The author raises valid points and summons commentary like the below, all in service of a defeatist position that presents a panopticon as inevitable.

If a national government like the UK, “has long since left behind the kind of simplicity that can be managed without government ID.”, then all the better. Let it fail.

“The historian AJP Taylor described that England, which in his words existed before August 1915: a country in which ‘a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman’.”