It’s hard to feel sympathetic. It’s actually gracious of them to offer an alternative.

Identity cards are free and you cannot really live without, you need to other your identity quite often. Sure, there are some convoluted ways to avoid that but it is a road paved with pain.

It is like the ability to make z handwritten cheque. It is clearly described in the law but I wrote me to meet someone who wrote accept such a document. I guess the bank itself would be stunned.

In many countries a declaration that you have no id card will be met with a blank stare by most people. In the UK it's one of the most politically toxic ideas imaginable. So extra points to the Starmer government for making it exponentially worse by proposing it be mandatory AND digital. We already have cheap passports, licenses and national insurance numbers, so i cannot think of a single way this measure will improve our lives. A consideration which is completely alien to Starmer and co, who can't understand why people are so stupid to prefer the "fascist" narrative over theirs.

While the US government issues documents that work for identification everywhere (called passports) approximately nobody living in the US actually has a passport.

So when planes began to be attacked by bad guys some decades ago, the aviation industry (regulated at the federal level, because it doesn't take long to fly out of the state you start in) decided to use the identification document that everyone does have: the drivers license.

But those are issued by the states, not the federal government.

And the states don't all do a great job of the surveillance state stuff, so it's pretty easy for a budding Mr Terrorist to get a drivers license, and for his state to not bother keeping much in the way of records to find him if he ever hijacks a plane.

The solution to this falls under the category of the US "trying everything before they get it right" -- the federal government (via congress) decided that only drivers licenses issued by states that get the surveillance stuff right to their satisfaction would be usable to get on a plane (passport always worked and still works, fwiw).

Some states said "ok, that's fine". Some states said "nope, not doing it". <insert years of wrangling> The final solution was that the "not doin it" states were told they could issue two kinds of drivers license (real-id and...un-real-id).

Since you have to explicitly request a real-id license in those states, which costs more, and because people are lazy and ill-informed, there are still people with no valid id document to get on a plane.

So now we get to the present day where the solution to that problem is to not let them on the plane. Oh...wait, no, the solution is to charge them $45.