‘The Political System Needs Fundamental Reform – From Capping Party Donations to Scrapping Voter ID’

The last Government went to great lengths to seemingly change election rules in its favour for self-interested reasons.

A key task for the new Government is to help make the UK a more civilised country, a more tolerant society, and to provide for a much healthier democracy.

We need greater public confidence and engagement in our democratic processes. And we need less of the kind of divisive rhetoric which alienated so many people from politics altogether, while fuelling prejudices, under the recent Conservative administrations.

The Conservatives introduced restrictive rules for voter ID in elections, without any evidence that this was necessary. As former Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested, it appears they were intended to ‘gerrymander’ the results to the Conservatives’ advantage.

The rules also go far beyond what either the Electoral Commission, or the election review conducted by former Conservative Chairman Lord Pickles, recommended on voter ID.

According to the Government’s own impact assessment, the current voter ID scheme was set to cost £180 million during the next decade.

For future elections, the photo ID rules must be scrapped or replaced. As I have suggested in the House of Lords, if ID is required at polling stations, then the official polling card sent to each member of the electorate who has registered to vote should suffice. Lost or stolen cards could be replaced.

The introduction of voter ID did not, of course, save the Conservative Party on 4 July. But there were many close results where these restrictive rules may have made a difference. They include the Basildon and Billericay constituency, where former Conservative Chairman Richard Holden scraped in by just 20 votes, having been parachuted into a seat that was supposed to have a 20,000-plus majority.

A post-election survey by the More in Common think tank suggested that 400,000 voters were turned away at polling stations never to return because they did not have the requisite ID. For each one of them, there were likely several people who did not go to vote in the first place because of the new rules. This may well have been a factor in the turnout being the lowest for any general election for 20 years.

An even bigger potential scandal is that, according to the Electoral Commission, as many as eight million people were not correctly included on the voting registers. This means that almost all of them will have been unable to vote, even though they were legally entitled to.

Many people believe that the process of voter registration is automatic, but it is not. It should be, and I welcomed the Government’s announcement that the UK will move to Automatic Voter Registration. This will take time, and the details are important, so we need draft legislation quickly. 

To help oversee changes to election law, we need to restore and strengthen the independence of the elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission. The Government should not be involved in appointing its chair, and the ‘strategy and policy statement’ foisted on it by the last Government now needs to be withdrawn, never to be replaced.

The Commission has proposals for strengthening controls on donations and loans to political parties, which we urgently need. There are significant dangers of foreign interference in our elections which must be tackled.

Increasing party spending limits by 80% has increased the potential influence of a few very rich donors.  A sensible cap on the size of donations is long overdue and the proposals of the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 2011 must now be revisited.

We also need to engage much more with young people. Proper civic education is vital, and to encourage young people to participate in and respect our democracy, we need to let them vote in the first election to take place after their sixteenth birthday.

During this election campaign, I canvassed several 17 year olds, frustrated that they had no say. If the next election is in 2029, then they will be almost 23 before being able to cast a vote in a general election. That is too late.

The voting system for Westminster also needs fundamental reform. It is a scandal that, in so many constituencies, people did not really have a choice of MP – as the real choice lay with a party machine that can foist MPs upon them. On 4 July, only 30% of those who voted got the MP that they voted for, and many of the 30% will have been voting tactically against another party.

The new Government should reflect on what I consider to be the single biggest mistake of the Blair Government in 1997 – to think that it would never lose another election. As a result, those around Tony Blair saw no need to move to a fairer voting system providing real choices for voters. 

After two full terms in government, Labour considered that winning again in 2005 with 35% of the vote was good enough. But it was not – and this Government starts its first term with having received just 34% of the vote. The failure of those Labour Governments to make progress with voting reform led directly to what was frequently referred to in the recent campaign as a ‘decade of chaos’.

With David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak we could not be said to have had the ‘stable government’ that was supposed to be the main justification for the First Past the Post electoral system. We need instead to do everything that we can to make sure that every vote counts in the future. 

Lord Chris Rennard is a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords