Elections Bill

Lord Woodley Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 21st March 2022 Lords Chamber

The balance of risk has not been made out. There is too much to lose for too many people at too difficult and divided a time. With the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and others who have added their names, including the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, who I think is also unable to be here, I say that Clause 1 should not stand part, given everything else we could be doing in the Bill.

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree that Clause 1 should be struck from the Bill, if the Bill itself is not withdrawn. The clause is a dangerous solution to a problem that, as has been said, does not even exist. Requiring photo ID to vote will not strengthen democracy; it will weaken it. There is no doubt in my mind about that. It will damage the democratic rights of millions, disproportionately disfranchising poorer and ethnic minority voters, who, as we know, tend to lean towards Labour in elections.

There is no evidence that voter personation, which is what the clause is supposed to tackle, is a problem in this country. On the contrary, in 2020 there were just 139 allegations of voter fraud, which led to one conviction and one caution for personation. In 2019, although there were local, European and general elections, there was again just one conviction for personation out of 60 million votes—no problem there, then.

If this was not so serious it would be laughable. I am somewhat sceptical. It is not a coincidence that this Tory scheme for voter ID to suppress working-class voters is a mirror image of what has been done to black, Latino and American workers by the Republicans, as has been said. You would almost think that the ruling class was organising across the Atlantic to change the rules of the game itself. Surely not.

It is important to highlight the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s warning that Clause 1

“risks upsetting the balance of our current electoral system, making it more difficult to vote and removing an element of the trust inherent in the current system.”

We should not forget that.

Then, of course, there is the financial cost of compulsory voter ID: £120 million over 10 years according to the Cabinet Office. No election in British history has ever been undermined by mass fraud, so why are the Government spending millions of pounds to fix a problem that does not exist?

I believe the answer may simply be that the Government are worried that many working-class voters are starting to realise they were hoodwinked at the last election. Workers and their families are watching this Government take decision after decision that make the very rich richer while the rest of society is squeezed dry by the escalating cost of living crisis that we are confronted with now.

The Government’s total capitulation to the big energy firms has led to eye-watering bills that are rising higher and higher. The national insurance hike next month is a tax on jobs that will hammer the working poor most of all. Real-terms cuts to social security are driving millions into despair and destitution. All this pain and misery is against a backdrop of rampant inflation and crony Covid contracts for the chums of the Prime Minister, who mostly, in my view, likes to party.

Workers are waking up to the Government’s ideological assault on trade unions, the last line of defence against the bad bosses and a system that has attacked them, including this very Bill, especially Clause 27 on gagging trade unions, which we debated last week. Let us look at the Government’s much-hyped Employment Bill. I repeat: let us look at the Government’s much-hyped Employment Bill—except we cannot. It is nowhere to be seen, despite the manifesto pledge to

“make the UK the best place in the world to work.”

It would be scandalous if this promised legislation was again absent from the forthcoming gracious Address. Perhaps, the Minister would like to share his thoughts with us all on this subject.

Faced with the reality that the Tory party is not on their side, many workers and their families who lent the Prime Minister their vote to get Brexit done now want their vote back. This Bill as a whole, and especially Clause 1, looks like a blatant attempt to limit the damage this will cause the Conservatives at the next election.

In this place, we are privileged to play a key role by helping to improve legislation and holding the Government to account. We would not be doing our job properly if we did not challenge bad Bills, and this is a very bad Bill indeed. The Minister will deny it, but Clause 1 is a key component of a backwards, Trumpian attempt to rig democracy in favour of the Tories. That is why I support the cross-party call by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti and others to strike it out. I urge the whole House to do exactly the same.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support this proposal that the clause stand part but I have some caveats. A high-profile Guardian commentator alleged:

“The Tories are introducing voter ID purely because they know the people lacking relevant ID are most likely to vote Labour, and they want to prevent them from voting.”


One Labour MP described it as

“a cynical and ugly attempt to rig the system to disempower the poorest and most marginalised.”

