jonbwfc wrote: For someone so enraged about all the money we send to the EU, Steve does seem very keen for us to spend huge gobs of it on other things that will do us equally little good.
Biometric ID systems are generally very expensive and don't live up to their billing in terms of accuracy and speed of result. So they'd be a pain int he arse to use for a population the size of the UK's. Plus even if we have post-Brexit level immigration controls, you're talking about hiring a large number of civil servants to handle and process all the issuing of new IDs and dealing with changes of name through marriage or divorce, incorrect data, recall of cards upon death etc. That's if you want to do it locally, which is of course what our current administration won't do. They'll outsource the whole thing to an American company who, given they no longer operate under the EU data protection regulations, would ship the data off to where-ever in the world is cheapest to host it. Which right now is India, which has a long record of colander-esque data security. While also thereby giving full access to the US authorities and therefore probably quite soon the Russian authorities too.
So give it, I dunno, six months from the scheme being in operation and you'll be able to buy the full IDs of British citizens on the streets of Leningrad or Mumbai for a dollar a thousand.
All this is without even considering the UK government's traditional competence at gigantic IT systems, which means if it arrived at all it would be at multiples of the predicted cost and years behind schedule.
Successive UK governments have looked at ID cards and decided they weren't workable. Some times they even get as far as a trial; one happened a few years ago In Manchester and a friend of mine still has his ID card from it. Pretty much nobody accepted it then, let alone now. Every single time, the conclusion has been that it would be an utter debacle and simply not worth wasting money doing. | 
