Was scrapping digital ID the right call?

This was not a referendum so much as a rout: scrapping the national digital ID scheme carried by a margin so lopsided that the interesting question is not who won but whether anyone seriously contested it, with barely one voter in seven willing to back the shelved policy. That the previous government's flagship digital project should die this unmourned, on a platform built for genuine argument, says something about how toxic the idea of a compulsory ID system had become well before Burnham ever touched it.

If there is a fracture at all, it runs faintly through age rather than gender — the 35-44s and the over-65s were the most willing to dissent, each still backing the scrap by a wide margin but with enough holdouts to suggest some lingering appeal to the "streamlined services" case among those old enough to remember national insurance cards or young enough to be comfortable handing data to the state either way. Women, by contrast, offered no dissent at all, a unanimity striking enough to note even from a modest sample.

The result sits squarely on the fault line the last government never resolved: state data collection versus household cost-of-living relief, with the millions of petition-signers who fought digital ID from the start effectively vindicated by a chamber that preferred £45 off electricity bills to a national database. It echoes a broader British instinct, seen in fights over the ID cards scheme two decades ago, that infrastructure promising convenience is judged first on what it might cost citizens in privacy and cash.

The floor's top Yes case distilled the mood bluntly: the country has "far better things to be spending taxpayers money on than an introduction to something no one voted for or got as say on" — a line that doubles as the epitaph for the whole scheme, since no comparably respected voice rose to defend it.

When 86% of a chamber agree on anything, the story isn't the divide — it's the consensus nobody in government saw coming.