Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 December 2020
Once again, I note my appreciation of the cross-party dialogue that there has been in the production of the bill. I will not go quite as far as Miles Briggs did—perhaps my Christmas wish list is a bit more imaginative than being confined to the measures in the bill—but if he is happy, I am happy for him.
The committee benefited from a great deal of expert evidence, as did the MSPs who discussed the bill with the Government before the bill’s introduction. The one exception to that is the written submission in which the main complaint was that general elections in Scotland should not be called “general elections”, because the United Kingdom also has general elections. I will spare the blushes of the member who submitted that. I am glad that we have reached a bill that, on balance, has broad support.
There is still a huge lack of clarity on what the uptake of postal voting is likely to be and what we need to plan for. That was never going to be a specified target in the bill—it does not work that way—but we need to be conscious that the demand for and uptake of postal voting will be determined not only by its availability or by the objective safety of voting, but by the perceived safety of voting. If more people feel anxious about voting in person, the uptake of postal voting may go beyond the current expectations.
In many ways, there is even less clarity now than there was when we debated the bill at stages 1 and 2, which was a very short time ago. During the stage 1 debate, we all recognised that the situation had been pretty dodgy a few months before, but we felt that, now that the vaccine was coming, we were turning a corner and there was a light at the end of tunnel. Now, in the final days of December, we are again all deeply worried about the virus taking another turn for the worse. We simply do not know where we will be and what the conditions will be by the end of April or the beginning of May. I regret that it is necessary to maintain the provision for an option to postpone the election. It is clear that, at this stage, that would not be welcomed by anyone, but the option must be in the bill.
I have a wider concern about participation in elections, which could never have been addressed by the bill, but which needs airing. Elections depend on lively, engaged democratic participation by not just voters, but political parties and, in the current circumstance, no one would welcome door-to-door canvassing, as they would not feel that that was safe. In the next few months, will we get to the point at which that could return? I simply do not know. Again, that is not something to be addressed in the bill.
There have been discussions about innovation and whether the coronavirus should be seen as an opportunity to innovate for the longer term. As I have said before, I am open to the idea of multiple polling days, just as I am open to the growth of postal voting. Not so long ago, people expected to need an excuse to have a postal vote; now, it is an expected right for everyone without having to justify themselves.
I have also supported extensions to the franchise and I would support consideration of where we put polling places. However, taking the opportunity to innovate in a pandemic might, in fact, harm the longer-term objective of having positive innovations that will last. When these immediate circumstances are gone, people will ask why we should maintain them, if the pandemic was the reason for the change in the first place.
We all want the same thing. We want our elections to take place and to be safe and secure, with no barriers of cost. We want voter trust, confidence in the outcome and high levels of participation. Although I do not know how well we will achieve those things in 2021, the bill gives us the opportunity to do our best.
15:45