UK digital IDs – utopia battles dystopia at a Westminster policy conference

For much of this decade, the mood music in Westminster, the seat of national politics in the UK, has been that Britain wants to introduce a national digital identity scheme. It took UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government to move forward on the idea this autumn, but a unified digital ID has been debated by policymakers for years, at least since the days of Boris Johnson's Conservative administration.

Even so, this week's Westminster eForum policy conference on next steps for digital identity takes place in a new context: the decision to stop kicking the can down Whitehall, the center of British Government administration, and instead attempt to boot it into the back of the net (the Prime Minister is passionate about football).

This is a bold move for several reasons. First, previous eForums on this subject (see diginomica, passim) have focused on the significant challenges of ...