Voter ID

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate the hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) on securing this debate.

It is striking that the general arguments against this measure are so consistent: it is a solution in need of a problem, its implementation will have a disproportionate effect on certain communities and it undermines our democracy. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) said, it is part of a pattern of measures—something we must not lose sight of. The hon. Member for Gedling (Tom Randall) made an important point; he said that we cannot really quantify it, but a problem really exists. In evidence-based policy making, one would normally identify a problem and then craft a proportionate solution. This way, we have a so-called solution that we know will cause a problem, but we have absolutely no idea of the quantum of the problem it is there to fix, if it even exists at all. I say gently to the Government that one should develop policy on the basis of evidence rather than anecdote. It is no surprise, given the evidence that we have, that this measure has quite rightly been described as voter suppression.

Let me turn to the genesis of the current voter ID plans. When the noble Lord Pickles reported on electoral fraud in 2016, he highlighted what he called the trust nature of polling station voting, and he was absolutely right to do so because trust is at its heart; it is the great strength of the voting process. Regardless of whether one agrees with the first-past-the-post electoral system, once voters have properly registered to vote, they do not need ID or even a polling card. In this democracy, if someone is entitled to vote, they can turn up and can cast their ballot—or not—for whoever they please. Suppressing the right to do that by making it more difficult will reduce trust in the result, not increase it, because the public will assume, quite rightly, that in some way this Tory Government have suppressed the vote to fiddle the result in their favour.

We did hear stuff about Tower Hamlets, and I do not doubt for a second that a lot of shenanigans went on, but the criminals should be arrested under the existing law. We refer to Tower Hamlets, but let me remind hon. Members of Dame Shirley Porter, Westminster council and the homes for votes scandal, which the district auditor described as “gerrymandering”. At the end of the day, after many court cases and trials and a huge amount of money, the verdict was upheld by the House of Lords and she was asked to repay £42 million. If the public are concerned that somebody is at it, we have evidence of Tory gerrymandering designed precisely to win a handful of marginal wards in one local authority.

I do not think we should be going down the road of voter suppression, lest we end up with the head of the Post Office taking away post boxes for communities that do not vote Tory, as we saw in the United States when post boxes were removed from Democrat-voting areas during the last presidential elections. To proceed with this voter suppression plan, before the Supreme Court has made a determination on whether the pilot schemes that the Minister may pray in aid were even legal, further suggests that something is far from right.

When the Government responded to the various reports by the Lords Select Committee or the Joint Committee on Human Rights on this matter and various related matters, they said a number of things, such as that the potential for electoral fraud exists and

“the perception of this undermines public confidence in our democracy.”—[Official Report, 12 May 2021; Vol. 695, c. 2WS.]

However, there was precisely no evidence that anyone has ever not voted because of the small potential for electoral fraud. They said that although the incidence of voter fraud may be low, its impact can be significant and takes away a voter’s right to vote as they want. That is true in the few cases of personation that we have seen, but the impact of voter fraud is not just low to the point of being almost insignificant; it is almost non-existent. This is, as almost everyone has said, a solution looking for a problem.

The Library has helpfully told us that the worst year for personation was 2016, with 44 allegations and a single, sole, solitary conviction. That is one conviction for personation in 2016, which was the year of the EU referendum—a ballot in which more than 30 million people cast a vote.

The Government have also said that showing ID for everyday activities such as picking up a parcel is something that people from all backgrounds do already, and that voting should be no different. In my view, that is a facile and puerile argument. Collecting a parcel is not a human right, but being able to vote freely in a democracy is.

Finally, the Government have said that voter ID does not have a negative effect on election turnout or participation. That is simply not true. We know from the pilots that the proportion of voters not returning after initially being refused a ballot ran at between 0.1% and 0.7%, which implies between 46,000 and 325,000 people in a UK election in the whole of Great Britain. This plan alone would likely deny somewhere in the order of a quarter of a million people the right to vote, so it will have an impact on participation. And as has been mentioned a number of times, the Electoral Commission has suggested that 3.5 million people would not have a suitable ID, which means that the impact could be substantially larger.

So, however the Government slice and dice it, whether the scale of the suppression is only a quarter of a million voters or 3.5 million voters, and whatever we heard in Tower Hamlets or whatever we know about for Westminster City Council, this would be voter suppression on an industrial scale, and I urge the Minister to think again.