It is a truth universally acknowledged, or at least widely tweeted, that a government in possession of a large majority must be in want of consistency. The latest illustration arrives with characteristic understatement from the Prime Minister’s office. From next year, should you wish to open a fresh account on Instagram, TikTok or the platform formerly known as Twitter, you will be invited—politely, of course—to upload a form of identification or submit to a facial age scan. The stated purpose is the protection of the young from the perils of the infinite scroll.
Fair enough. Children should not be left unsupervised in the digital sweetshop. Yet the same administration, under the energetic leadership of Andy Burnham, is simultaneously advancing legislation that would allow a voter to stroll into a polling station armed with nothing more photographic than a bank card. The card need not even display a full name in some interpretations; initials will apparently suffice. One is left wondering whether the electorate is considered more trustworthy than a teenager with a smartphone, or simply less inconvenient.
The irony is almost too neat to be accidental, social media, that noisy agora of the age, is to be placed under a regime of verification so that the under-sixteens may be kept out. The polling station, by contrast, is to have its existing photo-ID requirement diluted in the name of accessibility. The Representation of the People Bill, we are told, is being hurried along with a speed that suggests either profound confidence in the purity of the democratic process or a certain anxiety about the calendar. Bank cards are to be admitted as proof of identity. The Electoral Commission has expressed reservations about the reduced security of a document that carries neither likeness nor, necessarily, unambiguous personal details. These reservations have been noted and, in the classic manner of governments everywhere, filed under “concerns that will be addressed in due course.”
One need not be a conspiracy theorist of the more florid variety to observe that identity checks at the ballot box were introduced precisely because personation—voting in someone else’s name—is not an abstract theoretical risk. It has occurred. It has been prosecuted. The previous requirement of photographic identification was imperfect, as all human arrangements are, yet it raised a modest barrier against the more casual forms of abuse. Replacing that barrier with a plastic rectangle that can be obtained, lost, or, in less scrupulous hands, acquired with relative ease is presented as an act of democratic expansion. The native British working class, whose grandparents built the Labour movement in the mills and the mines and the union halls, might be forgiven for wondering whether the expansion is aimed in their direction. Those voters still tend to possess, or at least to understand the value of, a passport, a driving licence or a pensioner’s travel pass. The new dispensation appears more solicitous of those for whom documentary formality has historically been optional.
There is a certain historical poignancy here. The Labour Party was founded by men and women who believed that the franchise should be guarded as carefully as the rights it conferred. They fought for the vote; they did not fight for the right to treat the vote as a casual convenience. To dilute the safeguards while simultaneously tightening the screws on online anonymity looks less like progressive modernisation and more like selective vigilance. One set of rules for the digital commons, where the young must be protected from themselves; another for the polling booth, where the integrity of the count is apparently robust enough to withstand a lighter touch. The suspicion inevitably arises that the lighter touch is preferred not because fraud is impossible, but because a certain elasticity in the electoral roll may prove useful should the government’s mandate require a little artificial reinforcement.
Burnham’s defenders will insist that bank cards are ubiquitous, that the change merely removes an unnecessary obstacle for the poor and the transient, and that any talk of fraud is the fever dream of reactionaries who prefer fewer people to vote at all. The argument has a surface plausibility. Yet the same government that frets over the possibility of a fifteen-year-old creating a TikTok account shows a remarkable nonchalance about the possibility of an ineligible person casting a ballot. The asymmetry is instructive. Algorithms must be policed with biometric thoroughness; the ballot box may rely on the honour system, supplemented by a piece of plastic issued by a bank that has no particular interest in electoral purity.
One detects, beneath the language of inclusion, a quiet abandonment of the party’s original constituency. The native working class—those who still live in the towns that once returned solid Labour majorities, who pay their taxes, who send their children to the local comprehensive, and who notice when the rules seem to bend more readily for newcomers than for themselves—are offered the consolation that democracy is being made more accessible. They may be excused for feeling that accessibility is being redefined in a manner that dilutes their own hard-won voice. A false mandate, after all, need not be fabricated through overt criminality. It can be assembled through a series of small administrative adjustments that make verification less exacting and the electorate more elastic.
The late Miles Kingston, were he still with us and still inclined to comment on the passing political carnival, might have observed that the British genius for hypocrisy has rarely been displayed with such bureaucratic elegance. To demand a face scan before one may post a cat video, while accepting a debit card as sufficient warrant to help choose a government, is a performance of priorities that would have delighted the more satirical corners of the old television review columns. It is not that electoral fraud is being openly invited. It is that the obstacles to it are being courteously lowered, while the obstacles to anonymous social-media mischief are being raised. The working-class founders of the Labour Party, one suspects, would have recognised the difference. They understood that the franchise is not a consumer service to be made frictionless; it is a trust. Treat it as the former, and it ceases, gradually but inexorably, to function as the latter.
In the end the policy reveals more about the government’s hierarchy of anxieties than any press release ever could. Children must be protected from the internet. The integrity of the vote, apparently, can look after itself. Or at least it can be trusted to look after the interests of those currently holding the levers. The native British working class, who once formed the backbone of the movement, are left to contemplate the spectacle of a party that remembers their history mainly as a decorative slogan while adjusting the practical machinery of democracy in directions that may not favour them.
It is a curious form of progressive politics that makes it harder to open a social-media account than to cast a ballot. One can only hope the irony is not entirely lost on those responsible for it.