't help myself 🤷‍♂️: The UK Already Has ID Cards (We Just Lost the Plastic)

The UK government just loves the idea of ID cards. Officially, they say it’s about security, efficiency, and fraud prevention. Unofficially, it’s about control, data, and looking “tough” in a Daily Mail headline.

The funny part? We already have ID cards. They’re just delivered in classic Whitehall style: fragmented, half-baked, and crashing at login.

• NHS App? An ID card that thinks it’s a medical chatbot.

• Right-to-Rent checks? An ID card for your landlord, delivered with the warmth of a bailiff.

• Bank KYC rules? An ID card where you upload your passport so a machine learning model can reject you.

• Driving licence app trial? An ID card that probably won’t work at a petrol station — unless by “work” you mean showing the cashier your phone battery died somewhere between “verifying your identity” and “authorising an update from 2019.”

This is what Britain does best:
• Not delivering ID cards.
• But quietly creating 17 incompatible versions that all fail at peak demand.

And when the official ID card scheme failed in 2010? No problem. They just rebranded the problem into 50 different digital portals so nobody noticed we built the same thing again, but worse.

The irony: the one thing ID cards are supposed to do — prove who you are — is the one thing UK.gov systems never manage to confirm.

Maybe that’s the real national identity: chaos - like the real shit we are in thanks to Reevo, the manc skank and no drama starma.

So yes, HMG wants ID cards. They just want them in the only way government IT knows how: expensive, late, unusable, and quietly authoritarian. I mean christ alive who remembers borders?

Happy weekend. Don’t forget to verify your identity before taking a dump.

— Scott G