Identifying The Problem

Again, an anonymous comment on a previous post gets to the point:

The ID scheme for voting could only work with compulsory ID cards. That's what this is really about.

The BBC's failure to pick up Channel 4's meticulously researched Tory election fraud story should have killed the BBC's credibility already. When it all comes to court, that will finally happen.

Perhaps it will. But the Orgreave Broadcasting Corporation has form as long as its arm.

As does the Conservative Party. Some areas have still never recovered from the mass deregistration that arose out of the Poll Tax.

The only forms of official ID are driving licenses, which are not held by at least nine million adults, and ludicrously expensive passports, which are not held by 9.5 million.

Those figures amount to one in five adults, overwhelmingly the poor.

At the 2015 General Election, 31 million votes were cast.

There were only 26 cases of personation at a polling station, 27 cases of postal voting fraud, and 11 cases of proxy voting fraud.

Fully six cases resulted in so much as a Police caution.

Channel 4 News has, however, established a very strong case that the Conservative Party massively overspent in so many marginal constituencies that it is possible to travel from Land's End to the Scottish Border without ever leaving the area of a Police Force that was now investigating this matter.

Those investigations are very much ongoing.

But they are never, ever mentioned by this country's near-monopoly purveyor of news, the BBC.

As for identity cards, they have been the solution in search of a problem for at least 25 years.

Although quite that level of wildly over-budget computerised chaos was too much even for the King of Wildly Over-Budget Computerised Chaos, Tony Blair.

How would we identify ourselves when we first went along to collect our identity cards? Or when we first applied for them?