Elections Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Tom Randall

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Brendan O’Hara]

I absolutely will. My position is that there is no evidence whatsoever. Policy must be made on the basis of evidence. We have a limited time in this House in which to act and legislate. It is a waste of that precious time, I believe, for a Government to run around looking to create a problem to find a solution for. We should address the problems that we know exist, and those problems that have to be attacked.

Even Lord Pickles, in his evidence, said:

“I did not recommend photo ID”. ––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 16, Q13.]

He also said that fraud

“is not endemic within the system”,––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 8, Q5.]

However, somehow, Lord Pickles has now embraced this voter ID card with the zeal of a convert. It is further evidence of a Government with a solution looking for a problem.

Councillor Golds gave chapter and verse on the problems of postal voting in Tower Hamlets, and he was extremely convincing. Fair play to Peter Golds and the people who he has been working with—they have identified a serious problem—but to try to segue that into pretending that ID cards at polling stations will somehow solve what we saw at Tower Hamlets is frankly nonsense. It is not there.

[Tom Randall]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Brendan O’Hara]

I will in a moment. Ailsa Irvine, of the Electoral Commission, admitted that

“we are starting from a high base of public confidence.”––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 46, Q64.]

There is confidence in this system—that the system works and is sufficiently robust.

[Brendan O’Hara]

I will in a moment. There is nothing perfect. There is no way on earth that we can stop every sort of crime, but this Government and this Committee should concentrate on identified problems, rather than seeking to find problems and then provide a solution as they see fit. Now, there were two hon. Gentlemen bobbing.

[Tom Randall]

Just briefly, on Councillor Golds’ evidence, he did make reference to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been marked as having voted on the register in the polling station when, of course, they would not have done. I appreciate that it was anecdotal evidence, but does that not go to the heart of how difficult it for someone to realise that they are a victim of electoral fraud? If a non-voter was a victim of personation, they would not go to look for it.

[Brendan O’Hara]

Nobody on this side of the room is saying that electoral fraud should not be punished. It absolutely should be punished. It should not be tolerated and should never be tolerated. Any victim of it deserves justice. However, that must be evidence-led and proportionate. This is neither.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tom Randall]

An electoral card will be issued free of charge. I am sure that between the passage of this legislation and the introduction of that scheme there will be a lot of publicity surrounding it, to make sure that the new system that is to be introduced will be well understood. The Government are used to widespread publicity schemes. I see the point that the hon. Lady makes, but I am sure that can be addressed in the fullness of time.

The point was made that no significant election has been swung or affected by electoral fraud. I gently suggest that the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, a London authority only 18 minutes from here on the tube, which has a directly elected Mayor and a multi- million-pound budget, is not insignificant when it comes to elections—it is very significant.

For my final point, I declare an interest as a former chairman of Poplar and Limehouse Conservative Association. I know Councillor Golds personally. I speak to him as a friend as well as a witness to this Committee, and he made a point to me in writing afterwards. I will read the email from him, which stated:

“When we were preparing the grounds for the petition we investigated personation. We were a small, cross party group acting voluntarily and at our own expense. I was doing most of the legal digging and the amount of time required to prove personation would have been enormous. We had evidence via marked registers but quickly found canvassing and potentially obtaining statements would have been incredibly time consuming. People who are disengaged from politics and voting are unlikely to wish to make statements for submission to a court of law. We did refer to some of the worst cases in various statements but personation…was not one of the nine grounds that we concentrated on.”

Tower Hamlets has come up a lot in this debate so far. The absence of personation as the main ground in that case should not be interpreted as meaning that there was no personation in that election. The point is that investigating it is incredibly difficult. The fact that it was volunteers working on it, who stumped up their own money, which they have not got back, is perhaps one reason why that ground in that claim was not gone into in such detail.

[Brendan O’Hara]

Does not the hon. Gentleman think that it would have been helpful in his lengthy evidence session if Peter Golds had actually said that to the Committee, rather than saying it as an afterthought in a private letter? That is surely the whole point of holding an evidence session.

[Tom Randall]

I wish Councillor Golds had had a whole evidence session to himself, but unfortunately he had to share one and we had to listen to other witnesses, which I shall not go into now, but I think that was an unfortunate timetabling measure.

There is a fundamental weakness in the system as it stands. For that reason I will support this part of the Bill.

Elections Bill

Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Tom Randall

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara]

I do not regard any findings of the OSCE, but what I think is important in this place, looking at UK-wide elections, is that we have a measure that works for United Kingdom general elections, and this is one that absolutely does not. The right hon. Gentleman says we should be reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch. There is a debate to be had, but the imposition of this kind of voter ID now is absolute nonsense and there is no evidence whatever to justify it. This is, therefore, actually a ploy to stop people going to the polling station in the first place. I believe it really is as crude as that. The Government plan appears to have been to conjure up a demon, convince people that that demon is posing a threat to them, and then allow themselves to introduce draconian and totally disproportionate measures to slay the demon they have just invented.

The fatal flaw in that argument is that there never was a demon. No matter how the Government have tried to spin this, people know that there never was a demon and that there is nothing to see. Now, the United Kingdom Government stand accused of a sleazy attempt to gerrymander the register for their own electoral gain.

[Tom Randall (Gedling) (Con)]

In his judgment on the election in Tower Hamlets, Richard Mawrey QC said there was an appreciable amount of personation by false registration in Tower Hamlets. I wonder if the hon. Gentleman has read that judgment.

[Brendan O'Hara]

I would say gently to the hon. Gentleman on the Tower Hamlets issue, which I believe went back to 2014, that to change an entire voting system on what went on in one particular London borough—the anecdotal evidence I have heard is that it was more to do with postal voting than personation. This measure is to do with personation, which has been proven not to be a problem.

This is an utterly reprehensible proposal that would be more at home in Donald Trump’s Republican party than in the United Kingdom. What is more important and more chilling is the brazen way in which the Government are doing it. They seem not to care. We always know it will not be the well-heeled and the affluent middle classes who will struggle to produce a passport, or a driving licence. We know and they know it will be the young, the poor, the marginalised and the minority communities who do not have a passport or do not drive, who will struggle to manage to collect a voter ID card. They will be affected by this registration.

The Government know that there are already between 2 million and 3 million people who do not have that ID. They also know that there are about 9 million people not registered. I think they should be spending an awful lot more time getting people on to the register than organising to take people off that register.