A no-brainer in the Merrian-Webster online dictionary is ‘something that requires a minimum of thought,’ and in the Collins online dictionary as ‘something so obvious, simple, etc., as to require little thought.’ AI also pops up a definition on a screen, but this blog does not read AI. Every definition of a no-brainer means basically the same thing, apart from as the Collins online points out, there is a very informal USA slang which could occasionally refer to a person as a no-brainer, meaning they are really stupid, but even that is a bit stupid because there are plenty more words to describe a stupid person which don’t require four syllables, so the usual use of a no-brainer is not about a person themselves, but the action, the proposed plan, the intention to do something which has a tangible evidence.
Someone might say this title sounds a little muddled. ID cards are for humans who sure, are citizens, but dogs could not have an ID card because they are animals, they don’t have pockets or wallets or an i-phone to have a digital ID. Animals come under licences or certificates, and dogs live with a human who will have an ID of some sort, or live in a charity animal rescue home when it’s owner cannot care for it due to ill health or unforeseen circumstances, or the foreseen circumstances of being a lifestyle accessory and after a big hype then finds itself in an animal rehoming place but that place will have the relevant Council paperwork for trading and animal matters.
In the ‘UK’ at present an individual human does not have a government ID card but a variety of all sorts of different ID options, and an individual dog does not have its own ID either. Cats wish to be stated that they stand apart from discussions of this nature.
ID cards are about citizens, and a citizen is the same term for every human citizen because it is not the actual person even though we are ‘citizens’, but it is the legal bond between a governing power and the people of its jurisdiction. This writer studied law a long time ago and finds the terms jurisdiction and jurisprudence endlessly fascinating and unfortunately dropped from common parlance in the rise of the ‘Cult of the Individual.’ Before a digression slips in, the link between a governing power and the people within that jurisdiction – the area of power, control, responsibility, agency, same page – are citizens because that link creates a national country which is on geography but is the actually the geography. Someone from another national jurisdiction might be visiting another geographical region, but it does not make them a citizen when they arrive because they do not have that legal, governmental, citizen link. So a citizen is defined by that legal link of government and governance top down (two more deeply relevant words there, g+g), and of course everybody knows, a citizen in the noun is a human being with both rights and responsibilities under that legal link, back to the governing power which issues the citizenship.
So an ‘ID card’ is the shorthand for not any ID, not a passport, driving licence, birth certificate, or a few other possibilities which every citizen of a jurisdiction carries, either in its pocket or on its i-phone. The website of World Privacy Forum shows the areas of Earth (that spinning mass of rock in space, held in place by the Light and gravity of Helios)where ID cards are compulsory. This means that every citizen of those nation states all carry the same ID card in the generic sense, with their individual identity on that generic card.
https://worldprivacyforum.org/posts/national-ids-and-biometrics
Whether an ID card is ‘mandatory to carry at all times,’ or every citizen has an ID card is only a semantic difference. It is the fact of the citizen ID which is at point here. In the ‘UK’ we do not have citizen ID cards but we did in the National Registration Act 1939, in WWII, and kept until 1952 when Sir Winston Churchill’s government abolished the concept as not just unnecessary but ‘not British’. The population of the ‘UK’ in 1952 was just over 50 million people. Because identification is such a very necessary link in governance, or who is it that is being governed and has these rights and responsibilities, just as penguins can identify other adults and baby penguins out of thousands, such is the care the adults penguins provide with their offspring, the concept of a societal link is the point of this blog. Dyslexia may have taken over there. The point was that for a group of the same species to survive, there has to be that governing link which links the same species, although many many species inhabit the same patch of land and many billions inhabit the Earth, as it spins in space. The information on the Institute for Government’s website gives such a very useful overview of the question of ID cards in the ‘UK’ (apostrophes this blog’s, not the IoG)
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/digital-id-cards
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/government-still-has-questions-answer-digital-ids
Tony Blair, of the government which upended the global education network into a bubble which is rapidly collapsing leaving millions in a desperate state, often in a foreign country and unable to go back to the apparent lack of freedoms where they came from, amongst all the other collapses in the ‘UK’ from that era, is in favour of ID cards, though on his ‘Institute for Global Change’ (whatever on Earth that means) webpage states ‘digital ID systems improve governance, facilitate greater inclusion, fuel economic growth, and help governments achieve their core goals.’ The benefits to governments are stated as administering the benefit system more smoothly, and the NHS, and keeping personal data actually safer rather than having many different forms of ID. The last point seems completely valid.
This blog observes the other direction of travel, as it were, and instead of going outwards into ID cards making it easier to administer governance to the whole world, fuel economic growth however it is believed that would happen, and greater inclusion, this blog is observing what would happen if ID cards or digital was mandated for every citizen of the ‘UK’. The various discussions and half starts of projects, as detailed on the IoG website, since 1952, are on the same legal concept of the link between governing body and humans who are called citizens, the ID card which formalises that neutral fact of the citizen.
