JOHNSON'S NEXT PICK FROM TRUMP'S PLAYBOOK: VOTER SUPPRESSION

"All I know is we got 5,000 niggers in this county  who ain't registered to vote. And so far as I'm concerned, they never will be."

Thus the sherrif, in Alan Parker's great 1988 film, Mississppi Burning, about the FBI investigation into the murder of 3 civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississppi, in 1964.

The United States, as we have recently been reminded, is at heart a lawless, brutal, deeply racist country, where voter suppression is a hallowed tradition and has taken many forms, from gerrymandering, intimidation, removal of voting stations from poor areas, appointment of a Republican to head the US Mail to slow the postal votes before  elections, Republican ID laws designed to make it near impossible for poor blacks to register or to vote, and of course, lynching and most recently, a Republican President who phoned election officials and ask them to fake the numbers his way, Republicans who gathered armed round the homes of election officials and sent deaths  and rape threats to them and their wives and children, and Republicans egged on by their Republican President who attacked the nation's legislature, kill policemen and hunted down Deomcracts and even dissident Republicans to lynch right there and then, in the centre of the nation's capital, live on TV. Better no democracy than one that occasionally elects the other party.

Of course, we don't do that here. True, every party supports or opposes changes in electoral processes and law that will advantage or disadvantage it.  But neither party has ever gone in for voter suppression. Neither party attempt to make registration or voting more difficult. In fact now it's easier to register to vote than it ever has been, in the EU Referendum we signed up people on an IPhone in the street in 2 minutes.  In this country, all parties accept that the voters' decision is paramount and if you lose, so be it. We dont try to stop people voting.

Until now.

Johnson has announced legislation which will stop you voting if you dont have the right ID. Is this because voter fraud is a growing problem in the UK? No: it isn't. And that's official. The Electoral Commmission whose job is it to monitor voter fraud, has this to say:

They add that in 2019, there were 592 complaints of fraud to the police,  mostly about local elections. Just 3 resulted in a conviction. Three. In a year.

Clearly, Johnson's legislation is not about fraud. It is about voter suppression. It is intended to make it harder for the most deprived, rootless, vulnerable in our society to have a say in how that society is run, on the assumption that they would tend to favour other parties than the Tories.

It is utterly wrong and disgraceful. But entirely typical of Johnson and what one must call his Post Tory Party, because there isn't anything about it that connects to the great Tory tradition, not least of  electoral reform, including the 2nd Refform Act and extension of franchise to women.

The tradition Johnson choses to follow is that of Donald Trump's Republicans. A tradition more alien to this country and to our values and history than anything  that ever came out of Brussels.