Draft European Parliamentary Elections Etc. (Repeal, Revocation, Amendment and Saving Provisions) (United Kingdom and Gibraltar) (EU Exit) (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 General Committees

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

May I say what a great pleasure it is to once again serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies? This statutory instrument is a result of the Government’s mishandling of the Brexit negotiations. They attempted to push an unacceptable Brexit deal through the House on three separate occasions, meaning that we were forced to take part in European elections at short notice and at a time of political turmoil.

The Government are now required to extend elements required for the European Parliament’s post-election processes, which relate to storing documents, filing spending returns and investigating potential electoral offences. We do not oppose these necessary provisions, but it is crucial that the Government recognise that their chaotic mishandling of elections cannot continue. The integrity of our electoral system is paramount to the strength of our democracy, yet the Government continue to put our system at risk.

The Government’s attempt to push through a half-baked Brexit deal, without compromise, caused havoc on the country. The former Prime Minister’s grandstanding with the public ran the clock down while the Government refused to entertain the idea that we would partake in European elections, leaving electoral administrators tasked with delivering a national poll at extremely short notice, to ensure that eligible electors could exercise their democratic right to vote. Once again I pay tribute to those administrators in local authorities up and down the country who managed to achieve that, despite difficult timescales. However, the Government failed to deliver.

On polling day, many EU citizens living in the UK found that they were unable to vote because they had not completed a second piece of paperwork transferring their voting rights from their home member state to the UK. The Government are solely to blame for this chaos, having ignored the advice of the Electoral Commission to streamline the two-step registration process like other European countries did after the previous set of European elections.

Labour repeatedly warned the Government that EU nationals were not given enough time and notice to complete the necessary paperwork because of the short timeframe within which the election was called. However, the Government refused to listen, and their response was to tell EU citizens to vote in their own country; of course, for many EU citizens, the United Kingdom is their own country, having lived here for several decades in some cases. Not only did that add to the anger and sense of exclusion that many EU citizen residents of the UK felt but the Government were asking people to register to vote in a country where they might not have lived for decades and where voting registration might have already closed. This is not a Government who respect electoral integrity. This is a Government committed to power by any means, which means discarding voters who are unlikely to vote Conservative.

The statutory instrument claims to be about ensuring the integrity of the electoral system. In the explanatory documents that accompany the SI, the Government talk about extending post-election processes to uphold electoral integrity, but they have not scratched the surface when it comes to safeguarding the integrity of the electoral system.

Electoral integrity is not just about fulfilling administrative processes and investigating potential breaches of the law, which the Minister spoke about during one of his explanations to the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean; it is about ensuring that every eligible person is able to vote. However, we know that the Government have engaged in voter suppression. Perhaps they believe that those struggling at the margins of society are less likely to register to vote, and if they did vote, would be less likely to vote for a Government whose austerity policies have had such a damaging effect on the public services that such people rely on more than most, cutting welfare benefits to the most vulnerable in our society and failing to properly invest in our NHS.

The Government have no interest in increasing voter registration because they believe it would not be politically beneficial. Similarly, they had no interest in ensuring that EU citizens were able to vote in the European Parliament elections. The Government announced only on 7 May that the UK would be taking part in the European elections, yet in order to take part in those elections, EU citizens needed to have returned their forms to their local authority by 7 May, declaring that they would not vote in another EU member state. Many people said that they were not sent the form by their local authority and received it just days before the deadline, meaning that councils then failed to process the forms on time. Others said that they were unaware of the process altogether.

The Government made no effort whatever to educate, inform or prepare eligible voters to register, because by admitting that we were going to have to take part in the European elections the Government would have offended a large part of their core support, whose voters we then saw defect to the Brexit Party Ltd. This comes at a time when improving voter registration is more important than ever. A new study published last week by the Electoral Commission shows that up to 9.4 million people are not correctly registered to vote—an increase of 1 million voters since the Commission’s previous estimate. EU citizens entitled to vote in the UK were disenfranchised as a result of the Government’s failure to reach a satisfactory Brexit deal—just one incident in a long line of repressive measures undertaken by this Government.

On closer reading of the explanatory documents for this SI, there is a reference to the Government

“continuing to work with the Law Commissions, as well as other stakeholders such as the Electoral Commission, to consider ways to streamline and clarify our electoral system in order to make elections easier to administer and therefore more resilient to errors or fraud.”

What progress have the Government made in those discussions and what plans do the Government have to enact the Law Commission’s recommendations, because at the moment, we cannot find any evidence of progress. It is widely accepted that the laws setting out how UK elections are run and regulated are not fit for the modern age—the digital age, the age of social media— with some provisions dating back to the 19th century. We on the Opposition Benches strongly agree with the Law Commission that the current laws governing elections should be rationalised into a single, consistent legislative framework to govern all elections, but it seems that the Government have not yet responded to that important body of work. Perhaps the Minister might clarify that.

Although we accept the reasonable and necessary provisions in today’s statutory instrument, we do not accept the Government’s mishandling of the European elections, done for their own narrow political purposes and certainly not for the good of the United Kingdom.