The Barbour County Registrars

The last time I voted was in 2019. It was a simple thing. There are polling stations right near my home. You didn’t even need to take the poll card. You can do it around full time work, and the school run. You just walked into the booth and did it. 

If there’s something to be patriotic about in British politics it’s the ease of our voting system. Once we got rid of the property-owning qualifications, and the ban on women’s participation, voting became a simple process that gives (mostly) clear and decisive results. Liberals like me might not always like the outcomes, like the Leave vote in 2016, but at least you know what the results are. Sure, some of us might periodically argue for something like AV or proportional representation, but this never comes to anything and there’s something about the declamatory thump of first-past-the-post. 

Naturally, the government wants to make voting more complicated. 

Voter ID is a bad idea that never dies. There are many constitutional innovations I would import from the United States. Voter ID isn’t one of them. I remember coverage of Georgians waiting five hours on a dusty road to vote in the 2020 election. Having lost that one, the Republicans have redoubled legislative efforts to make voting more complicated still. Voting rights have a controversial history in that country, as in ours. Robert Caro, in his Master of the Senate, detailed the bureaucratic hurdles that faced Black electors in just one Alabama county of 1957:

The Barbour County registrars used a less sophisticated technique. They asked more reasonable questions – the names of local, state, and national officials – but if an applicant missed even one question, he would not be given the application that had to be filled out before he could receive a certificate, and somehow, even if a black applicant felt sure he had answered every question correctly, often the registrars would say there was one he had missed, although they would refuse to tell him which it was. Margaret Frost had already experienced this technique, for she had tried to register before – in January of 1957 – and forty years later, when she was an elderly woman, she could still remember how, after she had answered several questions, the Board’s chairman, William (Beel) Stokes, had told her she had missed one, adding, ‘You all go home and study a little more,’ and she could still remember how carefully blank the faces of Stokes and his two colleagues had been, the amusement showing only in their eyes.

As staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Centre, Caren Short, told the Guardian: ‘The real reason these laws are passed is to suppress the vote, and that is in fact what happens.’

ID is increasingly crucial to citizenship. The Windrush scandal in 2018 saw thousands of people lose their jobs, their bank accounts, even get deported, in essence because they could not provide reams of documentation going back many years.

Of course I am confident this is not the rationale here. When ministers get up to defend the proposal they will not say ‘We do not want certain people to vote.’ They will say it’s no different from showing your driver’s licence to get a mortgage, they will say they want to stop electoral fraud, they will make reasonable arguments (although perhaps with a hint of amusement in their eyes?) 

But we have already tried voter ID in this country, albeit on a local basis. In spring 2019 more than 800 people were turned away from polling stations in a small trial – and, considering the margins of victory for local politicians, that 800 can make quite a difference. Far from protecting the integrity of voting systems, the Tory plans potentially make local government even less accountable and more corrupt than it is at present. In all the bluster about Hartlepool and the Great Realignment of British politics, few pundits noted that the turnout last week was just 42.3%. Why didn’t the other 60-odd% vote? Why does the government want to make it harder for them to do so?

I don’t want to make a political attack here. I can absolutely imagine Labour governments bringing this stupid idea back to life.

But if the Great Realignment means anything, it is that the Conservatives are now the party of clipboard-wielding busybodies. You need two forms of ID to get a job (or keep one), you need two forms of ID to rent or buy somewhere, you will need papers to get into the pub and now you will need photo ID to get into the voting booth. ‘Active state’? You may keep it. 

The Two Musicians

I really must say a few words about Kirstin Innes’s fabulous second novel, Scabby Queen, which I have just got round to reading. It’s about an idealistic Scottish singer who has one big hit – a protest song about the poll tax called ‘Rise Up’ – then spends the rest of her life in activism and low key experimental music. Her first big tour is of Highland towns – ‘Thirty dates, none of them in cities. That’s what makes it revolutionary’ – Oban, Ullapool, Fort William, the kind of towns no London Brexit columnist would be seen dead in.

