And so on.
Please do not get confused with social security numbers (or equivalents) as universal or national identifiers. They are not, although their use in such a manner has caused issues (as pointed out in my comments here).
Coming from a country, Sweden, with no mandatory ID card and a national identity number, it was both quaint and a real hassle to deal with the odd notion that a national ID number in the UK was a threat to me, but in Sweden it wasn’t. I had more trouble because of it in the UK than I ever had in Sweden. And in the UK you often had to use a passport to identify yourself, which in practice is a national ID.
No ID cards are to be issued by the Secretary of State at any time on or after the day on which this Act is passed.
The UK equivalent of a SSN is a National Insurance number, but it’s totally possible to be a citizen without one (e.g. naturalised non-working spouse). NI numbers also aren‘t guaranteed to be unique (if a person is assigned a temporary NI number it’ll be non-unique with other people with the same birth date).
This is reasonably misleading, as nothing at all stops a new government with a parliamentary majority from simply scrapping that law.
Mmm, that’s not true. Courts recognise EU supremacy over the British parliament, although it would be possible to ant-fuck this point if you were feeling truly pedantic.