Letter to the Editor: "Gerrymandering” describes the manipulation of elections to favour a particular party or group. 

This might be done by adjusting the boundaries of a constituency, or by preventing some members of the electorate casting votes. Here we may be more familiar with the term, “voter suppression”.

Recently the Conservative Government claimed they were preventing voter fraud by insisting on the use of photographic ID. 

This sounds reasonable were it not for the fact that there is no evidence of widespread fraud, and that the cost of implementing this change will be, according to this same Government, about £180 million of our taxes every decade. Money I’d rather use for the NHS, schools and to feed hungry kids!

This week, the darling of the far right, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, let the cat out of the bag when he said: “parties that gerrymander end up finding that their clever scheme comes back to bite them as, dare I say, we found by insisting on photo ID for elections, only to find that those without ID were elderly, and who voted Conservative.”

In times past, an admission like this would have certainly led to the resignation of that MP and, probably, the fall of the Government – being hounded out of office by a balanced and honourable press. Not any more. Rees-Mogg’s admission hardly causes the rise of a single eyebrow, and the majority of news editors don’t seem to care. We are being played for fools!

The only thing one tabloid editor was interested in was the suggestion by the Labour Party that suffrage might be extended to EU nationals who were given leave to stay in the UK. Elsewhere, there was a revulsion of ideas from opposition parties that 16 and 17 year olds be given the vote, and that future elections be decided by Proportional Representation (PR) instead of the current system of First Past the Post.

Do I detect a fear by the political right of an extension of suffrage? Do I perceive a fear of democracy?

Mark Parry, Broadwell