Elections Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I must thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for his particularly generous remarks about my late father. I was very touched by them, and I will return to them because they are relevant to the theme of my speech today.

I must first apologise to this House for my delay in making this speech. I have spent my life as a newspaper editor, journalist and writer and we of course live by deadlines, but there is no deadline for making a maiden speech so I have procrastinated. But I hope I have some excuse. I was introduced when Covid-19 was going strong, and I found it difficult to acquaint myself with your Lordships’ House in hybrid form. A Parliament means a place where people speak, but the pandemic muffled normal speech. Many of your Lordships could not attend in person; many members of staff were working from home. I thank them all warmly for their kind efforts on my behalf, and it was not their fault that I was uncertain what I should be doing. Today it is an honour—and I must say a relief —to be addressing a fully functioning House at last.

I come from the county of Sussex. Nowadays Sussex is regarded as rich, but our eastern part of the county has traditionally been poor. A few years ago, the Tatler magazine published a satirical illustrated map of Sussex; our little rural patch was marked by a large cactus and the words “Social Desert”. We felt perversely proud of that. Even today, my birthplace, Hastings, is well known for areas of persistent poverty. Robert Tressell’s famous Edwardian socialist novel about poverty, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, is set in Hastings. It is subtitled “A season in Hell”. I maintain that modern Hastings has many glimpses of heaven, but problems do remain.

Hastings helps explain my interest in the Bill that we are debating today. In 1844, my great-great-grandfather, Robert Ross Rowan Moore, stood there as the free trade, anti-Corn Law candidate. In those days, the fishermen of Hastings did not have the vote, but they did support free trade. By law, no candidate could be elected unless present in the constituency on polling day, so the fishermen kindly proposed to kidnap my ancestor’s rival, the Tory candidate, and take him out to sea. Sadly, Robert Moore refused the fishermen’s offer and therefore lost the election, but my family still possesses a roll which names the

“one hundred and seventy-four honest and independent electors who voted for Robert R. Rowan Moore and free trade.”

In those days there was no secret ballot. Indeed, that great liberal John Stuart Mill was actually opposed to a secret ballot. He believed that honest men—and it was only men in those days—should publicly declare their allegiance. He was frightened of the corruption that goes with secrecy. As the 19th century progressed, however, people realised that only a secret ballot could prevent intimidation by powerful interests. In 1872 the Ballot Act was introduced. All of us in your Lordships’ House are disfranchised in general elections, so we can look at the matter disinterestedly, I think. I am sure that we all agree that the secret ballot was the right way to go. It was the key means of obtaining the universal franchise which lies at the heart of the development of our modern parliamentary democracy.

It follows that the ballot must be carefully protected from the corruption arising from secrecy which Mill feared. The integrity of the universal franchise is guaranteed by methods of registration and scrutiny. This has been essential for public trust. My late father, whom the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, mentioned, was a lifelong Liberal, and frequently a candidate. He therefore had the distressingly wide experience of losing at nine general elections. I remember, however, that he always expressed complete confidence in the functioning of the system, with one notable exception. This was when he stood in Northern Ireland in 1966. There, the split in the community was so entrenched that cheating was endemic. My father met a man who claimed to have voted unionist 92 times at the previous election and was offering to transfer his favours to him. He high-mindedly refused; like his great-grandfather in Hastings, he remained unelected.

The fact that voting in Ulster was often cooked was a symptom of democracy impaired. That is why Northern Ireland today is particularly careful, more so than the rest of the United Kingdom, to protect the integrity of the ballot. A painful history has taught this lesson.

The benign consequences of electoral trust are extremely high. When working on my biography of Margaret Thatcher, I was struck by how she, and most mainland candidates in the middle of the last century, could draw on public confidence in the ballot. In the 1950 and 1951 general elections, she had no hope of beating the Labour candidate, but the sense of engagement was strong. By the time she had left Dartford, she had raised membership of her constituency Conservative association to 3,160, a figure roughly 10 times greater than modern party memberships even in safe seats. No doubt much of this was due to the young Margaret’s phenomenal energy, but there was also widespread faith in the poll itself.

Nowadays, I think this faith is declining. There is serious controversy about personation, intimidation, proxy votes, postal vote harvesting and so on. In the United States, such issues are now so partisan that they threaten to undermine faith in voting altogether. We must not go down that path.

I have a small direct experience of this issue. Before entering this House, I was legally registered to vote in two places: at home in Sussex and in central London. There seemed to be no check on whether such people, of whom there are hundreds of thousands, were voting twice. In the EU referendum of 2016, I therefore decided to expose the problem. I voted normally in Sussex and then went to London. There, I entered the polling station and handed over my legitimate polling card. I went into the booth and wrote, “I am spoiling this ballot paper in order to show how easy it is to vote twice”, and then I submitted it.

I later described this in the Daily Telegraph, hoping to help the Electoral Commission by drawing attention to the dangers of abuse. After a bit, I got a call from the police asking to come and see me. The officer who arrived was very kind and a little embarrassed. She said that the police were acting at the request of the Electoral Commission. Although I had cast only one vote which could affect the result, she explained that, according to law, I had voted twice. The Electoral Commission wanted me prosecuted, but the police had decided that a prosecution would not be in the public interest. “Please don’t do it again,” she politely added. Some noble Lords may think I acted foolishly, but I hope they can accept that my motive was public-spirited. I must say I remain disappointed that the Electoral Commission showed more zeal in chasing me than in stopping potential abuse.

There are strongly differing views about this Bill. Some rightly worry that too close an invigilation of voters’ identity could deter whole classes of people from exercising their democratic right. Others see greater danger in leaving the vote so open to abuse that elections can no longer achieve a true representation of the people. In a maiden speech, I should not come down hard on one side, but I hope that we, who cannot vote in elections to another place, can unite in recognising that the integrity of the ballot really is a sacred trust. It is a simple act to write a cross beside the name of the candidate you prefer, but behind that act lies a long history of legislation and enforcement which is the work of a high civilisation. It is a continuing, delicate work which we must assist.