Unlike Boris Johnson, did you remember to take ID when you went to vote yesterday? Did you remember to take the right kind? Or, like one in seven Britons, did you have no idea you needed ID to vote? Or, like at least 2 million Britons, did you have no acceptable voter ID at all?
Until last year, when the 2022 Elections Act came into effect, British elections were free of these questions. For centuries, despite the slow, sometimes hugely contentious expansion of the electorate, and the acrimonious and distrustful character of our politics, voters were not required to produce documents in polling stations to prove who they were. This country did not believe in identity cards, many of our politicians proudly told us – particularly Tories. As the then shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, put it in 2009, shortly before his party returned to power: “ID cards … are both an affront to British liberty and will have no place in a Conservative Britain. They are also a huge waste of money.”
After 14 years in office, the Conservatives have not introduced ID cards yet, although given the party’s ever more authoritarian instincts I wouldn’t bet against it. Already, their Elections Act has created a form of identity document, the voter authority certificate, which anyone wanting to vote at a polling station needs to apply for if they don’t have another form of ID that the act deems acceptable. As so often, the party which says it loves freedom and hates regulation has burdened Britons with another layer of bureaucracy and state control.
The justification for this fundamental electoral change is flimsy, summed up by the government as “stamping out the potential for voter fraud” – in other words, dealing with a problem which doesn’t yet exist, or only on an insignificant scale. According to the Electoral Commission, at the last nationwide elections before voter ID was introduced, in 2022, only seven people were accused of the crime that the new system is supposed to end – impersonating another voter at a polling station – and none of these allegations led to police action.
The credibility of the new system has also been undermined by an obvious imbalance in the types of ID that polling stations have been told to accept. While a wide range of travel passes and other photo cards used by pensioners, who tend to vote Conservative, are permitted, that applies to very few identity documents commonly carried by young people, who tend to vote Labour. As the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg admitted last year, voter ID is an attempt to change the electoral rules in his party’s favour.
According to the Electoral Commission, in the 2023 local elections about 4% of non-voters did not participate because of the ID requirement. If repeated at a general election, that would mean more than a million non-voters. The Tories lost more than a thousand council seats, and without voter ID suppressing the turnout, the toll would almost certainly have been worse.
As with last year, assessing the full impact of voter ID on this week’s elections is likely to take months – non-voters and their precise motivations can be hard to pin down – but already more victims have emerged. They include a former soldier whose veteran’s ID card was not accepted, a woman whose ID was reportedly rejected solely because it was in her unmarried name, and, more pleasingly, the Tory politicians Tom Hunt and Boris Johnson, whose government produced the ID legislation. At the coming general election, when many more people want to vote than in local contests, the disruption of our supposedly smooth-running democracy is likely to be much greater.
What lies behind the Tory decision to shrink the electorate – the first such move by any British government for centuries? Short-term electoral desperation is the obvious answer. But there is also something deeper.
Ruthless politics, of which the Conservatives are habitual practitioners, is often more about exclusion than inclusion: isolating your opponents and their supporters from power, rather than building alliances. Ever since the Tories squeezed back into office in 2010, after an election at which almost two-thirds of voters chose other parties, marginalising and delegitimising enemies has been a key Conservative strategy.
Austerity was designed by the then chancellor, George Osborne, partly to reduce the number of Labour voters and left-leaning interest groups, which he believed state spending created. Similarly, the anti-elite rhetoric of Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s premierships was intended to discredit remainers, leftists and liberals by separating them from “the people”. Since 2010, meanwhile, the rightwing media have smeared the Tories’ opponents, even those as patriotic and respectable as Keir Starmer, by relentlessly presenting them as alien to mainstream Britain.
With non-Tories marginalised, the minority of Britons who actually are Conservatives – even Johnson’s 2019 “landslide” win was produced by less than 30% of the electorate – can be made to look bigger. The highly questionable claim that Britain is a naturally rightwing country can be sustained a little longer. At a time of tired and inept Tory government, and of increasingly liberal and left-leaning public attitudes, as the British social attitudes survey regularly shows, setting the boundaries of politics in the Conservatives’ favour is all the more vital for the party.
If Labour wins the general election, will it do anything to make our political system more balanced? A shrewd Labour government surely would. But it’s not yet clear whether Starmer plans to correct at least some of the system’s pro-Tory biases, or to try to live with them.
Last week, the shadow minister Darren Jones was asked on the radio station LBC whether Labour would repeal the voter ID legislation, and he replied, “I don’t know.” After texting Labour officials for guidance, live on air, he added: “We have seen multiple problems emerge with voter ID … [But] we are still waiting for the government’s review of the impact …”
One day, probably sooner than seems likely now, the Tories will no longer be far behind Labour in popularity. Every vote will matter again. It’s in the interests of all non-Tories – in fact, of anyone who believes in Britain being a fair and inclusive democracy – that voter ID becomes a historical footnote, an abandoned experiment, rather than something that helps darken our future.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
