It’s the morning of Saturday 6th May 2023, the coronation of King Charles III takes place today, but even before the first guests had arrived at Westminster Abbey, the police were confiscating placards from anti-royalist protesters, some of whom were arrested.
Now, you may say, “Quite right too,” and believe that nothing
should spoil the occasion of Charles’s coronation. You may hold similar views
about the actions of Just Stop Oil, or Extinction Rebellion.
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| Police remove placards from anti-royalist protesters. |
You may fully support the recently introduced Public Order Act that gives the police greater powers to deal with protests, including the offense of ‘locking on’ whereby a person commits an offense if they attach themselves to another person, an object, or land. Or if they merely go equipped to do so, by which we the act means carrying objects for such a purpose. How do you feel about arresting people for merely being in possession of such things as super glue or a padlock?
Even if you do support such legislation, doesn’t a little
part of you feel uneasy that in what we continue to call a free country, our
rights are being eroded, little by little? You may say that it’s only
extremists, the ant-monarchists and the climate change fanatics, that is to
say, those you don’t support, who are being targeted, and that they deserve
everything they get. But one day there may be something that you feel strongly
about, that gets you up in arms, but about which you cannot lawfully protest
about. The right to protest isn’t just being taken away from people you don’t
support or approve of.
Just yesterday, the results of local council elections that had
taken place in many parts of England on Thursday were announced, but almost overshadowing
the results – in which the Conservatives took a battering, losing over 1,000
councillors and the control of 48 councils – were the stories of voters being
turned away from polling stations for want of valid photo ID, this being the
first time that such ID had been required in England.
Is the requirement to provide photo ID to be able to vote a
sensible precaution to avoid fraud at polling stations, or is it voter suppression?
Personation - ‘assuming the identity of another (person) in
order to deceive' – at polling stations is very rare indeed, and there were
just seven allegations of personation at local elections in England, Scotland
and Wales, elections to the Northern Ireland assembly, a series of mayoral
elections in England and six Commons by-elections during 2022, none of
which resulted in any police action, yet it is estimated that up to two million
people lack an acceptable form of photo ID and applications for the government’s
free Voter Authority Certificate ran to just 85,000 ahead of the local
elections.
The requirement to show photo ID at polling stations is clearly a solution in search of a problem, and one exacerbated by the inconsistency in the types of ID that have been deemed acceptable.
Proponents of the scheme point to the fact that most of Europe, and even Northern Ireland, requires voters to produce ID, and that the Labour Party – who have largely opposed the scheme – require members to show membership cards to participate in party meetings. This argument spectacularly misses the point. Apart from Denmark, Iceland, and Ireland, all European Economic Area (EEA) member states issue national identity cards, and Labour Party members are provided with a card when joining the party.
I get the argument that successful instances of personation
may not be known, but it is likely to be very small indeed, so assuming that
this nut of miniscule proportions requires a sledgehammer to smash it, it would
surely have been appropriate for the government to write to everyone on the Electoral
Register personally to make them aware of this most fundamental change to the
manner in which our democracy works and ensure that everyone who needs one has
a Voter Authority Certificate but apparently not.
The publicity surrounding events of this week at polling
stations, with many people turned away, and some apparently challenged even though
they had valid ID (allegedly the likeness of holder’s photos on passports and driving
licences was questioned in some places), should mean that come the next
General Election the number of people unable to vote for want of correct
documentation will be significantly lower, perhaps as low as the number of
cases of personation at the last one in 2019 (33 allegations, 1 conviction, 1
caution).
Voted ID wasn’t required seven years ago, at the EU
referendum, and despite various attempts at getting Brexit done after Leave won
the vote, we seem to have achieved very little that is positive. A recent Savanta
survey for The Independent shows that two-thirds of
Britons now support a referendum on rejoining, and of course in the years since
2016, many thousands of teenagers, too young to vote then but who were more
likely be supportive of the UK being inside the EU, have joined the electoral register.
Even many of Brexit’s staunchest supporters are unhappy
because the version of Brexit that we have is not what they wanted, although on
the basis that the ballot paper merely asked whether voters wanted to Remain or
Leave, any form of Brexit must be what the public voted for as no details of
our ongoing relationship with Europe were specified on the paper.
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| "Leave the European Union." Seven years on we are still arguing what that actually entails. |
Where views on a subject are firmly entrenched it is often pointless arguing about them in person, and even more futile arguing on social media, and especially with strangers. There are some subjects like Brexit, or climate change, that are so complex or diverse that few people have an all-encompassing view, but there may be one area in which they are well read. This results in arguments being all about the pros and cons of two individual’s wildly different areas of expertise, areas in which they have no common ground. In such instances, no one gives way.
Paul Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement categorises various
types of argument into a pyramid as shown below:
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And the reason that the hierarchy can be thought of as a
pyramid is that the higher up one goes, the rarer that type of argument
becomes.
It used to be said that the hardest three words for a man to utter were “I love you,” but since providing a counter argument or refuting the central point of a particular case rarely cuts any ice with those who with entrenched views on a particular matter, it’s more accurate to say that the hardest three words are “I was wrong.”
