The UK government has justified this with reducing the amount of illegal workers. To work legally currently you need an NI number, this is not an improvement on that system other than requiring everyone to have a phone (probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom).
I personally do not trust the government one little bit and am sure they'll find some way to abuse this, as they have just about everything else they do at this point. This possibly sounds far fetched, but why couldn't they ask for GPS permissions on the app then use it to quickly find out who was at a pro Palestine protest for example given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
They have given us no reason to believe things will improve with it's introduction, and have given us plenty of reasons to believe it will be abused. It's almost perfect for that, "install our software on the device you have most places you go, or you can't earn a living anymore".
More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.
There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.
Currently enforcement is expensive, because in order to prove that somebody is/isn't allowed to work, you need to first identify them. Without any way of identifying workers, how could the government make the case that a company is employing people illegally? Generally crime incidence is higher when chances of getting caught are low, so as long as the government cannot practically enforce these kinds of laws, employers are more likely to continue breaking them.
The crackdown on immigrants is just an excuse. The real reason is different, the government is out of money and it doesn't believe most of the current welfare bill goes to people in genuine need. (Hence why the previous misadventures of a left-wing government involved 2 attempts at cutting welfare - first the winter bonus for pensioners, then a type disability payments).
The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.
Most pensioners don't need financial help. The fuel allowed was introduced by Gordon Brown when they were the poorest cohort in the country. Now they are they amount the most well off. Pensioners that need it still get it.
Strangely there was no fuss when universal child benefit was taken away in 2015 (or maybe later I forget). The media was full of stories about how rich people were getting £20 a week when they didn't need it.
Now apparently pensioners that have a larger income than most working families are desperate for the fuel allowance and they will be freezing to death without it. Its nonsense.
>probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom
And they can, forgive me for my rather vulgar language, fuck right off with this thinking. Problem is it will still go into place, because for most people giving up the right of being able to govern their own device that they paid for is not a problem for whatever reason. Neither will it be until it touches something that is important to them - that's when, hopefully, some more people will be able to see that we are rapidly spiralling downwards toward a complete techno-authoritarian dystopia.
>given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
A protest group attacked a military base causing £millions of damage. They got censured, as a terrorist organisation.
"Protestors" decided they wanted to support that specific organisation, taking focus away from their message and chasing after something the government simply can't countenance: allowing protestors to ruin our defensive capabilities, at immense expense to the taxpayer, just to make some headlines.
If these people cared about Palestinians then they should have given up supporting the proscribed 'terrorists' and protested in a way that didn't require the government to crack down hard. Plenty of other non-proscribed protest groups are perfectly allowed.
Private corporation's already know everywhere you go, if you have a mobile phone, or use a debit/credit card, or drive a car. The government already know where you work and when, if you pay your taxes.
What Reform/Tories/right-wingers didn't want was any solution that would ease the problems they're using to try and rile the people into full culture wars. Labour are giving them what they [say they] want: making it harder for illegal immigrants, making it harder to claim benefits. But Farage isn't really there to solve a problem, here's there to create one as a means to weadle into power (presumably so he can refuse to do any useful work with that power, as he did in the EU) so he can fuck up the UK trying to be Trump 2 Fascist Boogaloo.
It's messed up that they wasted millions of pounds that should have been sent to israel instead. If they were really serious about their cause, they should have protested in a manner that is convenient for me and totally harmless
Terrorism is targeting civilians or civilian infrastrucure to further a political goal.
Terrorism have a bad rep, but it was used successfully in South africa to remove apartheid, with the French resistance and a lot of anti-colonization movement. Targeting fuel depots and the Crimea bridge can also be considered terrorism (and is, by the russian).
I personnally think we ought to distinguish terrorism which mostly target civilians from terrorism on which civilan death are side-effect, but the US state department calling terrorists people who only killed military targets during the Irak/Afghanistan war diluted the meaning of the word further. I'm trying to push back on that, because when the meaning of terrorism is diluted enough, it stop to be a good word to describe a phenomenon we ought to stop, and start to be a word used by politician to target what they don't like.
In glad you used scare quotes around the word "terrorists", suggesting you are as cynical about this absurd misuse of the term as the rest of us. That's the actual issue here. Yes, PA's acts of civil disobedience should be punished according to law, but classing an organisation as "terrorist", based on one (?) incident that appears to have spread literally zero terror, is appalling behaviour from a pitiful, authoritarian government.
I personally do not trust the government one little bit and am sure they'll find some way to abuse this, as they have just about everything else they do at this point. This possibly sounds far fetched, but why couldn't they ask for GPS permissions on the app then use it to quickly find out who was at a pro Palestine protest for example given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
They have given us no reason to believe things will improve with it's introduction, and have given us plenty of reasons to believe it will be abused. It's almost perfect for that, "install our software on the device you have most places you go, or you can't earn a living anymore".