I do not believe that at all. It seems to me those arguments—we have heard some here—are concrete evidence that cranky, conspiratorial thinking is alive and well across left and right. I am not convinced that this is a Trumpian plot, an attempt by the Republican Party to take over the Conservatives or anything else. The view that everything is a sinister international plot—and goodness knows I see a lot of that on social media—is itself in danger of fuelling a cynicism and nihilistic distrust in institutions and politics. We should not necessarily resort to it to oppose voter ID. I do not think we need to.

I am prepared to take at face value that the Conservative Government are trying to fulfil their manifesto pledge to tackle potential voter fraud. There certainly has been concern about it although, as it happens, that has largely been confined to postal votes, which are being dealt with separately. But even if I take it in good faith that they are trying to shore up trust in the electoral system, my big problem is that voter ID is a wrongheaded way of doing it; it is likely to backfire and stoke up mistrust.

Let me explain a few of those points. The voting system in Britain is the outcome of centuries of struggle and civic engagement, and often, indeed, class struggle. The degree of trust that allows us as a country to allow citizens to vote on the basis of just showing up and giving their name—it is as simple as that—is a real success story. That is something that the Government and all of us should be proud of and celebrate; and—guess what—there is no evidence that it has been subverted in any way. We should have the same pride that we do not live in a “produce your papers” society, based on constant official checks by authorities. It is important to maintain that distinction between citizens and the state.

That is why so many of us campaigned against ID cards in general when the Labour Party tried to bring them in, and more recently balked at vaccine passports pushed by the Government and backed by the Opposition. Even fully vaccinated enthusiasts for the jab such as myself worried that saying, “You have to show your papers”, was an egregious, divisive encouragement to look at one’s fellow citizens with suspicion. We are now talking about showing your papers when you go to vote. General ID cards are a barrier to being able to go freely about our business, while voter ID is a barrier to being able to vote freely. In that context, voter ID is not just a technical matter; no matter what method is used, it creates obstacles to voting.

I do not think that it will lead to mass disfranchisement and, to be honest, I find it slightly awkward when people say that poorer people and the marginalised will not be able to cope with filling in the forms or getting the ID; that is potentially rather patronising and is not our objection. Let us imagine what it will do to a bond of trust, however, if you go along to vote and witness numerous people being turned away from polling stations; we know that people will be turned away because we have seen pilot schemes in which that has happened. Surely that would put a question mark over those electors, as though they were somehow a bit dodgy, when in fact they have just got the wrong paperwork.

Then there are other kind of nightmare scenarios that I dread. There just needs to be a handful of officious, jobsworth local officials overzealously treating people as though they are would-be cheats with the paperwork, and chaos will ensue. Anyone who has had to go to a government department and deal with the paperwork will know that that is all completely feasible. What is more, the more the Government double down on this—I do not understand why they are doing so— the more they send the message that the voting system itself is a major problem. It gives the misleading impression that large-scale fraud is going on that needs to be tackled, which is just so negative. In fact, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, pointed out, there are positive ways of talking about engaging voters rather than this negative view that somehow we have to stop all those people who are trying to sneak in and cheat.

Democracy is based on trust. At its heart lies the belief that all people should be treated equally at the ballot box regardless of any social or educational inequality. Your status is irrelevant when you get to that polling booth. The most lowly person is equal to the highest person in the land—every vote is equal. That is based on the belief that everyone can be trusted to decide on the future direction of society and to vote in good faith. That is what democracy is all about.

When a very few bad apples—maybe only one, according to the evidence—become the focus for a Government to reorganise the election practice, or when there is a greater problem of distrusting democracy and democratic institutions, which I talked about at Second Reading, it is a bigger problem, but I do not think that this solves it. When that bigger problem of distrust in democratic institutions is narrowed down to take the form of a managerial, bureaucratic solution, I fear that democracy itself will be damaged. I fear that it will fuel only a climate in which future election results will be open to suspicion and in which the integrity of the system is undermined. However, I appeal to those people who agree in principle with this to avoid cheap sectarianism in making their case.