Effective and Legitimate

David Frost writes:

Most people assume, without thinking much about it, that only British citizens get to vote in British general elections. They are often very surprised to learn that it’s not so. In fact Britain has probably the largest electoral franchise in the world. Not only do Irish citizens get to vote, but so do so-called “qualifying Commonwealth citizens”. And that “qualifying” doesn’t mean a lot. Commonwealth citizens need not have settled here permanently: time-limited immigration permission is quite good enough. The Electoral Commission spells it out: “Any type of permission to enter or stay is acceptable, whether indefinite, time-limited or conditional.” That covers workers, students, family members, even refugees.

All such Commonwealth citizens get to help choose our government, without becoming British, or even having a permanent right to live here. A student on a short visa can help elect a government whose mistakes may well last a lot longer than his or her time in the UK. The reality is that if any of the Commonwealth’s 2.7 billion citizens can get to the UK on any basis other than being a simple tourist, they can get to vote here too. I find that people are extremely surprised when you describe this situation to them. Often they literally cannot believe it. It’s time to end it. That’s why I am tabling amendments for debate this week in the House of Lords as it examines Labour’s Representation of the People Bill. 

My amendments maintain the Irish exception. The Northern Ireland settlement recognises the right of its people to identify as British, Irish, or both, and it is not the moment to start requiring British citizenship as the price of parliamentary participation. Moreover, it’s reciprocal: Brits get to vote in Irish elections. But the Commonwealth entitlement is quite different and frankly indefensible in its current form. For one thing it’s a complete anomaly internationally. No EU country allows non-citizens to vote in national elections except for Ireland (for British citizens) and Portugal (in the arguably somewhat similar case of Brazilians). You have to be a citizen to vote in national elections in Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Australia (unless a Brit resident there in 1984), and the United States.

The only real exception is New Zealand, which allows all permanent residents to vote, not just a subset. That, at least, is logical. What we do is extend the right to vote to citizens of countries on the basis that Britain governed them 60 years ago (mostly, but not exclusively: Rwandans and a few others are included too). This makes no logical sense in the modern world. Nor are the arrangements reciprocal. Only a small number of Caribbean countries, and a couple of small African ones, allow Brits to vote, and even then they generally have to be permanent residents. Indians can vote in Britain, but no Brit can vote in India. It’s the same for Pakistan. It’s the same for Canada. Sri Lanka — no. Bangladesh — no. Nigeria — no. The list goes on. I don’t blame them. They rightly regard choosing their government as the business of their citizens. We should do the same.

This really is an imperial hangover. These voting rights reflect an entirely antiquated relationship between Britain and the Empire, a legacy of the original expansive definition of who could claim to be a “British subject”. The definition of citizenship has of course been tidied up since then (though we have handed it out far too freely) but the legacy rights to vote have not. They have nothing to do with citizenship of a modern nation state. Of course I value the Commonwealth and our friendships with its members. But they are different countries. That has to mean something.

When I have discussed or written about this issue, I don’t find any convincing objections of principle. Sometimes, of course, there is a half-suppressed admission that Indian or Pakistani citizens are felt to be more likely to vote for a particular party, but that really can’t be a basis for providing voting rights. The argument I hear more often is “it’s always been like that”. It’s true that Conservatives should respect inherited arrangements. But one of our inherited arrangements is the British nation state. Preserving effective and legitimate democratic government of our state should surely be our top priority.

I am not the first person to question the arrangements as they currently stand. The Labour peer and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote, in his review of UK citizenship for the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008, that “I do propose that government gives consideration to making a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote by limiting in principle the right to vote in Westminster elections to UK citizens”, adding “it is right in principle not to give the right to vote to citizens of other countries living in the UK until they become UK citizens.” Unfortunately Gordon Brown ignored the report. So did David Cameron’s government and all its successors. But Lord Goldsmith was still correct.

Goldsmith’s proposal would have preserved existing voters’ rights while changing the rules for new Commonwealth arrivals. That would probably have been reasonable at the time. There were around a million Commonwealth citizens in Britain at that point. Things have changed since then. Research from Pimlico Journal estimates that, thanks to the Boriswave, around 2.5 million Commonwealth citizens could now be in the country and eligible to vote. The Electoral Commission has suggested in the past that around two-thirds of Commonwealth citizens register to vote, a figure that will probably go up when auto-registration, provided for by Labour’s proposed new Act, is introduced. Given the way that migration is concentrated in particular areas, it is entirely plausible that numbers like this start affecting British elections.

But the case for change doesn’t rest on this. It rests on the constitutional reality of what it means to be a nation state. A nation is not the same thing as the people who happen to be standing on these islands at any given moment. A nation is a political community of citizens who have, at least in theory, specific rights and responsibilities, and have made particular commitments to stick by each other. One of those rights is to help choose the government. Non-citizens haven’t made the same commitment. For one thing, they can leave if things get bad. So they shouldn’t have the same political rights as those who make up the nation. If they want them, they should become citizens, and if doing that is too high a price to pay, it’s entirely correct that they don’t get the right to choose the government.

It’s time to tidy all this up and join the international norm. That’s what needs to be debated this week and what my amendments seek to do. Only British (and Irish) citizens should have the right to vote in national elections or those for the devolved assemblies. Only those citizens should have the right to stand at elections, and if those standing for election are citizens of other countries too, electors should know that. And, finally, the rules should be set centrally at Westminster, not tinkered with for political convenience by the likes of the Scottish “Government”. There should be one set of rules for the whole country. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a party political campaign. It’s a campaign to bring the rules into line with what most people in Britain already think they are. It’s a campaign for reason, fairness, and equality in our electoral arrangements. It’s a campaign whose time is coming, for there really is no good argument against change.

But there is not necessarily a compelling argument for this change. The thing about allowing only British citizens to vote is that Britain has never done it. Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there. Imagine suggesting there or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here, where an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. Is anyone still sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish? That may now be an open goal for rivals to be the First Past the Post. Yet it is perfectly possible.

Last year, the Migrant Democracy Project was merely stating the obvious when it called this country’s qualifications for voting “colonial”. Britain has a long, a recent, and, as we see from the Chagos Islands to the Falkland Islands, an ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us “maritime", but not to call us “insular”. Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?

Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the NHS. We give the citizens of the Commonwealth’s other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocate; two of the last six Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament. The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who wrote above the line in the Daily Telegraph would want? It says that Ghanaians are more “like us” than Germans are, and that Swazis are more “like us” than Swedes are. Is that what those who wrote below the line in the Daily Mail would want?

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else in the world has. Although no less, either. Britain is now globally noted for its superdiversity, uniquely combining people from every inhabited territory on Earth, some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else. So, since there would seem to be no remaining example to the contrary, require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But either restrict the franchise in the same way, or let everyone vote. Those two options should be put to the House of Commons, with whichever passed by the larger majority coming into effect, or with neither of them doing so if both had been defeated.