This topic has come and gone a few times during my adulthood. The tension is always, from one side, that we’ve never had them therefore they can’t possibly be justified. From the other side, there is a suspicion that whatever the Government says they want them for is not really why they want to introduce them. I have a lot of sympathy with that second point, but, basically, every other country has some kind of national ID card scheme and that helps do a) a bit more joined-up government and b) understand who’s within your borders a bit better. I’m massively pro-immigration, but the general discontent with economic migrants to UK (or any country, I guess) is that infrastructure doesn’t scale with new arrivals, so doctors, schools, transport, housing whatever doesn’t match, which causes understandable frustration. The laughable situation where we don’t know who’s within our borders because we don’t check or at least record it anywhere is not best practice. (As for jobs related to migrants, that’s totally a red herring as your general sorts of jobs, e.g. supermarket workers, deliveries, teachers, builders all kinds scale with more people; sure, some specialist jobs won’t, but the cry of complaint from bulldog-tattooed nutters is rarely “I’m concerned about the top-end Formula One automotive engineering jobs around Banbury being taken by Bulgarians”.)
We do of course have a ton of national identifiers already, so it seems bizarre not to initially bring them together and then somewhere down the line do something more advanced with such a system. I present my idea for an English variant of the UK ID card:
Timsformational 