Jem Whitely, Mike Cushman, Martin Willey and Eleanor Martindale respond to Simon Jenkins’ article about the government’s plans for voter identity checks
Simon Jenkins is right (Johnson’s voter ID checks are not about electoral fraud, they’re about power, 18 May), but also wrong. This is not mainly about “regulation and surveillance of daily life”, it’s about voter suppression, and for the Tories it’s so much the better if, like so many of their policies, it disproportionately impacts ethnic minorities. Because, like Boris Johnson’s remarks about burqas and letterboxes, like the hostile environment that the Home Office is perpetuating, and like the detention of visiting foreign nationals, it signals to target voters that they can trust the Tories to tacitly indulge their prejudices.
The confected “perception” that voter fraud is a problem plays into a feeling triangulated between “they all look the same to me”, “they can’t be trusted”, and “they shouldn’t be allowed to vote in our elections anyway”. So it’s easy enough to see why the Tories promote cheap policy initiatives like this, like denying institutional racism, and like protecting statues, which their strategists will tell you play well in the former “red wall” constituencies and elsewhere. It’s less easy to work out how the other parties should react, because part of the beauty of all this for the Tories is that natural and laudable criticism precisely marks the opposition, in the minds of many of those voters, as fighting for and prioritising the interests of those who are not like them.
Jem Whiteley
Oxford
