Please Verify Your Age

The flagship sinks, the scaffolding stays up, and nobody remembers agreeing to either

For a good stretch of my working life, I was the man at the gate asking to see your pass. RAF Police, then years in senior security management, and in both jobs a surprising amount of the work came down to one question asked thousands of times: who are you, and can you prove it? What I learned standing at those barriers wasn’t much about identity. It was about people. The first time you ask someone for ID, they bristle a little, pat their pockets and wonder aloud why it’s necessary. By the hundredth time, they have it in their hand before they reach you. By the thousandth, they’d feel oddly naked if you waved them through without checking. The checking stops being an event and becomes the weather.

I’ve been thinking about that barrier a great deal since reading a short, sharp piece by Kit Knightly at OffGuardian, published back in July when the government announced a midnight social media curfew for 16- and 17-year-olds. His argument, stripped to its bones, is that none of these online safety rules is really about what they claim to be about. The nudity filters, the under-16 ban and the curfew all end in the same place: please verify your age. Fifty different questions, as he puts it, with the same answer. The real product, he says, isn’t safer children. It’s a population that has learned to hand over its face or its passport whenever a screen asks nicely.

That’s the idea I want to sit with, because I think it’s half right. I’m aware that “half right” is the least satisfying verdict in the world. It pleases neither the people who think the government is building a digital cage nor those who think anyone who questions it is wearing a tinfoil hat. But half right is where I’ve landed, and I’d rather be honest about the half that’s wrong than borrow someone else’s certainty.

What was actually announced

Let’s start with the facts, which are less dramatic than the headline. The government did announce a six-hour social media curfew from midnight for 16- and 17-year-olds, but teenagers will be able to override the default setting. Autoplay and similar features that keep people scrolling will also be switched off by default for that age group. Even the Conservative opposition noticed the obvious flaw, with Laura Trott arguing that curfews teenagers can simply switch off won’t achieve anything. So as a measure to keep a seventeen-year-old off TikTok at two in the morning, it’s roughly as effective as a “please don’t” sticker on a biscuit tin.

The under-16 ban, which Knightly writes about as though it’s already in place, isn’t yet. It was announced in June and is set to take effect by spring 2027. It was also not dreamt up in a bunker. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology ran a six-week pilot with 300 young people aged 13 to 17, testing bans, time limits and curfews, and its consultation drew nearly 30,000 responses from parents and children. Denmark and France have been moving in the same direction. Parents are genuinely frightened about what their children are being fed at three in the morning, and they have reason to be.

None of that disproves Knightly’s point. It just means the story is messier than “they want your face”. Messy stories are the ones worth telling properly.

The plot twist nobody predicted

Here’s where the OffGuardian thesis runs into trouble. Knightly argued that the outgoing Prime Minister was pushing through unpopular measures so that his successor, Andy Burnham, could enjoy a longer honeymoon before revealing himself as more of the same. Every leader is interchangeable; every road leads to the same checkpoint. It’s a tidy theory, and I’ve written in a similar spirit myself in “The Same Car, A Different Driver”. But within days of taking office, Burnham did something inconvenient for it. His office announced that the UK’s proposed digital ID scheme would be scrapped, ending one of Starmer’s more controversial policies. The estimated £1.8bn earmarked for the scheme over three years was to be redirected towards the cost of living.

There’s a lovely irony buried in that. Burnham was the Home Office minister responsible for much of the early implementation of Tony Blair’s ID card scheme in 2006, before it too was scrapped in 2010. He has now helped bury two national ID schemes, which is either a sign of personal growth or proof that Whitehall never throws an idea away; it simply leaves it in a drawer for the next person to find.

Either way, the BritCard is dead, and a public that pushed back hard enough made it so. An e-petition opposing it reached almost three million signatures, and the government had already dropped the mandatory element in January before Burnham finished the job. That matters. It tells you that objection works, sometimes, and that the future isn’t as settled as the doom merchants would have you believe.

But I spent too many years in security to stop reading at the headline. The flagship sank. The fleet didn’t.

The scaffolding stays up

The government is still developing UK One Login, a single account for accessing government services that replaces more than 190 separate login systems, and UK Wallet, an app for storing official documents digitally. The Commons Library notes there’s no indication either is affected by the cancellation. Alongside that sits a private-sector verification industry that was never part of the BritCard row in the first place. The government’s own analysis identifies 275 companies providing digital identity products and services in the UK. Every age check demanded by every new online rule is a paying customer for that industry.

So yes, the ID card is gone. What remains is the plumbing, the habit, and a market with a commercial interest in you being asked for your face as often as possible. Nobody needs to announce a national ID scheme if everyone has already verified themselves to a dozen private companies for a dozen different reasons.

