I moved from the UK to Scandinavia, where there is a federated ID (BankID) that you use to access pretty much everything and it removes all this complexity that the UK has. I can't imagine life without such an easy system. One of the downsides is that there's a bit of a catch-22 to getting an ID in the first place but once you've managed that it's done.

A key difference is the relationship between the people and the government and the motivation behind creating a federated ID. There's definitely an element of governmental monitoring to the Scandinavian model but the relationship with the government is less adversarial than in the UK.