Lord Mcalpine And Electoral Registration

EDM number 659 in 1996-97, proposed by Harry Barnes on 13/03/1997.

That this House congratulates Lord McAlpine, who was Treasurer of the Conservative Party for 15 years before his defection to the Referendum Party, for his candour concerning the political impact of the poll tax in his autobiography, Once a Jolly Bagman, in which he concedes that 'the million people whose names were missing from the electoral roll...were the missing million votes that helped John Major win the 1992 election...'; recognises that the demise of the poll tax has not halted the trend begun by the poll tax and that between three and four million people are missing from electoral registers for a variety of reasons including, in particular, an archaic and inefficient registration system which should be replaced, at the earliest opportunity, by a modern rolling electoral registration system combined with far greater efforts by central and local government and voluntary institutions to encourage maximum electoral registration; and urges the Government, even at this late stage, to make sufficient resources available for people to take up their postal and proxy voting rights and to register themselves on supplementary electoral rolls being prepared by local electoral registration officers.

This motion has been signed by a total of 23 MPs.