I’ve been concerned for some time about the influence of non-British citiizens on the democratic process in the UK. Dame Marion Roe, Member of Parliament for Broxbourne 1983-2005, has written in her submission to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee,
I 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. This would recognise that the right to vote is one of the hallmarks of the political status of citizens; it is not a means of expressing closeness between countries. Ultimately, 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.
She discovered that although the Government chooses not to collect statistics of how many Commonwealth citizens are registered to vote, not least to avoid embarrassment, in Croydon there were 17,930 Commonwealth citizens on the electoral roll, in Birmingham there were 24,760, and in Greenwich there were 15,694.
In the 2010 election in Greenwich there were only 41,000 votes cast for an electorate of 66,000. Therefore the electorate consisted of 23% non-British citizens. That seems a remarkably unreasonable quantity of non-British people who are directly able to influence the outcome of elections to our national Parliament. Labour won in Greenwich, but it is not possible to determine by what degree their majority, or even their victory, was determined by the 23% of the residents who are not British but can vote. Indeed the situation is much worse because in other elections, not for the Westminster Parliament, nationals of other EU states can also vote. Therefore in some areas it would not be unreasonable to estimate that the influence of non-British citizens could reach 40%, or even 50% of the electorate.
The management of who can vote has a significant effect on the outcome. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century there was a constant effort to extend the franchise to include all British adults. But over the last decades this hard-won right has been eroded by allowing very large numbers of non-British citizens, of various origins, to participate in our democratic process. Of course those who are allowed to become British citizens might naturally expect to be able to vote (although there are also questions about how this process of granting citizenship is managed), but most British people would object if they even realised that citizens of so many other countries have the right to vote in our General Elections simply by virtue of being present in the UK for a few weeks.
This same issue is likely to be significant for any future referendum on Scottish independence. Not only do non-British citizens tend to vote for socialist parties, but as immigrants and migrants they are more likely to vote for an independent Scotland within the EU (if the EU will have an independent Scotland). It is being proposed that British citizens who were born in Scotland, or have Scottish parents, but who live in England will not be able to vote. Yet those Scots who live in England are much more likely to vote in favour of retaining the Union between England and Scotland. If the same rules are to be applied which are used when considering whether Pakistani citizens can vote for our British Parliament, then all that would be required is the completion of a form which states that an address in Scotland is now a person’s residence. It would be entirely legal for large numbers of British citizens to move to Scotland for a couple of weeks with the intention of making it their sole residence for that period, and by registering to vote they would be able to participate in a Referendum on Scottish Independence, or indeed in any other Scottish elections.
That this is possible shows the weakness in our present electoral rules. What is much worse is that there are now over 1.5 million non-British citizens in the UK who are registered to vote in all of the elections to different levels of Government in the UK. There seems to be no concern about the bias that this will undoubtedly introduce, and no concern that it would be entirely possible for a Pakistani national to visit England, register to vote, and then ask for a proxy vote while living in England. How many proxy votes were allowed for non-British citizens? It appears that no Government wishes to collect this data.
In Greenwich, with 23% of the electorate being non-British and non-EU nationals, and assuming that those 23% tend to vote for socialist parties at the recorded rate of 80%, and also cast their votes with the same degree of participation as the British citizen electorate, then some 7,500 of the votes cast for the Labour candidate might be due to these non-British citizens (that is, citizens of countries other than Britain). If they voted with a greater degree of participation than the average of 62% then it would be possible that the seat was won as a result of non-British citizen votes.
In how many other seats is this a possibility? If the over 1.5 million non-British citizen votes in the UK were considered with the same proportions as in Greenwich, then Labour would have lost over half a million votes, concentrated in England. That could have been worth a 2% share of the vote to Labour.
Who we allow to vote matters. It is clear that Labour would never have wanted to address this issue because it gave them a clear electoral advantage, but it is unclear why the Conservatives would not want to advertise this issue and deal with it once and for all to. We no longer have a global empire, and there is no reason at all why a citizen of Pakistan, or India, or Bangladesh should be able to vote in our elections, especially when no British citizen is able to vote in their own.
It is utter lunacy to be allowing non-citizens to vote in the governance of the country.
I lived in the US for 13 years, on a Green Card (Permanent Resident)… and it is quite a performance even to get a Green Card. They don’t exactly hand them out like sweeties. I was legally entitled to work and obliged to pay my taxes. I wasn’t eligible for anything else, never mind the vote.
In Mexico, you have to have renewed your permission to remain in the country for, I think it is, seven years before you are offered the right to become a Permanent Resident or a citizen. If you become a Permanent Resident, it just means that you don’t have to go down to Immigration with all your papers every year any more. You don’t get any other rights.
If you opt, as a friend of mine did, to try to become a citizenship, you have to go through an onerous exam. You are not allowed to simply become a citizen without knowing all about Mexico. Boy, do you have to know about Mexico! I had a friend, a fluent Spanish speaker (by the way, the whole tests, written and oral, are conducted in Spanish only; the interivewer won’t help you) who went for citizenship. You get a list of 100 questions on Mexican history, the make-up of the country, the political history of the country and so on.
My friend, who is a very clever person, was in despair because he thought he would never retain it all … in Spanish, at that. On the actual day, the interviewer chooses (I think it is) around 10 questions out of the possible hundred, in Spanish only … no help, no prompting … for the written and oral tests.
Until you are a citizen, you cannot even attend a political rally. There was a point in my previous city which had a large open public space and people used it to demonstrate every now and the, and if my taxi took me through it, I used to turn my head away, I was that scared of being accused of attending a political rally.
