Keir Starmer’s government won’t be the first to engage in gerrymandering when it seeks to lower the voting age from 18 to 16, inviting into the polling booths a group which most people suspect will be more inclined to vote Labour. But could Labour’s elections Bill end up being more radical than that?
The Labour-linked think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has just published a report arguing for more extensive reforms, including removing the requirement for photo ID at polling booths, automatic voter registration and giving the vote to foreign nationals who are long-term residents of Britain. They also include holding elections at the weekend and introducing ‘election day service’ rather like jury service, where members of the public would be selected at random to help come and count the votes.
Would those missing renters mostly vote for left-wing parties?
Such reforms, says the IPPR, are ‘the only solution to the heightening doom loop of voting patterns, skewed policy and populist politics’. The think tank isn’t trying too hard to conceal its political leanings. Voting patterns, it claims, are being skewed by ‘political inequality’ which:
increases the space for populist politicians, who pit ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’…. They are doing so to ruthless effect. Reform UK and the Conservatives performed better with non-graduates than graduates at the 2024 general election; the opposite was true of the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green parties.
It adds: ‘This is a relatively new development: before 2016, non-graduates were more likely to vote Labour in every election since 1979.’
It isn’t hard to decode this: reform the election system and we will be able to get all the dim people voting for nice progressive parties again rather than nasty right-wing ones. But is the IPPR a little misconceived in its theory that persuading more people to vote would increase the vote for left-wing parties?
Looking through the statistics presented by the IPPR there does seem to be a worrying dip in voting turnout among some groups, most obviously between owner-occupiers and renters. A graph presented by the IPPR and attributed to a previous paper published by the think tank in 2023 suggests that while 80 per cent of owner-occupiers tend to vote, that is true of only 60 per cent of renters. The differential has widened sharply since 1990, although the figures only seem to go up to 2010.
It is not hard to wonder why turnout should have fallen among renters; a generation ago most renters were living in secure council tenancies. Now the norm is for shorthold tenancies. If you are only in a property for a year you could easily miss the annual letter sent to properties asking occupants to update the electoral roll, and you might well fail to register even when an election is called. Perhaps something does need to be done to put this right.
But would those missing renters mostly vote for left-wing parties? As the IPPR admits, working class voters are showing an increasing tendency to vote Conservative or Reform UK. Get more of them on the electoral register and it may well end up benefiting those two parties. Voting at the weekend? Given that polling stations in Britain are open long hours from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. it is hard to see that many working people are denied the opportunity to vote. In any case, plenty of people work at the weekends, too.
Ending the requirement for voter ID, which the IPPR says resulted in 16,000 people being turned away from polling stations (it doesn’t say how many later returned with the required ID)? The attitude of the Left towards voter ID has always seemed a bit peculiar, especially given that had the Blair and Brown governments lasted longer we would all have ID cards by now anyway. Election day stands out as a bizarre day off from Britain’s surveillance society. But more to the point would it increase votes for left-wing parties? Even if none of those 16,000 lost voters returned to the polling station and voted on their second attempt it is hard to see how such numbers are going to influence an election in a country of 48 million registered voters.
Labour may well find a new group of client voters in 16 and 17 year olds, but I doubt whether the IPPR’s suggested reforms will squeeze out a lot of extra votes for the Left. They may well, if introduced, end up adding to Reform UK’s tally.
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