However, from 1952 the society of the ‘UK’ has changed out of all recognition. The population of just over 50m has risen to c.70 million, that’s a rise of 40%, and now instead of localised societies, often in situ for 100s and even 1,000s of years, regional societies formed by the very different geography, accents, agricultural produce or fishing (before decimated by the EU), with the cities and major towns all with the groupings of ethnic minority people from all over Earth, as were the different white people spread over the ‘UK’ from Irish red and brown to the Swedish white sort, the Welsh again, Scotland ranging all from Irish to Norse people, and the Cornish a distinct physique and language, with most humans very close to production of vegetables, meat, fish if coastal, fruit, fresh water, all in their place within the seasonal year. In 2025 with societal collapse, systems collapse, the Palace of Westminster needing urgent repair, the political parties elected on protest votes, appeals to ‘the young’, the stated democracy bringing people from all over the world to have their voice, freedom, opportunity, individual identity, and be assured of guaranteed economic prosperity and not just that but growth, the ‘UK’ is in such a very great opportunity to examine this question of the link between citizen and government.
In general a mass of confusions can only be sorted if there is a common denominator, and a common denominator in maths is the baseline number of a fraction so 2/5, 3/5 and 4/5 all relate to each other in some way, and as a percentage that is 40, 60 and 80 (just check that, yes, it is) because a percentage is governed by 100 which creates the top down governance to define all the figures, or citizens. Why is the ‘UK’ since the time of reality of war had faded so opposed to ID cards? Reform are against it, Nigel Farage for again the fact that it is just not British. So what is British? The map of countries, the 131 of them, which have ID cards are about functional government, so why in this time of absolute collapse and impending god knows what would a government in the ‘UK’ not want to introduce an ID card, hard copy or digital?
If there would be one action to rapidly bring many many issues under one alignment, if the centralised link between citizen and gov was an entity in itself, how much in percentage figures would the so many aspects of societal collapse just lose their identity, from the fact of having that identity card? Just by implementing one for each citizen – not offering or encouraging or ‘nudging’ or persuading – how much would society order itself around the concept of the citizen and the restoration of nothing more than the survival of a society requiring a balance of both rights and responsibilities. With everything now filtered through the individual and the days of WWII when raising an army was a reality, and the citizens all formed round the necessary actions for that, and the link land, each human, government was too obvious for anyone to know how things would look in 2025, if one single thing could bring some clarity to the multiplying questions faced by a collapsing society, why not do it?
Humans are humans, canines are canines, but the concept of ID this blog sees as the same. The concept in really general terms is what is it and what function does it fulfil, and is there any difference between the clarity which ID cards bring to raise the human citizens above their ‘individual rights’ to being just one common denominator of millions within a nation but that new identity which is formed which links government to humans. With the dog population having risen to about 13 million in the ‘UK’ in 2025, for all the reasons of the pandemic when people suddenly wanted a puppy to cheer them up and puppy farms sprang up overnight to provide the new commodity and the dog food industry saw the next economic boom, the dog coats and accessories industries jumped fast into smart outfits for all occasions, the dog sitters, dog walkers, dog psychologists, dog hairdressers, dog therapists, all entered the boom with largely the female humans responsible for this strange madness of creating a sweet little child not from the normal practices of the goodness of men and women interaction (and which was largely good until the ‘women and girls’ misanthropy created the new witch hunt, now against males). The millions of dogs now, 13 million of them, form a whole new society both in the link the (mostly) females have created with a dog instead of a man and which can be controlled and projected onto with ease and the societal chaos in dog bites, plastic bags of dog poo left around, if it is picked up and really why is it not used as fertilizer or something, the new societal issues of vet bills, the need to work from home because of the dog, and of course the inevitable end result of many dogs just being put out to a dogs home when it does not fit anymore with requirements, just as the females now put the men out when they want some of their own individual expression time and space. It is also said to be a ‘British thing’ to love animals, though the French in a much bigger land area have only about half the number of dogs in the jurisdiction of the French government, and in France the link between chien, owner, government is a much clearer alignment than in the ‘UK’. Everyone is more on board, on the same page, the citizens to the government et les chiens avec leur citoyen francais (which has accent of course).
If a dog licence was required for ownership of any dog from a little pooch to a big strong dog, costing say £10, how would that automatically reduce this new societal crisis of over 13 million dogs in the ‘UK’? It would do, that’s just a fact not an opinion. Why? Because less people would get dogs on a whim, therefore less dogs would be soon taken to an overflowing dogs home, and there would be less of a marketing magnet for venison and duck dog food at £9.99, less of a market for dog coats, hairdressers, psychologists, attacks by off the lead dogs, etc., and less people would find themselves facing a large vet’s bill. Would the RSPCA think that is a good idea? Would the police? Would the many different dog’s homes? Would a societal poll in a neighbourhood, anonymous of course? All probably yes, this blog does not want to assume for anyone. If a government was faced with Yes or No, introduce a dog licence costing £10 to the local council before ownership of a dog is legal, the same response would raise to the human ID card – not fair on the individual, and for the dog’s licence no doubt, how could people be expected to pay £10?
Human ID cards and dog licences can therefore both be taken as the same governmental issue, and a healthy governance link between citizen and government could put both in place within one month, or thereabouts. Implementing both actions would rapidly bring an alignment, and in alignments that which is not in alignment rapidly falls away because the common denominator forms a living identity. That is not meant to be mystical talk but merely the living reality of the seen and unseen which links a functioning society, of humans or bees or geese or ants or mackerel.