King’s Speech

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, a key test of this Government in five years’ time will be whether we are a more civilised country, a more tolerant society and a healthier democracy, with greater public confidence and engagement in it and less divisive rhetoric. In the previous Parliament, we saw many measures introduced by a Conservative Government who were constantly seeking to change in their favour the rules by which elections are conducted to try and assist their return to office—to which I might say, “A fat lot of good it did them”.

The Conservatives introduced the most restrictive form of photo ID without any evidence that it was necessary, despite overwhelming evidence that it was not and with a scheme that went far beyond what either the Electoral Commission or the election review conducted by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, had suggested. We need to scrap or replace the photo ID rules. If ID is deemed necessary, the official polling card should suffice. Using it would save £180 million over the next decade.

The photo ID did not save the Government but there were many close results where these very restrictive ID rules may have made a difference. They include the Basildon and Billericay constituency, where the former chairman of the Conservative Party, Richard Holden, scraped in by just 20 votes, having been parachuted into a seat that was supposed to have had a 20,000-plus majority.

A post-election survey by More in Common suggested that 400,000 voters were turned away at polling stations never to return, because they did not have the requisite ID. For each one of them, there were probably several people on the registers who did not go in the first place, because of the new rules. This must have been a factor in the lowest turnout for 20 years.

An even bigger scandal is that, according to the Electoral Commission, as many as 8 million people were incorrectly not included on the voting registers. Almost all of them would have been unable to vote, even though they were legally entitled to do so. Most people think that the process of voter registration is automatic. It is not, but it should be, so I welcome the announcement that we will move to automatic voter registration.

To help make changes fairly, we need to restore and strengthen the independence of the Electoral Commission. The strategy and policy statement foisted on it by the last Government should be withdrawn, never to be replaced.

As for the voting system, it is a scandal that, in so many constituencies, people did not really have a choice of MP, as the real choice lay with a party machine that can foist MPs upon them. Only 30% of those who voted on 4 July got the MP that they voted for, and many of the 30% were voting tactically against another party.

While I welcome the Ministers to the Front Bench opposite, I ask them to consider that the single biggest mistake of the Blair Government in 1997 was to think that they would never lose another election. This meant that those around Tony Blair saw no need to move to a fairer voting system providing real choices for voters. After two full terms in office, they considered that winning again in 2005 with 35% of the vote was good enough, but it was not and they lost. This Government start with having received just 34% of the vote.

The failure of those Labour Governments from 1997 to make progress on voting reform led directly to what was frequently referred to in the campaign, by the then Labour Opposition, as a “decade of chaos.” With the now noble Lord, Lord Cameron, the soon to be Baroness May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, it could not possibly be said that we had the stable government that was supposed to be the main justification for the first past the post system. We need to do everything we can to make sure that every vote counts.