Archive for January, 2024

Welcome to Britain 2024 – we’re worse than Georgia when it comes to voter suppression

17/01/2024, 10:50:55 PM

by Paul Wheeler

2024 is the year of elections including amongst others the UK and US.

For decades political pundits here have been able to point an accusing figure to the Southern States of the US when it comes to the dark arts of voter suppression. Well thanks to the current Government Britain has lost the moral high ground. The credentials required to vote in person here are more restrictive here than in Georgia. Student ID is a permissible form of ID in Georgia a form of ID specifically excluded in this country.

The case for voter ID in Britain was always thin but the way that it has been implemented has descended into embarrassment. The comparison with other European countries who request voter ID ignores the simple fact that they nearly all have universal Identity Cards used in everyday life.

Perhaps most important it has diverted political time and energy which would have been better focused on improving the process of voter registration. The electoral register in Britain has been part of the hidden wiring of British democracy since the introduction of universal suffrage in the early twentieth century. However, in the last decade we have seen a slow-motion collapse in the accuracy and scope of the electoral register.

A major part of the problem is that we have expected cash strapped councils to implement huge changes to the process of voting and registration. If ever the principle of unintended consequences was relevant in public life it would apply to the introduction of Individual Voting Registration (IVR) in the UK.

Introduced in 2009 in the last days of the last Labour Government it was a well-intentioned attempt to move away from allowing a ‘Head of Household’ (usually assumed to be a male) to complete the registration of all members of the family/household. and instead put the responsibility on every individual to complete the registration form themselves – a huge change in terms of bureaucracy and form filling

Sadly, it didn’t anticipate that it would be implemented under a Coalition Government who implemented a savage reduction in public expenditure particularly amongst the 400 councils responsible for voter registration.

For one group of voters the results of the change to individual voting was catastrophic – ‘attainers’ are 16/17 year olds included on the register to anticipate their eligibility to vote at 18. In the past a Head of Household was expected to include them. Now the responsibility was their own. It became increasingly apparent over the years that 16/17 year olds have other priorities than voter registration.

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The Uncuts: 2023 political awards (Part II)

01/01/2024, 04:42:03 PM

Politician of the year: Team Starmer

For the 2023 award, Uncut is bending the rules a little to hand the politician of the year gong to a team. There is a logic. Keir Starmer had an excellent year, he has palpably learned, adapted and overcome the challenges in front of him. But politics is a team sport and while he has been front of office, the back-office team have made much of this progress possible.

In the 1990s, Tony Blair had a close-knit team around him that propelled him to power. The big names are well known – Jonathan Powell, Anji Hunter, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Sally Morgan. Even at the time, each had their own distinct profile, just as Gordon Brown’s team with Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, each had their own media profile.

The difference in the 2020s is that team Starmer is just that, a single unit, there is little briefing or publicity for the different members. No running storyline on tensions with the shadow chancellor’s team where the advisers become the story. After the psychodrama of the TB-GBs, fuelled in large part by advisers, and the scorched earth of Dominic Cummings tenure, a return to the days when advisers remained firmly in the back-office is a welcome change, not to mention an important part of minimising stories of splits and backbiting in any future Labour government.

So, congratulations to Morgan McSweeney, Matt Pound, Matt Doyle, Deborah Mattinson, Peter Hyman and Muneera Lula for not being the story with an honourable mention for Sue Gray, only recently in post as chief of staff, following a highly publicised exit from the civil service, but resolutely absent from the headlines in her new role.

Most underrated in 2023: President Biden

America is heading towards a presidential election between a candidate facing nearly 100 criminal charges and another that has delivered unprecedented and, given the shocks of Covid and Putin’s war, unexpected economic strength.

It should be a no brainer that the latter will win. By a landslide. And yet the polls suggest otherwise and nervousness – Democratic (as in the party) and democratic (as in the political system) – is pervasive.

When Americans vote, Democrats win. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats won by larger margins than in the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania — all battleground states. Democrats also performed strongly in 2023: flipping a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin; defeating a six-week abortion ban in Ohio; and keeping the Virginia state house.

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The Uncuts: 2023 political awards (Part I)

01/01/2024, 10:45:40 AM

Worst and Best Takes on the Israel-Gaza Crisis

It has been a decade since the last major flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. In that time, millions of Britons have come of age and many more millions, lacking the excuse of youth, seem not to have paid any attention to the facts of a complicated conflict and prefer easy, soundbite answers.

In 2023, there was not a mere escalation in tensions but a horrific upsurge of violence, triggered by a single day of massacre of civilians on the 7th of October. We struggle for comparisons, but a simple way think of it is as the Israeli 9/11; a day when a terrorist organisation opted to cut the lives short of innocents, in this case many tortured and raped before their eventual slaughter. How anyone could expect Israel not to retaliate against an organisation not only carrying this out, but which had restarted a daily barrage of rocket attacks into the bargain, defies understanding.

It is unfortunate to have to note that our national media has not exactly covered itself in glory on the subject. The Guardian we have, in the main, long expected to show ugly partisanship with any country which opposes Israel, no matter how awful the regime. But we might have expected better of BBC News and even Sky News, which seemed to demand ridiculous levels of proof of the rape and torture aspects of the attacks which most of us realised were real on Day Two, as well as adopting unabridged casualty figures from a terrorist organisation well known for its shameless misinformation.

For balance, there were some poor journalistic takes on the pro-Israeli side too, however; in the Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons decided that the two-state solution was part of the problem and not the solution. And there were the usual braying voices on the Israeli right.

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