Labour *DID* bring in an ID Card system, it was scrapped by both the Tories (on financial grounds) and the Lib Dems (on the basis of civil liberty/privacy concerns).
Had it been merely an ID Card which establishes that the owner is who they say they are and a PKI cert so the owner could do the same for online transactions (exactly as they do in many other countries) then we'd probably still have it and there wouldn't have ever been a problem for most people. It would be quite useful for the homeless I'd have thought (once their ID was initially established, which is not always trivial).
Unfortunately that is not what we got... instead what we got was a vastly overreaching biometric database that logged every time it was accessed (forever) that could not be proved wrong in court (leading to an effective end-run around habeas corpus), that broke the web of trust based around other forms of ID, provided a single point of failure/weakness for identity theft and was really a multi-billion pound boondoggle for whoever got the backhander from Crapita.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
