UK FREEDOM PASSPORTS TO BE ISSUED TO THE COVID NEGATIVE?

UK government is awarding contracts to firms to design an app that can be used to show a person is Covid-19 negative. This will allow the user to acquire a 'freedom passport' which will allow you to enter pubs, schools, and workplaces, and other public venues. The article says the government haven't quite decided to do this, but it looks like they're thinking in that direction.

The article raises the question of how the 'hapless', would be able to prove their 'negativity' if they haven't got a smartphone or some other whiz kid device. Presumably, they would have to go out and buy one or be refused admittance. Needles to say, this would be classed as essential shopping. 

Although I don't take a blasé attitude towards the Covid pandemic and take precautions, it does raise serious issues concerning civil liberties and possibly discrimination.

A university lecturer said to me only recently, that he thought Britain was beginning to resemble Vichy France. I said, I thought, a more appropriate comparison was with East Germany - more state control, the erosion of civil liberties, shop a neighbour, more spying, and the Stasi on your back. 

I just wonder what Mrs Gamp would have made of all this surveillance? After all, "I am not  a Rooshan  or a Prooshan" as she says: "and consequently cannot suffer spies to be set over me."