When did this almost Reaganite sentiment ("I'm from the government and I'm here to help") make home in the UK? I know it's not recent: I remember similar arguments coming from the No2ID camp in 2005 at-least.

For ID cards specifically most of the hostility was towards Blair's specific implementation which had a wide-ranging database that pretty much everyone and their dog in the public sector and beyond would have access to. While the arguments are perhaps a bit weaker in the modern day where the government taps the internet backbones and surveillance is a major category of business model, there were definitely good arguments against Blair's proposals that weren't necessarily applicable to ID cards in general.

I don't think it's necessarily Thatcherism that made people like this, just a slow erosion of trust that the government has the competency to carry out the tasks of a modern country that's accelerated as time's gone on. Anecdotally Liz Truss's episode as Prime Minister seemed to be the final straw for a lot of people's goodwill towards the government.

Quite a lot of it is Reaganism, via Thatcher. Probably dates from the Winter of Discontent.

It's not entirely without merit, but only because there's a tendency to drastically underfund and micromanage state services. And things like the Post Office Horizon fiasco do not make the government look good here.

On the other hand GDS is excellent - but that's almost entirely as a result of staff professionalism, rather than being driven by whichever ministers had the leadership of the civil service.

An odd outcome of the ID discourse is that we now have an extremely high tech biometric identity system .. but only for immigrants.

'The Post Office' is a private company. Wasn't the Horizon system implemented after privatisation?

No. The Post Office is not a private company, it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder.

It was changed from a government department to a statutory corporation in 1969. It was then changed to a public limited company in 2000.

Furthermore:

- Post Office Ltd owns and runs Post Office Counters Ltd which runs the post office branches. This is the company that uses Horizon (since 1999)

- Royal Mail delivers mail to addresses, and owns the Postcode Address File. Royal Mail was separated from the Post Office and privatised in 2013. It has never used Horizon.

Horizon is an EFTPOS/accounting system, nothing to do with mail delivery. It was introduced to the Post Office in 1999 after Fujitsu/ICL were originally commissioned by government to build an accounting system for the Benefits Agency, and it was so awful and buggy the Benefits Agency rejected it, so the government asked them to retool it for the Post Office.

> it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder.

...isn't that PR China's business-model: state-capitalism?

It's the other way around here; the Post Office is effectively a government department, cosplaying as a commercial business. It has never posted a profit. It's up to the government to bail it out, every time. It's controlled at arms length by a body called UK Government Investments (UKGI) who crack the whip at it and try to ensure "value for the taxpayer".

The rest of the UK government is capitalism on stilts, and is forever outsourcing everything to the private sector. There was a scandal when the outsourcing firm Carillion went bankrupt - we learned that the cleaners in Parliament were under four layers of subcontracting - i.e. four sets of middlemen taking a cut between the government paying for cleaning Parliament and the people who actually do the cleaning. One of those middlemen was Carillion, which had just paid £79m of dividends to investors and then collapsed with £7000m in liabilities and £29m cash. That's because capitalism is perfectly efficient, and it's not just a bunch of crooks cooking the books to appear to be perfectly efficient, right?

There's certainly been distrust/mild distain for the govt in Scotland, Wales, and The North since Reagan's gender-swap, Thatcher, for broadly similar reasons Reagan is maligned

I'm saying this as quite a strongly left-wing person. I am very much in favour of competent government intervention and regulation of markets. But the current government, probably since Thatcher, has shown themselves to be incapable of delivering large-scale national projects.

Take the aircraft carriers for example, we’ve currently got 2 but only purchased enough aircraft for half of one.

Whether you view this as a mistake of over investment or under investment, it’s clearly a mistake of some sort.

See also HS2.

But they already have. The Post Office was still nationalised when post codes were distributed.

True, but it's specifically the modern UK government - with its penchant for outsourcing jobs to ministers mates and bloated contractors - whose competency at large scale projects I dread.