Elections Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

I crave your Lordships’ indulgence on two fronts. First, I was in a Select Committee which removed me from the Chamber for a large part of your Lordships’ deliberations. Secondly, I am going to be the umpteenth speaker to welcome the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham. My grounds for being the umpteenth such speaker is that he was my editor nearly 30 years ago at the Daily Telegraph. If that strikes your Lordships as an implausibly long time ago, I can only say that he was something of a Mozartian child protégé in the world of journalism. He edited the Spectator when he was, I think, nine; the Sunday Telegraph when he was 11 or so; and the Daily Telegraph when he was 14. He was an absolutely model editor, fearless in his criticism of those in high places and absolutely impervious to praise from those beneath. Annoyingly, he now writes a column in the Saturday Telegraph. I say annoyingly, because I write one in the Sunday Telegraph and again and again I find that he has said what I was planning to say but much better—and today’s debate is no exception. He has covered most of the points that I had in mind, so I will confine myself to making just one.

I think the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, quoted John Major on the “fragility of the democratic system”. Those words come very easily, but let us ponder for a second how unnatural, how counterintuitive is the system which we have all taken for granted and about which we have become a little blasé. How odd that we elevate process over outcome. How odd that huge human populations care more about the honouring of a set of abstract rules, something that cannot be seen, or touched or heard or smell, rather than about the victory of their candidate—their tribe. Yet it is that counterintuitive and necessarily acculturated, learned notion that has made possible all the freedoms and personal liberties and comforts that we take for granted in modern liberal societies. Because it is unnatural, it is under constant pressure. If we look even at the United States, perhaps the first country founded in the ideal of popular sovereignty, we see how quickly people have moved back to taking a contingent, provisional view of elections. Almost without fail, every election is met by a series of acts of lawfare by whichever party happened to lose. That should not surprise us at all. The surprising thing is that they went for so long without that happening.

That is why I say that the act of voting needs to be enchanted—it needs to be given a little bit of magic and made to feel precious. After all, our vote, statistically, is unlikely to change very much. If noble Lords think back to the last time they cast a vote—not putting themselves in the shoes of a prospective imaginary voter but thinking of the last time they let a ballot drop from their fingers into that big black tin box—did they really think that the consequence of their vote would be more or less parking, or more or less housing or higher or lower council tax? Were they not doing it, at least on some level, out of a sense of civic obligation—a sense of duty?

It is terrifically important, if democracy is to be made to work, that the act of voting be magnified, dignified, almost sanctified, and given a sense of importance beyond the chances of one particular vote in one constituency making a major impact on policy. That is why, when there is a question of balance between potential fraud or devaluation of the vote and extra procedure, however minimal, our instinct should always be towards ensuring that people have absolute confidence in the integrity of the process.

By the way, I do not think it is that big a deal. Personation may not be a big deal, but neither is presenting identification. Most countries in the world do it. Countries with largely illiterate populations manage it. I rather agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who said that it was particularly patronising to suggest that somehow minorities were not able to vote in the same way as everybody else. In fact, if anything, I would have thought ethnic minorities in this country are more likely to have passports than the general population. It is a bizarre idea that being asked to demonstrate who you are is somehow off-putting. That is not the experience of pretty much anywhere else.

I am glad that the Front Bench opposite agreed on what I think are bigger issues in this Bill: the measures against harassment of candidates and those to crack down on some aspects of postal and proxy fraud. But I come back to saying that if we want people to vote and if we want to get away from the situation in which every recent election has been won by the stay-at-home party—in other words, the group of people who took the trouble to register to vote and then did not bother to vote on the day is always bigger than the single number of votes for any of the other parties—then we have to restore a sense that casting your vote is a thing of importance and dignity.

Of course, that will require some substantive changes. I would like to see a significant shift of power from Whitehall to town halls and from unelected functionaries to elected representatives. But it also involves making people feel that there was something special about that trip and that presenting their ID and casting their ballot was a civic act, one that dignified and elevated the process. If we do not do that, we are giving up on restoring honour, purpose and meaning to the act of casting a ballot.