I don't trust the UK government either. But I'm both British and Australian and I see the need for a centralised identity service. Because the alternative is that we provide our passport to every online service that 'needs' to verify our identity. Then – lo, would you believe it! – they get hacked, and now all of our data is in the wild again . I'd much rather the government, who already know everything about me beca…
Your mistake is assuming good faith on behalf of the government who arrests thousands of people for social media posts. Beyond faith, they are incredibly incompetent and this data will be stolen.
The question isn’t whether the government can/will identify and track you. They do, in good faith or bad. This is unfortunate and attempts to allow them to decrypt or acquire additional data about citizens’ activities (like chat control) should be opposed, but identity/activity tracking is omnipresent and irreversible.
The question is whether identity credentials should be available which reduce the risk of additonal credential theft or bad-faith action (e.g. by other entities stealing non-secure-for-digital-use credentials like passports).