"Papers, please" - Not in Britain.

When the Labour government recently announced plans for a digital-ID card scheme, the public backlash was immediately hostile. Nearly three million people have already signed a petition opposing the idea. It is not just that Britons resent carrying another bit of plastic or presenting more digital credentials. The deeper reason is that Britain’s national political and constitutional tradition has always treated the carrying of identity papers with suspicion. We may be technologically advanced and digitally connected – Britain has embraced cashless payment more than any other country – but at heart we remain a country built on the idea that citizens are free people — not subjects whose movements, identities and everyday lives must be documented at the whim of the state.

To understand why Labour’s digital-ID proposal matters so much, and why it has stirred such discomfort,  it helps to look back over the history of identity cards in Britain to see how past efforts succeeded or failed, and how they established a deep cultural resistance.

The early attempts: 1915 to 1919

The first time Britain introduced anything close to a national ID regime was during the First World War. Under the National Registration Act 1915, a system of registration and identity cards was established. However, the concept was short-lived and regarded entirely as a wartime expedient. The first national register (1915-1919), and accompanying identity card proved to be a failure. The 1915 National Registration Act was passed amid wartime panic — originally to help mobilise manpower and track the workforce. In true British bureaucratic fashion, its purposes soon became blurred and confused. It was supposed to aid conscription, then to identify skilled workers, then to regulate labour… and by the end, no one quite knew what it was for. That loss of clarity undermined legitimacy.

The first register was a patchwork of local lists compiled by councils with little central coördination. Cards were often misfiled, misprinted or not updated. People changed jobs or moved house faster than the system could keep up. It became an unwieldly administrative liability, never up-to-date and therefore never accurate. In peacetime the idea simply could not be sustained — the public accepted it during crisis, but once the war ended the appetite vanished.

Wartime redux: 1939 to 1952

The second serious attempt came at the start of the Second World War under the National Registration Act 1939. The government required identity cards to be carried and a national register maintained. This system had greater practical uptake and was a partial success. Success was born of necessity: war, rationing, population movement, evacuation. The system was deeply tied to other war-time controls (rations, housing, manpower) and to all intents and purposes piggy-backed off other regulatory systems thereby making it more palatable to the public. Nonetheless, as soon as the war ended, the pressure grew for abolition. Yet, while peace may have returned, bureaucracy marched on. The Labour Government kept the wartime identity cards, claiming they were indispensable for everything from National Service and rationing to family allowances, post-war credits, and the brand-new National Health Service (NHS). The Post Office, never shy of red tape, insisted on seeing a card if a clerk so much as doubted a customer’s identity.

It took a High Court ruling that called into question whether it was right for authorities to continue to use a power given during a national emergency when the emergency no longer existed. On 22 February 1952 the cards were finally abolished – yet individual registration lingered on through the NHS and National Insurance Numbers. Regardless, the compulsory identity card as a visible everyday burden was ended. The belief was that when the law of emergency ends, the extraordinary system must roll back. The public felt that there was no longer any need for identity papers, in the same way there was no sense that NHS COVID Passports should be retained after the end of the pandemic.

The post-war consensus: no papers, no compulsory ID

From 1952 onwards, Britain reverted to a system in which identity documents are used (passports, driving licences, etc.), but there is no legal requirement for all adults to carry a government-issued identity card and produce it on demand. This became an intrinsic aspect of our sense of national identity. Even when another Labour government tried to re-introduce the ID-card idea in the early 2000s, they faced public resistance. In 2003 MP Simon Thomas told the House of Commons:

The Government have not presented a unified argument in their discussion of a national ID card. They have been as convincing as they have been consistent. We were told first that ID cards would deter international terrorism and political violence; next that they would enable the Government to end benefit fraud.

All sounds very familiar. The Labour government twenty years ago was trying to justify the policy as a solution to much bigger problems, but the public and Parliament back then smelt a rat. The lack of clear, limited purpose undermined trust. Between the war-time experience and more recent debates, a pattern emerges:

1. Identity cards work when the government can tie them to another, widely accepted regime (rationing, war-time mobilisation, pandemic).

2. When the emergency ends, the public demands roll-back of visible identity-papers.

3. In peacetime a mandatory ID is regarded as at odds with British values of liberty, privacy and trust in the individual.

   
   

By 2010 the scheme had been scrapped. The reasons echo old arguments: high cost, weak public trust, and mission‐creep, as well as fears about databases, surveillance and civil liberties.

So why has Britain always rejected them?

Fast forward to 2025. Another Labour government and another attempt to introduce compulsory ID. The current iteration is not exactly a physical identity card in your pocket, but rather a proposal from the Government to roll out a mandatory digital ID for adults — initially to prove right to work. On the face of it, the message is modern: smartphones, digital wallets, less paper. But for anyone familiar with the history, alarm bells sound.

The lessons of 1915-52 warn us: identity registration tends to creep into peacetime state control, unless carefully constrained. The same fears about central databases and mission-creep apply, even when the credential is ‘digital’ not physical. Indeed, the current policy paper even acknowledges that the reïnstatement of a mandatory ID scheme would come against the long-standing tradition that cards are fundamentally at odds with British values and civil liberties. The idea that the card will be used for right to work checks raises the very scenario historically rejected: regular citizens subject to state credentials if they want to live freely in society. Furthermore, all employers are already required to check the right of new employees to work in the UK.

The promised convenience (access to public services, easier forms) may sound attractive — but the historical pattern is that convenience alone is not substitute for trust. Without trust the system is resisted. In an era of government departments losing confidential material and increasing cyber attacks against the state, who is willing to place their faith in this system?

History teaches that any national ID system in Britain needs to meet at least two strict tests if it is to stand a chance of broad acceptance:

1. Clear scope and limitation. The system must be framed as narrowly as possible: what it is for, what it is not for, and how the information will be used and archived. The past shows that when a card becomes a gateway to multiple state powers, public trust collapses.

2. Strong justification and direct benefit. If a scheme is presented as a tool of state control rather than a tool for citizen empowerment it will fail.

3. Voluntary or limited compulsion. When the state demands compliance from all citizens simply to participate in everyday life (work, health, benefits), resistance rises.

Conclusion

Britain’s long-standing aversion to identity cards is no accident. It is built into our national story of liberty, individualism and scepticism of bureaucratic power. It is possible to argue that the digital age requires new forms of verification, but if we ignore history, we risk repeating its mistakes: effective ID systems do not carry the imprint of mandated subjecthood, nor do they survive when introduced without broad public trust. The left-wing and statist Guardian perhaps put it best in its February 1952 editorial on the abolition of identity cards:

If our affairs were governed by the strictest considerations of efficiency we should not only carry identity cards but also work-books (on the Nazi and Russian model) and have our fingers printed (as in gloriously free America). But in this country we do not like this sort of thing. Better a little evasion and inefficiency than too much petty bureaucratic interference with the individual. The Labour Party ought to know this characteristic of its countrymen by now.

Sources

• Agar, J. Identity cards in Britain: past experience and policy implications. History & Policy, November 2005. (History & Policy)

• “Identity cards abolished after 12 years – archive, 1952.” The Guardian, 22 February 2018. (The Guardian)

• “Mixed feelings on Labour’s plan for mandatory digital ID.” The Guardian, 29 September 2025. (The Guardian)

• “Digital ID in the UK.” House of Commons Research Briefing, 2025. (Research Briefings)

• “New digital ID scheme to be rolled out across UK.” GOV.UK, 26 September 2025. (GOV.UK)

§  https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194