My Lords, I shall wait for just a minute while those who do not wish to hear my exciting speech absent themselves.
Those who heard the remarkable speech by the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, on Thursday will know that the case for this clause to be included in the Bill is very weak. He said it all, in effect. First, this is an extremely
small problem; secondly, it will disfranchise the poorer and more marginalised elements of the electorate; and, thirdly, the larger problems of our electoral system lie elsewhere. The PACAC report, which has been much quoted in Committee so far, states:
“There is very limited evidence of personation at UK elections.”
These proposals represent
“a disproportionate response to a problem that appears not to be widespread.”
Paragraph 96 states:
“Introducing a compulsory voter ID requirement risks upsetting the balance of our current electoral system”—
that is a real constitutional reform in the wrong direction—
“making it more difficult to vote and removing an element of the trust inherent in the current system.”
The more urgent problems facing our electoral system include some things we will discuss later today, such as intimidation, of which I have experience, but above all the missing 8 million to 9 million citizens who are not on our electoral register. The Bill leaves to one side the issue of the incompleteness of our electoral register. As it happened, last week, I turned up in my pile of Cabinet Office publications one from December 2017 entitled Every Voice Matters: Building a Democracy that Works for Everyone, introduced by Chris Skidmore, then the Minister responsible. As we were discussing in Questions, there have been several changes of responsible Ministers since then, which has no doubt contributed to the incoherence of the Bill. Skidmore argued very strongly in that document for citizen engagement, greater participation and a more complete register.
Here is a major weakness in the integrity of our elections. Previous Conservative Ministers thought it important, but the Bill instead chases after other imagined problems—ones that US Republicans also chase for reasons not concerned with election integrity. The Bills that Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed under the title of election integrity have been concerned with pushing people—marginal, poor, black and others—off the register. The Minister will be well aware of the wide suspicion of the degree of Republican infiltration of the Conservative Party and of Conservative imitation of right-wing Republican enthusiasms and campaigns, most recently illustrated in the remarkable and awful speech which the chairman of the Conservative Party gave to the Heritage Foundation only two weeks ago.
Perhaps the Minister would like to argue that the absence of evidence of a serious current problem should not deter us from turning to the precautionary principle—introducing this in case there turns out to be a larger problem in future than there was—but he has told us that he does not accept the precautionary principle. After all, it is a European principle disliked by all true Anglo-Saxons.
The cost of introducing voter ID across the entire electorate could instead be spent on citizen education and engagement, to encourage more young people to play an active role in our electoral system and its campaigns. We could experiment with moves towards automatic registration—that is, automatic entry on to the register, which we will discuss later in Committee.
3.30 pm
Last week, the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, remarked that voting was a right, not a privilege. Everyone should be on the register. It is not something that you might care to volunteer for if you wish, and it is easier if you are middle-class and educated. Years of Conservative resistance to ID cards have been swept away by the demand that there should be compulsory photo ID; I remind the Minister that the idea of photo ID was not on page 48 of the Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto. However, if the Minister were perhaps to persuade his colleagues to change the Government’s approach to ID as a whole, it would fit, as others have discussed, with the way in which other nations manage their elections. Having no formal ID card means that voting rights should not be limited by a requirement for particular ID.
I am reminded of the occasion when I was in the Minister’s place during the coalition Government. I found myself saying to a Cabinet Minister, “You may feel deeply committed to this clause but, unless you can find a better rationale for it, it will never get through the Lords”. I feel that the Minister has not yet provided us with an adequate rationale for this clause and, on that basis, I hope that it will not get through the House of Lords.