BY ALEXIA JAMES

Labour clearly have something to hide. Why else would they be coming out in droves to reject Voter ID across the UK? It’s not that block votes from temples and mosques, or student double voting (in their university and home towns) are coming to an end. We all know that postal voting has been abused in the past. Could it be that they fear such examples of voting laxness – next in line after ID checks – will result in less Labour votes than in the past?

There is no common-sense reason why Labour would reject ID checks for voters – such checks are commonplace across our world, from first to third. Especially in a climate where talk of Russian interference in Western elections is ubiquitous. Especially in an era when UK voters doubt the UK voting system more than they have in many decades, and complaints have reached record numbers. There is such doubt now over some constituencies’ vote counting that some are calling for police from other areas to man vote counts.

ID is called for increasingly in modern life, partly as a result of counter terror measures and partly because technology has made large transactions feasible with the mere click of a mouse or swipe of a contactless card.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) analysed the 2010 and 2015 general elections and suggested that the UK Government should give “serious consideration” to introducing “a more robust mechanism for identification of voters”.

So to strengthen the voting identification process and acting responsibly, the Tories introduced checks in five areas in a trial. The trial worked successfully. Among the proposals set out in the Queen’s speech on Monday were “steps to protect the integrity of democracy and the electoral system in the United Kingdom”. In response Labour has suggested there’s no good reason for changing the system. “In fact, the changes seem to be a cynical ploy to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister,” argued The Canary, a pro-Corbyn publication often described as bird-brained by critics.

Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn is furious:

“These plans are clearly discriminatory and a blatant attempt by the Tories to suppress voters, deny people their democratic rights and rig the result of the next general election. The people that the Tories are trying to stop voting will be disproportionately from ethnic minority backgrounds and they will disproportionately be working class voters of all ethnicities.”

Call me mistrustful but Labour’s reaction, warbling about “an affront to Democracy” and “making it more difficult for the more vulnerable to vote” has echoes of the desperate Democrats in the US who pushed across various states for voter rights for illegal aliens while simultaneously talking a tough line on illegal immigration in the 2016 election. The analogous hypocrisy is eye-watering.

The fact is that most of the population of this country cannot for the life of them work out who would vote for Labour in the first place. Who can vote for a party whose leader supported the IRA and calls Hamas friends? How can anyone associate with Britain’s antisemitic party? Apart from politically-naive immigrants, it has to be dead voters voting for Labour and those who shouldn’t be voting in the first place.  What else explains odd results like the Peterborough by-election and tales of boxes of votes suddenly appearing in Dent Coad’s Kensington and in Tom Watson’s constituency of West Bromwich? The police were involved.

So, voter ID is a vital step to shake out the corpses and to determine who’s voting twice, and to help expose who the election crooks are. Labour’s rejection of Government proposals is frankly embarrassing. Just how big a dependency on dodgy votes do they have?