The Elections Bill 2021

 Labour's Clive Lewis nailed it in his speech in yesterday's Commons Second Reading debate:

I will start with a question. If your policies are unpopular with most voters and your own party’s demographics are shrinking, what do you do? Do you change your policies so that your party’s platform is more appealing to more voters, or do you make it harder for people to vote? After reading the Bill, I think we now have this Government’s answer.

The point is that the most contentious change to our electoral law need not be made. Personation, as has been explained here and elsewhere many times, is a vanishingly small issue in England and Wales. The requirement for photo ID is an unnecessary inconvenience. Government spokesmen repeatedly riposte that the voters of Northern Ireland have no trouble with it. But the situation in the six counties is different. Because personation, including the use of the names of the deceased, has been a systemic evil there for generations, the majority of democratic voters in Northern Ireland welcomed the reform introduced by the Blair government in 2002. 

So, if a change does not have to be made, and that change involves additional expense, especially on the part of local authorities who will be responsible for issuing electoral identity documents, then one must suspect an ulterior motive.

The latter holds true of the removal of the limit on the years an expatriate has been away from the country after which they cannot be registered to vote here. If this was such a basic right, unjustifiably denied, why did the Conservative-run coalition and subsequent Conservative government not reinstate it? The answer to that is of course that it would have tilted the vote in the 2016 EU referendum and subsequent elections in which Europe was a principal factor.

Why remove the limit now? The suggestion has been made that it increases the pool of people permitted to make personal donations to candidates while making such donations more difficult to police. Another relaxation benefiting richer parties was welcomed unashamedly by Craig Mackinlay who was one of the Conservative MPs helped by the party's national "battle bus" sent to closely-contested seats. 

From changes made which were not needed, to needed changes which have not been made

As the secretary of a party which had blind and partially-sighted members, I naturally looked in the Bill for a remedy which genuinely is needed, enabling all disabled voters to cast a secret ballot. I was disappointed. In clause 8 there is just the following wording: "such equipment as it is reasonable to provide for the purposes of enabling, or making it easier for, relevant persons to vote in the manner directed" which is easy for local authorities to weasel out of, given the inclusion of the word "reasonable". From memory, this is no more use than the existing provision which resulted in a variety of devices in polling stations round the country, most of them virtually useless. 

One further thought: discussion of this important Bill in the media is inevitably swamped by responses to the announcement by the PM of increased taxation to boost the NHS and social care budgets and the attack on the living standards of state pensioners. For once, this seems to have been a lucky (for the government) coincidence rather than the result of plotting.