So, once again, we have the UK government taking another leaf directly out of the Republican playbook of corruption. There has been a long history in the US of parties using gerrymandering laws to give themselves an advantage in elections and in recent decades they have stepped that up to try and include forcing people to show i.d. in order to vote. They do this by making outrageous claims of voter fraud in order to suppress poorer communities that may vote against them.
You only have to look at the ridiculous and unfounded claims made by their previous president to see how easy it is to rile up their base.
However it's very important to note that individual cases of voter fraud in modern elections are extremely scarce and have almost no effect on the elections outcome. The only time voter fraud is a real danger is when it is committed by the people in charge of running the polls.
And that brings us to the government's plans to insist on photo i.d. in UK elections.
There were, apparently, six cases of voter fraud in the last UK election. SIX! According to Matt Hancock that is six too many.
This is a government that has presided over a record death toll from the pandemic. A government that has a quarter of a million homeless people that it's ignoring. A government that sees millions of it's citizens suffering from food poverty.
They do nothing about any of these things but SIX cases of voter fraud is too much?
We all know that this is just an excuse to disenfranchise millions of poor families.
The press know that this is just an excuse to keep the power in Tory hands.
Tory voters know that this a corrupt way to ensure that their party has an unfair advantage.
And the government know that this will keep them in the business of stealing from the public purse for as long as possible.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?