BORIS Johnson has been compared to a "timpot dictator"over a new bill designed to protect elections.

The Electoral Integrity Bill will see people having to present photographic ID in order to vote.

However the SNP's Westminster leader accused the Prime Minister of attempting to "rob people of their democratic right to vote" and warned many people do not have ID. 

Speaking during Prime Minister's Questions, Ian Blackford said the bill " is designed to do anything but increase the integrity of our elections. It is a solution in desperate search of a problem that simply does not exist."

He added: " What the Bill will do is to impose for the first time Trumpian voter ID laws in the UK.

“The Electoral Reform Society says it could lead to voter disenfranchisement on an industrial scale...Disenfranchising people from working class communities, BME communities and others already marginalised in society, creating barriers to vote."

He then asked Mr Johnson why his government were "trying to rob people of their democratic right to vote”.

The Prime Minister said: “What we’re trying to protect is the democratic right of people to have a one-person, one-vote system.

“I think it is important that we move to some sort of voter ID and plenty of other countries have it and I think it eminently sensible and people I think will be reassured that their votes matter and that’s what this Bill is about.”

Mr Blackford said only 34 cases of voter identity fraud were recorded in 2019, and the bill was trying to solve a problem tat did not exist.

He aded: "3.5m people in the United Kingdom do not have a form of photo ID. 11m people do not have a passport or driver’s licence.

“These millions of people will be directly impacted by seeing their right to vote curtailed.

“And it’s not just the opposition saying this, members of the Prime Minister’s own party have called his plans, ‘an illogical and illiberal solution to a non-existent problem’.

“Will the Prime Minister withdraw these vote-rigging proposals immediately or will he continue down the path of being a tin-pot dictator?”

Mr Johnson said that elections should not been “clouded” by suspicions of voter fraud, and said Mr Blackford was "making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill" as councils will provide people who do not  have photographic ID with free identification.