What need for photo ID?

The recent flurry of publicity about the newly introduced requirement for voters to present photo ID at polling stations has engendered surprisingly little comment as to its purpose and the motivation behind it.

Ask the Conservative Party and they will tell you it is designed to prevent electors being impersonated so as to unfairly influence the outcome of the election.

If you then challenge their reasoning by pointing out that the number of cases of ‘personation’ as it is known, is vanishingly small, they will say it is to prevent the potential for fraudulent voting.

At this point you may begin to smell a rat.

Governments have lots of pressing problems to solve, not least when the country is in such a dire mess, with rising poverty and the NHS and police in crisis, to name just three major problems, so they don’t devote valuable Parliamentary time to heading off things that aren’t, but just could conceivably be, a problem at some future date.

So we must look for the true motivation, and it isn’t hard to find. It is the Conservative Government that has a pressing problem, not the country, and that is that there is every chance they will lose the next General Election.

So what could be better than a measure designed to make it hard for those least likely to vote Conservative to vote?

The reasoning behind this is that the young, the disadvantaged and some ethnic minorities are more likely to vote something other than Conservative and they are less likely to have the necessary photo ID.

Yes, there is a procedure to get around this, but these groups are also less likely to have the time and knowledge to deal with the bureaucracy involved.

If you want further evidence, just consider the fact that pensioner bus passes are acceptable ID but student cards are not. So let us call The Elections Act 2022 what it really is - The Vote Suppression Act 2022. There are many

Those without ID are less likely to vote for the Conservatives

reasons for booting out this incompetent Government. What more do we need?

Jim Hooker Birdham Road Chichester