Elections Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham. His witty, erudite and insightful speech shows what an asset he will be here.

The Elections Bill is designed to strengthen the integrity of the electoral process and therefore strengthen UK democracy per se. That is a worthy aim that we should all embrace, but I worry that the Bill takes an overly technocratic and legalistic approach that evades deeper problems and cultural trends that undermine democratic norms today, from assaults on free speech to the fashion for casting aspersions on the capacity and motives of voters. When I am lobbied by opponents of the Bill, who say that the legislation “would not look out of place in Hungary, Russia or China”, I fear that hyperbole and partisan paranoia might distort the important public debates we need to have about democratic elections that this Bill should positively kick-start.

Like other noble Lords I have a lot of specific areas I want to ask questions about in Committee. Will restrictions on third party campaigning lead to disengagement of civil society organisations from political activism? Why on earth did the Government table changing the voting system so late in the day? For now, I have some comments on the alleged voter fraud issue. I welcome the Bill tackling the problems of postal voting. The noble Lord, Lord Pickles, described concerns over harvesting votes, which I think many of us have shared for some time. Of course postal voting is necessary, but it should be a narrow, particular form of voting and not a go-to device so open to abuse. Tightening this would help and would shore up the legitimacy of elections, I have no doubt.

The same motivation is used by the Government to justify the controversial voter ID scheme. However, I am less convinced that this illiberal show-us-your-papers measure is either proportionate or necessary when the data shows such minuscule examples of voter fraud, as we have heard. I do not go along with the overblown conspiracy theories that see voter ID as a dastardly Tory plot of “deliberate voter suppression”, as one Guardian editorial called it, or an evil attempt to rig the system to disempower the poorest and most marginalised. No, I think that kind of discussion is unhelpful. My objections are rather those raised by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, about unintended consequences. Rather than reassuring voters that elections are not being corrupted by fraud, voter ID gives the impression that vote rigging is such a wide-scale problem that we need to change the law. Surely this puts an unnecessary question mark over election results and inadvertently sows suspicion among the public of their fellow voters.

Perhaps one underlying reason for all this focus on fraud is a more worrying problem beyond technical solutions: namely, the increasing disillusion with the democratic decision-making process, as expressed by a greater willingness to refuse to accept the outcome of legitimate votes. We have seen the emergence of the withdrawal of loser’s consent from recent election results. In America, Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” assault on the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as President is a case in point. Sadly, the precedent for this was set closer to home, in the attempts to frustrate and suppress the democratic result of the 2016 referendum, often led by powerful voices in the establishment, with celebrity QCs turning to the law courts, the People’s Vote campaign, and the likes of John Major—who has been cited by everybody here—and Lib Dem Lords, in fact, calling for a second referendum that demanded going back to the polls until voters gave the correct answer.

While many who oppose voter ID worry about disenfranchising electors now, for me the deeper problem is how widespread it has become to tell millions of voters, many who voted for the first time, that that once-in-a-generation vote should not have counted, with attempts to de-legitimise and tear up their vote by maligning 17.4 million citizens for being duped and not being educated enough to know what they were voting for. So, if the aim of Part 1 of the Bill is to bolster trust in elections, I suggest that far more effective than voter ID would be a robust campaign to restore the value of loser’s consent and to ensure that democratic outcomes are respected, however unpalatable those in power find voters’ choices.

There has also been a lot of disquiet expressed today about proposals to hold the Electoral Commission to account, critiqued as dangerous government interference in the Electoral Commission’s independence. I want to ask how independent the Electoral Commission really is. The commission outed itself as breaking its own impartiality code when the UK had the largest vote in its history. Its chair and commissioners expressed their regret that the electorate voted to leave the EU—in other words, that they voted the wrong way.

These remain sentiments were not just confined to their opinions but were wielded as power, with so much systematic investigation, prosecution, threats of fines and ultimately harassment of leave campaign groups and activists that the present chair of the Electoral Commission, John Pullinger, had to issue a public apology to the likes of Darren Grimes and so on. While leavers have been cleared, there are still those who cite the Electoral Commission investigations as an official stamp of approval to repeat misinformation about the legitimacy of Brexit.

I think it is time we questioned whether democracy benefits at all from a quango set up to adjudicate on and stand above democracy itself. I remind noble Lords that there is already a powerful and fully independent body that can hold politicians and political parties to account. It is called the electorate. I appreciate that my power-to-the-people stance will be dismissed sneerily as populism, but I am rather proud of trusting the people myself.