Elections Bill

Drew Hendry Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Fundamentally, this Bill is an attack on democracy that will disenfranchise millions, entrench more powers with the Executive, and remove the power of the Electoral Commission to scrutinise. Like many others, I urge Members not to look at the Bill in isolation but to view it in the wider context of the other legislation going through the House at the moment with respect to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, citizens’ right to peacefully protest, and even the proposed privatisation of Channel 4. That paints a very bleak picture for our democracy.

When the Bill first appeared, in the Queen’s Speech earlier this year, the headline-grabbing proposal was voter ID, whereby photographic evidence would be required before an individual was allowed to cast their vote. However, as we have heard from many others this afternoon, voter fraud at polling stations barely reaches the height of minuscule, and the evidence that we have heard from those on the Government Benches has been based on personal anecdote. We have to ask: what is the problem they are seeking to solve?

Seeing a Government introduce such radical policy changes without a shred of evidence to support those changes sets alarm bells ringing among those of us who believe that every Government should be trying to remove barriers that prevent participation in the democratic process, rather than raising them.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about not taking the Bill in isolation and looking at the cumulative effect. Does he agree that it is definitive of a Government that have lost any confidence in their ability to outrun their outrageous false claims, their untruths and their broken promises that they have to bring this measure in to try to gerrymander the system?

[Brendan O'Hara]

I could not agree more, and I will elaborate on that as I go through my speech.

In all the debate and discussion that have followed the Queen’s Speech in May, the Government have had ample opportunity to produce the evidence that these proposals are a proportionate measure to deal with an identified problem, and they have not. The reason they have not is that there is absolutely no evidence for them to produce. As one leading, albeit unelected, Scottish politician recently said:

“They can’t cite any evidence of it because I don’t think there’s any evidence to cite. In terms of this particular part of the Queen’s Speech, I think it’s total bollocks, and I think it’s trying to give a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and that makes it politics as performance.”

It is not often that I agree with the former Scottish Conservative leader, Baroness Davidson, or whatever her title is at the moment, but on this occasion she was absolutely spot on.

In the absence of any evidence that voter ID is the answer to an identified problem, we can only conclude that, for the Conservative party, the problem is not folk turning up at polling stations without photographic ID, but that certain folk turn up at polling stations at all.