I was a campaigner against ID cards back then, and this is basically spot on: even back then, the people on the street who supported ID cards mentioned immigration. What happened? The biometric residence permits. ID cards are mandatory if you're a non-EU immigrant. The rest of the "hostile environment" made proof of immigration status mandatory for employment and renting a house. We got all the pieces of a surveillance state except the ID cards - because that's what the public wanted.

All of the Windrush fiasco and other Home Office outrages show that the UK is pretty comfortable with bureaucratic authoritarianism so long as they think it only applies to immigrants.