The photographs for the voter ID are not free, so that is a lie, for a start. But you do not need any form of it for a postal vote, which really is free. Far from favouring Labour, and the communities cited would not vote for Keir Starmer to save their lives, postal voting kept the Conservatives as the largest party in 2017. Had that seemingly interminable General Election campaign lasted yet another week, then it could not even have done that, but enough people had voted early by post for the Theresa May campaign that we all then had the pleasure of watching collapse.
Electoral fraud in Britain is in single figures even in General Election years, and it is almost always perpetrated by candidates, although never such as to affect an outcome. A Government that won an overall majority of 80 under the present arrangements sounds very odd when it claims that those are riddled with fraud and somehow rigged towards the other side. But that is not what this is really about.
This is about identity cards, which have been the Home Office's solution in search of a problem for as long as I can remember. And identity cards, which are once again Labour Party policy as well, obtained from whom? The Passport Office and the DVLA, documentation from one or other of which is now required in order to exercise the franchise, are about to be privatised. Who is going to buy them? Infosys? The foreign states that have bought the utilities and the rail companies? Who, exactly? Meanwhile, we are now going to have American-style denial of the result at every election for evermore, or at least while this madness lasted.
But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.
To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
Yes, this is their chance to be the largest party in the hung Parliament of 2024.
ReplyDeleteAnd we could make that work for us. But the poor now split evenly between Labour and the Conservatives, whereas the rich are now more likely to vote Labour. The poor are more numerous than the rich, and here we are. It is no wonder that Labour is keeping quiet about this mass disenfranchisement. Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.
DeleteIf the argument is that photographic identification to vote already exists in Northern Ireland, then the Government is expressing an existential fear of at least half the electorate, although, as set out above, it is quite wrong to have such a fear. The silent Opposition, on the other hand, has every reason.