[cronin101]

As a Brit that relocated to Norway a decade ago, trust me when I say you cannot fathom the lack of organization around identity that the UK (somewhat intentionally) has. (It’s constantly used for political Godwin’s-law fear-mongering)

There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number but this is basically only outbound for PAYE tax and haphazardly correlated to your pension payments in late life.

Everything operates on a “trust system” where you often present paper (!) with whatever address you claim to be living at as proof you are real (e.g. opening bank accounts).

Passport loss is rectified by seeking out “professionals” with government-approved occupations that are not related to you that can vouch you are actually the person you are trying to replace a passport for.

The entire thing is a mess and living in digital-identity-native Europe is a dream come true that you should be extremely thankful for.

[gambiting]

>>There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number

Until you find out that due to a cock up years ago the National Insurance numbers are not guaranteed to be unique, and you realize that somehow the best proof of identity British people have is a humble driving licence because DVLA is at least somewhat competent.

[pasc1878]

Unfortunately I don't have a driving license as I am physically unable to get one by law.

[The-Old-Hacker]

The mess around voter ID is a case in point. A badly-implemented "solution" to a problem that didn't exist.

[vidarh]

It's even worse now: A lot of places now accept PDF's of things like bank statements, since so many people don't get paper copies any more.

It's not that it was hard to fake before if you wanted to, but when you can just get a real PDF as a starting point, and edit it slightly it's just theatre.

[astrange]

It doesn't have to be perfect. This is how financial regulation works in the US too, but it does work. The idea is that every individual step is weak, but it's a crime to bypass any of it. So the deterrence is you can catch things probabilistically and most people don't want to commit a whole bunch of crimes at once because they all have individual punishments.

[jonathantf2]

B-but... if we have an ID card the "government" will be able to track us! /s It does annoy me how much people get away with scaremongering, I just read a comment of someone who's against digital payments because "then the government will be able to work out how much tax you owe"????