What the Butler Saw… and What Should Always Remain Private

Civitas, 10 December 2004

In an interview contained in this week’s issue of the Spectator, former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, delivers a coruscating attack on the style of government of the present administration.
Of especial concern to Lord Butler has been the way Prime Minister Blair’s almost Presidential approach towards his job has steadily eroded the sovereignty of Parliament, and, in particular thereby, undermined the authority of the House of Commons.
In face of what Lord Butler has exposed as the present administration’s contempt for representative government, small wonder is it that many of today’s more serious national dailies make their top news story the government’s decision to reject the advice of the Electoral Commission that it proceed no further with its plan to replace the secret ballot by postal voting.

The Electoral Commission has rejected postal ballots on the grounds that their trial introduction in some constituencies in recent local elections have shown them to be highly susceptible to vote-rigging, especially, through intimidation.
The government’s ostensible reason for replacing the ballot box by postal ballots has been its concerns about low voter turn out and belief that postal ballots would encourage more voter participation.
However, it is almost inconceivable that any government, and especially this one, would have sought to make the change unless it thought it stood to gain some electoral advantage from implementing it.
In any case, that the government seems bent on pressing on with introducing postal ballots, against the advice of the Electoral Commission, is further evidence of its contempt for representative government that is of such concern to Lord Butler.
No one anticipated more clearly the dangers of postal ballots or spoke out against them more eloquently than John Stuart Mill.
As we witness the present government about to strike yet a further nail into the coffin of parliamentary democracy, it is worth recalling Mill’s warning against using postal ballots in parliamentary or local elections delivered back in 1861. Mill wrote:
‘The proposal … of allowing the voting papers to be filled up at the voter’s residence, and sent by post, … I should regard as fatal. The act would be done in… the presence of all the pernicious influences. The briber might, in the shelter of privacy, behold with his own eyes his bargain fulfilled, and the intimidator could see the extorted obedience rendered irrevocably on the spot.’
Then, in a footnote, Mill took care of the present government’s concerns about the need to reverse current low voter turn-out. He writes:
’The expedient [of postal voting] has been recommended … on the score of … obtaining the votes of many electors who otherwise would not vote, and who are regarded by the advocates of the plan as a particularly desirable class of voters…. But when the matter in hand is the great business of national government, …[t]he voter who does not care enough about the election to go to the poll, is the very man who, if he can vote without the trouble, will give his vote to the first person who asks for it, or on the most trifling or frivolous inducement. A man who does not care whether he votes, is not likely to care much which way he votes; and he who is in that state of mind has no moral right to vote at all; since if he does, a vote which is not the expression of a conviction, counts for as much, and goes as far in determining the result, as one which represents the thoughts and purposes of a life.’
Thus, those members of the electorate who are genuinely apathetic should not be encouraged to vote, and those genuinely concerned to vote should be allowed to do so without fear of intimidation, which means in the privacy of the voting booth.
Perhaps, current voter apathy in Britain will start to be reversed when its laws cease to be imposed by diktat from Brussels as European Directives.
We can only hope and pray, therefore, that, when the British electorate is asked whether the government should sign up to the European Constitution, the referendum will be conducted by means of the ballot box and not through postal voting.