The Government is beset by so many struggles on a day-to-day basis that even a specialist site such as ours can comfortably fill its pages with them.
But we are nothing if not diligent at ConservativeHome, so let’s talk about the looming fiasco that is the Government’s voter ID scheme.
Last month, the BBC reported that ministers were pushing ahead despite only one per cent of voters without proper documentation – some two million people, apparently – having signed up for a Voter Authority Certificate, the special bit of paper that will allow them to vote; the Guardian reported that take-up was especially low amongst older and younger voters.
Some of this will be simply a product of the inevitable fact that lots of people will not sign up for something for which they need to pro-actively register, even if they don’t actively object. That was the logic underlying the introduction in 2020, by this Government, of an opt-out system for organ donation.
More of it may arise from understandable confusion about what forms of ID actually qualify. If you’re curious, here’s the Electoral Commission’s list. As the Electoral Reform Society noted, the 20-odd options strongly favour documents issued to older people.
Curiosities abound. An older person’s bus pass, introduced by New Labour in 2007, is valid voter ID; the 26-30 railcard, introduced with some fanfare by the Conservatives in 2019, is not.
It isn’t difficult to see how this will go wrong. Recall the outrage when, in 2010, over a thousand people ended up getting locked out of polling stations – and they, at least, left it late, and the Government which could plausibly be blamed was in any event leaving office.
As sure as night follows day, people will be turned away from polling stations. That is, after all, what the policy does. We don’t yet know how many – local election turnout is low, perhaps that motivated slice of the citizenry will be disproportionately on top of their paperwork – but it won’t take many to make a story.
Cue outraged vox pops outside polling stations, a succession of press reports and packages on the broadcast news, and eventually a solemn-faced minister promising to get to the bottom of it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
At some point in the post-mortem someone will suggest, as they surely have already, that the only real solution is for the Government to issue a universal ID document. And they will probably be told, as they surely have been already, that this is quite out of the question, because we are not a papers-please society.
The Conservative Party’s antipathy to ID cards is a sort of ideological appendix; a relic of an earlier era that is generally obsolete and, on occasion, actively harmful. It’s a meme, divorced entirely from the reality either of national life or, indeed, Tory policy.
That the Government does not actually believe in the sort of state implied by the phrase “We’re not a papers, please society” cannot be doubted; we all live the proof.
Here we need our Unique Taxpayer Reference Number, our National Insurance number, our NHS number; there our passport or driving licence; somewhere else again a bank statement or utility bill. We are compelled by 2017 anti-money-laundering regulations (enacted by the Conservatives) to provide copious documentation when buying a home; landlords are required to demand proof of identity before letting us one.
To borrow from Derrida, the thing signified by “We’re not a papers, please society” – a light-touch state sitting atop a high-trust society – vanished, decades ago. The days when an Englishman might go about most of his business without interacting with government are long in the past.
Yet the signifier – the phrase itself, so wonderfully evocative of one of the things for which we fought The War – lurches on; a rhetorical zombie, not powerful enough to actually deliver libertarian policy, but capable of tying ministers’ shoe-laces together.
Thus, the Government is going to step on an unburied landmine by demanding that people present one of a score of documents they may or may not have when trying to vote. Thus, Suella Braverman takes pains to rule out the one thing which might actually make the planned crackdown on illegal working and other immigration offences enforceable. Thus, David Cameron could find no way of preventing EU citizens from accessing the welfare system.
All unforced errors, all rooted in the same bizarre but long-running effort to try and have a papers-please society but pretend we don’t by not actually issuing papers.
Those are just the obvious political calamities, too. Any number of the issues highlighted by Robert Colvile, in his theory of the database state, could plausibly be exacerbated by government demanding that citizens engage with various systems without giving them a unified ID that interacts with all of them.
It’s time that ministers bit the bullet. Electoral fraud is worth tackling. But the point at which the state is asking voters to present papers to vote is the point at which it ought to be issuing those papers to everybody, by default.
Doubtless some MPs will vent Linnekerian fury at the Government doing something which vaguely resembles something the Germans once did. But the charge will be as specious from their lips as from his. If we are to keep building this papers-please society, it’s time we had the papers.