Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory former business secretary, has described the requirement for people to need photo ID to be allowed to vote as “gerrymandering”.
The law, which came into force following the Elections Act 2022, will apply throughout the UK at the next general election, and took effect for the first time at the English local elections earlier this month.
In his speech to the NatCon conference, Rees-Mogg (who defended the legislation when he was a minister and it was going through parliament) said:
Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.
We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.
Ministers insist that the legislation was not introduced for party political advantage, and the Electoral Commission originally called for people to have to show ID when they voted. But the system actually chosen by the government – compulsory photo ID, with the list of acceptable photo ID cards appearing to favour pensioners – did fuel opposition suspicions that the move was, at least in part, intended to suppress the anti-Tory vote.
At the weekend the Tory peer Lord Cruddas told the Conservative Democratic Organisation that Labour policies, including abolishing voter ID, would make it impossible for the Tories to win an outright...
Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay $385 million to settle U.S. allegations related to poor manufacturing practices at two facilities, including one involving an investigation of a contaminated faci...