Voter ID is coming. But is it part of the Brexit puzzle too?

Nigel Whitfield
4 min readMay 18, 2017

One of the things that’s included in the Tory manifesto is the proposal to require ID when people vote. On the face of it, this is not necessarily a bad thing — though it’s worth noting that pretty much all of the suspected electoral fraud in the UK (which isn’t much) has been around postal voting, not impersonating people at polling stations.

In fact, in Northern Ireland, there is already a requirement for photo ID to be shown when voting. Passports, driving licences, and some transport passes are accepted, and they don’t even have to be in date. So if your passport expired, you can still use it as long as you look pretty much like the photo.

But what of those people who don’t have a photo ID? It’s easy to assume that everyone has a driving licence, or a passport, but that’s not always the case for the less well off. If you don’t need to drive for a job — especially if you’re in a city with reasonable public transport — why would you get a licence? It’s £34 online, or £43 if you don’t have access to a computer. Add the cost of a photo on top of that. If you don’t have a birth certificate — not everyone remembers to keep these things somewhere safe — that’s another £9.25. If you’re never even going to be able to afford driving lessons, that’s money you can spend on something else.

In Northern Ireland they have a solution. The Electoral Identity Card, is free, and if you go to one of their offices, they’ll even take the photo for you too. So, essentially they have a voter ID system that doesn’t impose a massive financial burden on anyone.

We don’t yet know the details of what’s proposed for England and Wales, but I’d say that if it doesn’t provide a free option like the card in Northern Ireland then it’s going to have the side effect — unintended or not — of disenfranchising the less well off, especially in cities like London, where driving is far less necessary.

What does this have to do with Brexit? One of the things that struck me about the way people have responded to this proposal is the familiar distaste many Brits — and not just on the left of the political spectrum — have for the idea of having to prove who we are.

Identity cards are never liked, sometimes because of the intention of government to collate data about us, or because of the perceived civil liberties issues.

Thinking about this some more, I started to wonder if our reluctance to embrace cards has in part helped fuel some of the frustrations that lead to Brexit.

For all that people talk about “open door” migration from the EU under the Freedom of Movement rules, the fact is that there are provisions in those rules that qualify them. If someone has no job and no means of supporting themselves, they don’t have the right to remain here indefinitely.

The big problem, however, is that we don’t really know who’s here, or where they are. And that’s not really the fault of Europe — it’s entirely a British issue. In many countries, not only is there an ID card, but there’s also a requirement to register. That may be with the police, or the local town hall, but it’s not uncommon to have to register where you are living, within a relatively short period after arriving.

Why not just make foreigners do that? That would be tricky — while we’re a member, we can’t treat citizens of EU states differently, so if we wanted to have a registration requirement that would allow us to sort out some of the issues with Freedom of Movement, we’d have to impose that on UK citizens too.

Without a standard form of ID available to everyone, that’s pretty close to impossible (though it has been tried once before, sort of — the Community Charge, aka Poll Tax, required registration if you moved. Look how well that turned out.)

It looks very much like voter ID is coming to the UK, barring a major election upset. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it gradually morphs into a national ID system either. Whether the Tories will be brave enough to try a second time to introduce a registration requirement will be interesting to see.

If they do, however, it might give them cover for accepting some free movement from the EU as part of the Brexit settlement, on the grounds that we’d be able to enforce rules in a way that we couldn’t before.

To me, that raises some interesting questions. Could that be spun as enough of a change in freedom of movement to satisfy people who voted to leave? Would people whose principal concern was sovereignty, rather than immigration, be prepared to accept a requirement to register where they live? And — hypothetically —how many of those who voted to remain, and oppose ID cards in the UK, would have grudgingly accepted their introduction, if it was the price of staying within the EU?

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Nigel Whitfield

Will write for money, shag for beer. Have been doing queer stuff online for over 30 years. Presently run a leather club.