www.nesta.org.uk/blog/the-britcard-more-than-digital-identity-card-this-could-be-a-potent-symbol-of-pluralism-and-belonging/
For me, there are two ways to think about identity. “Big I”, if you will, is about who we are as people. When we seek comfort in belonging, when we have visceral reactions for and against one group or other, when we consider our lives in a wider context, we are addressing the politically potent questions of “Big I” of our identity.
By contrast, “little i” identity is the practical world of identifying ourselves, of states and non-state bodies issuing credentials that entail rights and responsibilities. So when a festival venue gives me a wrist pass, when a club sends out a card that gives bar discounts to members or when a state places an ankle tag on a prisoner or issues a passport to a citizen, these actions are all part of the practices of “little i” identity: who is this person, what rights and responsibilities go along with being that person, and how do the right systems know the particular categories that a person falls into?
LabourTogether’s suggestion that the government issue a BritCard - a digital wallet with right to work, right to residency, and perhaps a driving license - is an example of the ‘little i’; but I think it could embrace ‘Big I’, too.
For me, the two identities are very much linked. I remember in 1983 my father becoming anxious and pre-occupied by the arcane details of the updated Nationalities Act. He had escaped Nazi Germany by the skin of his teeth in 1938; his parents did not - for lack of passports with visas - and his father was subsequently executed at Sachsenhausen in 1941. His escape from Germany in 1938 was made possible by a Polish travel document, so for him, having a passport was the essence of his Britishness; ‘Big I’ was fused with “little i”.
He kept official documents in a personal shrine: the 1938 letter from the Cologne SS expelling Polish Jews who had lost their Polish citizenship, the bureaucratic notification of the death of his father from the Sachsenhausen authorities and his act of naturalisation. The material manifestations of “little i” identity got woven into what it was to be him.
And it seems that the physical passport is, for one reason or another, an important part of Britishness for many people - part of their ‘Big I’
How else can one explain the prominence that Brexit gave to the freedom to return to the dark blue passport? The physical embodiment of the rights represented matter to people. Football club shirts, flags, membership cards, stickers - these material representations of belonging matter, possibly because the rights, responsibilities and attachments that they represent are so hard to define or express.
LabourTogether are right to point out utilitarian aspects of their proposed BritCard. For example, today, it is easier and cheaper for an employer to conduct a right to work check on a legal immigrant than on a UK worker, because the Home Office already issues digital right to work credentials to legal immigrants. UK subjects do not have such a digital document.
A photocopy of a passport or driving license does not give an HR department the same degree of confidence that someone has a right to work as does the Home Office’s digital solution. I can picture many pub conversations where this grain of truth that “the administration makes it easier to employ migrants than British subjects” gets turned into a mountain of false impressions about the actual biases in society and who suffers from them. It pays to be very attentive to these details, and this particular one is easy and simple to address with these new digital tools.
But these objective reasons of fairness and convenience for issuing the BritCard should be intelligently and intentionally merged with the symbolic aspects, those which bridge “little i” and “Big I”.
Eric Hobsbawm and a group of fellow historians noticed the importance of the careful construction of national symbols, especially during periods of great change in everyday existence. As he writes, “it is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the ‘invention of tradition’ so interesting”.
It is natural to associate such inventions with conservatism, and Hobsbawm notes its links in the late 19th century and early 20th to nationalist - and often toxic - movements. But he is far from dismissive. He notes the invention of a distinctive “Swiss” history post 1848, untainted by subsequent Nazism, as a necessity of that country’s modern nation-building. Our politics, dominated as it is by divisions, is in one of those periods when the constant change of modernity threatens to overwhelm our ability to face the future together. The BritCard, combining the high tech of cryptographic credentials with a now old and accepted reality of “papers”, can embrace the invention of tradition.
Here’s my starter for ten. I would make the BritCard and the GOV.UK Wallet (I think of the latter as a container for different BritCards) skinnable and customisable. The wallet and cards would be issued with some small number of iconic representations for the different credentials. The digital passport could be the absolute ideal of the dark blue passport; or perhaps there could be some banknote style iconic figures and scenes - Jane Austin, Sid Vicious, The Battle of Britain, the Windrush…
People could change to a different icon, or they could create/upload their own. The one thing that would be made quite clear is that these iconic representations would be visible to whoever saw that person’s credentials. If someone were presenting their “I am over 18” credential at the bar, club or off-license, the requester would see their icon as well as the credential. Just like the bumper sticker, the football colours or the dark blue wallet in which some people slotted their EU-Burgundy passports before Brexit, the credential would be partly public.
For example, I would be very tempted to put the equivalent of my passport behind a cross of St George surrounded by 12 European stars, pointing to Anthony Barnett’s compelling case for the political expression of a European, English civic nationalism. My driving license I might like to put behind a Mini Cooper in racing green, or - in a nod to the essence of the British post-war period - a Robin Reliant. Or I might just stick with whatever I had been defaulted into. These would be simple acts of expression, perhaps triggers for conversations, perhaps for a few moments of reflection about my relationship to the nation and to the state. What is more, the very act of being able to express myself on these questions would itself be an expression of a real political culture of pluralism for which Britain can often be proud.
The technologies of digital identity are going through a pivotal moment. The recently passed Data (Use and Access) Bill sets up the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes which will provide assurance that identity providers can be trusted.
The world of “little i” identity will be transformed by these new legal structures, together with laws that make digital credentials common currency and with technology companies understanding that this will allow the wallet to properly move completely into the phone.
Many of us have experienced the dance at the aircraft gate where we have our boarding pass on our phone, our passport in our hands and our luggage in another hand. We need to keep walking while opening the passport to the right page, the phone is in danger of being dropped, we feel the pressure of the queue behind us… Now, all the checking of credentials should go through a process essentially equivalent to doing a payments transfer on our phones, through the Near-Field Communication (NFC) chip (a component that enables short-range, wireless communication between two devices).
Why do employers need to have a plastic card-issuing system for security gates when digital credentials can do the trick? And what about my favourite credential in my own wallet, my annual membership card of the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, proving my insurance and qualification standard to fly, which still requires me to find a physical photograph of myself every year? Identity has been a backwater of cyberspace for too long, partly because of its libertarian roots that initially loved the freedoms of anonymity and pseudonymity.
But we have grown up from that phase. The LabourTogether proposal aims to make an important political point with the coming technologies of digital identity. Digital credentialising is going to reduce fraud, reduce costs, reduce everyday annoyances; it will make the Internet safer for children through more effective age-verification; it will make it easier to open bank accounts, to rent property, to get a phone deal. Moreover, AI will increasingly develop a demand for the “prove to me you’re human, not bot” credential, and these technologies will deliver that too. The techno-legal infrastructure of ‘little i’ identity is about to become one of those really important, almost invisible transformations in our lives, as Robin Tombs, CEO of one of the pioneering firms in the space, Yoti, points out.
This should be made a little more visible in its civic dimensions, and LabourTogether's proposal usefully points that out. Let’s also give serious thought to design, to user interfaces and to how these can help to join the ‘little i’ and the ‘Big I’ of our identities - the person and the “we”. There is a major political opportunity, not only in simple utility, but also in the subtle and potent world of symbols. Let’s do it right and put in the serious thinking this deserves.