Clio Campbell is considered D list as a celebrity, but she makes a strong impression on everyone she meets, and her story is told through the perspectives of the people who knew her best – her parents, people who grew up with her, the men she married, the artists she inspired, the activists who shared her squat in Brixton in the 1990s. Innes has a gift for mimicry and epistolary detail, and I particularly liked the op-ed clippings from the right wing newspapers and the music press about her. The very names – ‘John Biddie’ – ‘Pete Moss’ – are a delight. 

Martin Amis writes in his Inside Story that ‘There used to be a sub-genre of long, plotless, digressive, and essayistic novels (fairly) indulgently known as ‘baggy monsters’… For self-interested reasons I like to think this sub-genre retains a viable pulse; but broadly speaking the baggy monster is dead.’ Surely Scabby Queen is a classic baggy monster novel, long and digressive but certainly not plotless: Innes manages to keep an array of characters, cities and timelines going without once losing our attention. It’s a fractured tale, and a great novel about uncertainty, and fractured lives.

Clio’s childhood in industrial Ayrshire is torn between her lazy, irresponsible father Malcolm and her respectable mother Eileen. Her contemporaries follow the rules, keep their heads down and train for jobs that, in the event, vaporise when the industrial base is destroyed in the 1980s. But Innes doesn’t romanticise the road Clio has taken, either. At a squat reunion in 2009, Clio’s old friend Sammi reappraises her activist peers of two decades back: ‘She saw them now, frayed, middle-aged and flustered, people who’d never held down a job, raised a kid, had managed to coast through to their forties and even their fifties on outrage and vim, untroubled by any real responsibility.’ Scabby Queen is not an advertisement for dropping out. 

Her own inspiration is Robert Burns, and I wonder if the whole story is set around this Burns poem, that we hear towards the end of the novel: ‘There was a lass and she was fair,/At kirk or market to be seen;/When a’ our fairest maids were met,/The fairest maid was bonnie Jean. And ay she wrought her Mammie’s wark,/And ay she sang sae merrilie;/The blythest bird upon the bush/Had ne’er a lighter heart than she.’

But the next verse takes a dark turn: ‘hawks will rob the tender joys/That bless the little lintwhite’s nest/And frost will blight the fairest flowers,/And love will break the soundest rest.’ Burns warns that the world breaks people who dare to rise above a certain level of mediocrity, and that’s more or less what happens to Clio. Her world is full of decent people but also hawks, circling the skies, waiting to strike. After her death, her story is rewritten, just as Burns is mainly read in golf clubs and Rotary dinners these days. Innes establishes the erasure of working class women’s stories with more deft and clarity than any contemporary academic discourse. 

Just before an Iraq war demo in 2003, Clio meets her father for the first time in many years. Malcolm is also a musician but not a songwriter: ‘If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people really only want to hear songs they’ve known before…. hear those songs that mean things to them… Och, what’s that word – nostalgia.’

Clio is subdued during this argument. She just says ‘It’s important. Make a big public stand.’ Malcolm, in full wind, goes on to say this:

You can’t stop these bastards from doing what they want to do and hang the ordinary people. It never changes, lass, believe your old father here. You know that. You’re hardly a wee girl now, are you? All the likes of you and me can hope to do is cheer them up with a couple of tunes. That’s why we were put on this earth. That’s our purpose, you and me. You’ve got a God-given gift in that throat of yours, lass – you use that rather than your feet. Sing a song for people and at least you give them some hope.

Clio wants art to be more than that. She wants change, not hope. Who is right in this argument? Should art move the world and change it? Clio’s friends don’t know where the talent and passion ends and the actual person begins. She’s a mystery, and in Scabby Queen there are big plot twists but also the nagging sense that you are not being told the whole story, that there is important stuff we’re not privy to. For how can anyone really know anyone else?