Elections Bill — House of Lords, 2022-03-21
Topic: Civil Rights
Bruce Joseph Grocott (Labour, Centre-left): Has the noble Lord finished? I am sure my noble friend will deal with his query, which has been dealt with thoroughly already. The Labour Party is a voluntary organisation which you can choose to be in or not, and if you choose to, you abide by the rules thereof—rules that are democratically determined within the party itself. It is totally different, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, from a clear right to vote, which should apply to everyone, irrespective of the degree to which they wish to become involved in daily politics, which is of course a matter of choice I wanted to speak now because I did not quite understand what it was that the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, did not understand about my previous intervention on this subject. I shall not discuss any individual details, because we have sundry debates on those coming up. The silence of the Government Front Bench on two or three issues in the whole of this discussion seems to have permeated the Back Benches as well. One of the crucial questions for me is whether the Tory party, which is investing an awful lot of time and effort in the Bill—and money; £180 million at least and rising—is doing so on the basis that somehow, we should be disturbed by the result of the last general election, which, I sadly remind everyone, it won with an 80-seat majority The Government are saying—by their actions, if not by their words—that the election is a bit dubious, a bit dodgy. Every contribution from that side is more or less implying just that. If it is not dodgy at a global level—the 80-seat majority—it must surely be dodgy in respect of a number of individual constituencies. So, I would like to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, who is an expert on these things, which of the 650 constituencies he thinks should probably be declared invalid on the basis of serious doubts and misgivings about the authenticity of the voters in those constituencies Having fought numerous elections and, on one occasion, having won by 360-odd votes in an electorate of 90,000, I can only say to the noble Lord and to all those who say that people do not accept our election results because the system is first past the post, that no one in the ballots in individual constituencies argues for a moment with the idea that the person who was first past the post was the winner and should be declared the winner, even if it was by a short head. But the point I am making now is that no one contested that result. My opponent, to his credit, although he called for a couple of recounts, did not doubt the validity of the result any more than I did when, prior to that, I lost by rather more, it must be said—by 1,500. Likewise, I did not contest the result I really do want to know the answer to this, because we are in a very odd situation. You would think we would be on different sides of the argument. You would expect the Opposition to be saying that they were really worried about the last election result and that it looked very dodgy that the Tories got an 80-seat majority, with the Government saying that it was the finest election they have ever been privileged to take part in. But in this Alice in Wonderland world, it is the Government who are raising serious questions about the validity of the election result. So, I repeat that point, which is hanging in the air, and if the Minister would share with the House his deep anxieties about the last general election, I would like to hear them I would also like to hear from the Minister precisely what the Government’s estimate is of the effect on voter participation of the proposals in Part 1 of the Bill, which introduce a substantial new requirement for people to exercise their right to vote. This is the biggest change in the electoral requirements in my lifetime. I suppose the voting age has changed and there have been other changes of that sort, but this is a substantial one that says to electors that what they have done in the past is not good enough and there are too many risks associated with it, so they must jump over these additional hurdles Our contention—I say ours, but I think it is a pretty broad contention—is that the one thing you can be sure of is that introducing a brand-new requirement such as this will have a completely neutral effect on election turnout, which, I remind the House, has been going down rather badly, certainly since I first started fighting elections. I looked up the figures for a few—1970 was the first one I fought. In February 1974, the turnout was 79% and for the last five or six elections, it has been down in the 60s. That is bad news for anyone who cares about democracy. I was proud of the fact that we used to beat lots of other countries substantially on turnout at major elections. That is no longer the case. It is not credible to say that this big change in voting requirements for voters will have no impact whatsoever on turnout. I will give the Minister three options: is he saying it will have no impact whatsoever; that it risks reducing turnout; or that it is going to increase turnout? That would be an interesting intellectual case to develop.