This is the part of Knightly’s argument I think is right, and it’s the part that doesn’t require anyone to be a villain. In my civilian security days, I watched access control systems installed to stop stock going missing quietly become the way management checked what time staff arrived and left. CCTV put up to protect a car park ended up settling disputes about who’d taken the long lunch. Nobody sat in a meeting and plotted it. The capability existed, someone found it useful, and the original purpose drifted out of view like a buoy on the tide. Security people have a dry name for this… function creep… and every one of us has seen it happen. You don’t need intent for infrastructure to be dangerous. You only need the infrastructure, and a future owner with different priorities.

There’s also a more immediate harm the “they want your face” framing tends to skip over. The companies doing the checking hold the images, and companies get breached. In October 2025, Discord disclosed that a third-party support provider had been compromised, exposing tens of thousands of government ID images users had submitted for age verification appeals. Nobody ever intended those photographs to end up for sale. That’s rather the point.

Why getting it half wrong matters

Where I part company with the OffGuardian piece is the line that says, in effect, that this is all any of these rules are about. It’s a satisfying sentence to write. I know, because I’ve been tempted by versions of it myself. But it attributes a single hidden motive to policies with obvious and visible drivers: frightened parents, cross-party support, and governments across Europe copying one another because no politician wants to be the last to act when the next grim story about a child and an algorithm appears.

I wrote about this problem in “The Soup Problem”… the way real institutional harms get contaminated when they’re served up alongside conspiracy. The moment you claim to know what’s in someone’s head, you hand every critic an easy exit. They don’t have to answer your argument about function creep, breaches and normalisation. They just have to point out that the curfew came from a pilot study and a consultation, and suddenly you’re the bloke on the internet shouting about the Starmer Agenda, and the serious point dies of embarrassment.

The better argument is harder to dismiss precisely because it’s more modest. Intentions don’t matter nearly as much as architecture, and architecture outlives the people who commissioned it.

Then there’s the money

Which brings me to the part of this that genuinely keeps me up at night, and it isn’t teenagers on Snapchat. It’s what happens when verified identity meets programmable money.

Let’s be precise about where things stand, because precision is the only thing that separates concern from paranoia. The Bank of England says it hasn’t decided whether to introduce a digital pound, and that the earliest it would issue one is the second half of this decade. Any decision to build one would require Parliament to pass primary legislation first. The Bank is explicit on the control question too. It says neither it nor the Government would be able to program people’s digital pounds or restrict how they were spent, and both have committed that they would not access users’ personal data in a digital pound ecosystem. The decision on whether to proceed is due this year, alongside a published blueprint.

On paper, then, the safeguards are there. My problem is the phrase “on paper”. A promise written into one Act of Parliament can be rewritten by the next. Every guarantee the Bank offers today is a guarantee about the intentions of people who won’t be in the room in 2040. And we’ve just established that intentions are the weakest part of any argument about infrastructure.

What unsettles me more is that we don’t actually need a digital pound for money to become an instrument of control. In 2022, the Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of people connected to the trucker convoy protests. No central bank digital currency was involved. Ordinary banks, ordinary accounts, and an ordinary statutory power did the work. The capacity was already there, and it was used the moment someone found it convenient.

The quiet revolution isn’t the arrival of a digital currency. It’s the disappearance of the alternative. Every shop that goes card-only, every branch that closes and every cash machine that vanishes from a high street narrows the space in which you can pay for something without a record of it existing somewhere. Out here in rural Spain, living off-grid in a cave with a few friends, cash still does a good deal of the talking. I’m aware that makes me sound like a man with a vested interest in the past. But I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more I value anything that lets me act without first explaining myself to a machine.

The barrier and the bloke

So where does that leave me? Honestly, somewhere uncomfortable. The curfew might well help some teenagers sleep. The under-16 ban might spare some children the worst corners of the internet. The Bank of England might build a digital pound with every protection it promises, and might never break a single one. Burnham might keep killing ID schemes until he’s run out of Labour Prime Ministers to disappoint. Each individual brick can be defended, and some of them deserve to be.

But no single brick is the wall. That’s what I learned at the gate. Nobody resents the first check, or the tenth. It’s only years later, looking back, that you realise the barrier moved from the perimeter to the car park, then to the building, then to the corridor, and finally to the door of the room you’re sitting in. At no point did anyone ask whether you minded, because at every point the answer seemed obvious.

I’m sixty-six years old. I’ve been asked who I am more times than I could ever count, and for most of my career I was the one doing the asking. I understood then why the question mattered. What I’m no longer sure of is who’s asking now, what they’re keeping, and who they’ll be handing it to when the people making today’s promises have moved on. I have my pass in my hand already. I just can’t remember when I started holding it out.

Until Next Time