Verity, I think all of those things you have experienced yourself are entirely reasonable requirements for all people wishing to come to the UK, and the fact that they are already implemented in advanced first world societies shows that they are not some extreme, racist agenda but absolutely justified.
I would add that those who are not British citizens should be considered for deporting if they commit crimes which carry a prison sentence and be usually deported as a matter of course.
There may well be 1.5 million non-British citizen voters, but how many non-British citizens have been given citizenship while loathing our British society, how many have been given British citizenship while being unable to support themselves and their families, and how many have had many children who do not want them to be integrated into British society? A third of Muslim students in the UK support violence in the name of Islam. Who is teaching them these things and how are they compatible with British citizenship?
P from M – Trust me, if you commit any crime of any kind in Mexico, you will be tried and if found guilty serve your prison time in Mexico and, at the end of your sentence be accompanied to the plane out and you’ll be on the computers. I will ask a friend who is a lawyer, but I believe deportation is automatic here if you’ve been found guilty of a serious crime. Or, indeed, any crime. But I’ll ask.
Citizenship tests should be onerous, as they are here in Mexico, as I described above, and in the US. Not handed out like toffees as they do in Britain which seems to no longer have any national pride. Of course, the EU was part of that plot to destroy pride in national identities.
I accept all of the above, but I fear it is not enough to cause the earthquake we need to end the LibLabCon hegemony.
For that, we must look to Scotland. I can’t say I’d ever vote for Alex Salmond myself if I was Scottish but if he can get Scotland its independence, I believe a new, more honest Scottish conservative party (I emphasise the small ‘c’) will emerge.
It would have the same effect in England and Wales, which is why the three main parties are so worried.
Look at the European elections. Although Brits don’t like the voting system, when they worked out how to use it and that their votes were no longer wasted, what a kicking the main parties got.
That put Labour right off AV. They saw how much it would hurt them.
I do not support AV, but I did not vote against it. I think it would have give the UK the political enema it so badly needs and which has started in the European elections. I’m sorry it didn’t happen.
If it was rubbish in and of itself, it may have been a means to an end and I personally can’t wait for the next European elections because I think LibLabCon are going to get kicked even more than last time. It’s happening slowly, but people are slowly working out how to use that voting system.
If Alex Salmond gets independence, I think the English and Welsh will finally wake up. They’ll think, “Well, they don’t have LibLabCon up there, so why do we have to have it down here?”
We need something, anything, to melt the iron grip of the LibLabCon elective dictatorship.
Think of Scottish independence as a means to an end. I believe that being responsible for themselves would make many Scots go off socialism and that the frustrated voters outside Scotland, who often don’t vote at all, or vote for the compromise party, would start to think of alternatives.
We only make the problem worse by voting LibLabCon.
To coin a phrase from the Hen’s Arse: “We can’t go on like this.”
Tulip – We don’t have to lose Scotland as part of the United Kingdom to find a solution to the monoglutinous ConLabLibs.
Rather than cast an entire country, which is basically our own people, free from its moorings, the people of Britain should not be voting for any of the three failures. They should gather the strength of will to vote UKIP, a genuinely uniting party with a mission that most British can relate to.
Nigel Farage is an outstanding political thinker and speaker and God knows, he has more staying power than any of the three jerks in charge of the major parties. And far from having his eye on preferment among the intriguers and schemers of Brussels, he is focussed on Britain.
(And as an aside, unlike Shameron, Millipede or Cleggy, he has a gift for spontaneous … as opposed to labouriously prewritten … wit and would certainly brighten up the grey, droning debates in Parliament as presently constituted.)
Tulip, and others, for a very interesting take, that hasn’t been addressed before, so far as I am aware, on the possible secession of Scotland from the United Kingdom, see Norman Tebbit in The Telegraph today my time.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100137056/the-people-of-scotland-have-not-been-told-the-whole-truth/
Verity: It is NOT utter lunacy to be allowing non-citizens to vote in the governance of the country. It is a diabolical plan to keep the barbarians in control.
Without fully reading the above,the situation is part of our history,and is what allowed me to make an unauthorised write-in vote in the last Conservative leadership election for Mark Steyn:there being no reason why he shoudn’t be British P. M.(Cameron won with the votes of 40% of members:who’se total is about 135,000—down from 1.5 million under Mrs. Thatcher.).
The vote should be restricted to those born of this country, none other. The usual suspects will jump up and down, protesting at the injustice, well tough, if that is injustice then we could do with a bit of it. At the last election I was walking down the street in the Islamic republic of Tower Hamlets, when my friend pointed out a woman being helpedinto a van of the Respect party, he told me she was a neighbour and was registerd to vote at two addesses. The abuse of the postal vote system is endemic, yet those in authority do not want to know, far better to have dodgy elections than to be accused of racism. The madness gripping our political class is destoying our country by encouraging they who hate us. A couple of centuries ago we used to go down to Bedlam to have a laugh at the loonies, nowadays we go out and vote for the bastards
I think we understand about Respect(aka. The Ba’athist Socialist Party).
In addition to the point that Stephen Maybery made, I don’t think that individuals who hold the dual citizenship of another country should be allowed to stand as an MP or other public office in the UK. Either they are fully committed to our country or they are not!
AWK 9:56 – I stand corrected.
Re Stephen Mayberry’s post, there should be signs on London buses reading:
ISLAM IS NOT A RACE. IT IS A FREELY-CHOSEN RELIGION.
David M – Are people with dual citizenship allowed to run? If so, you are correct. It should not be so.
An MP does not have to be a British citizen at all. It would be entirely legal and possible for a Pakistani citizen with no British citizenship to stand and win a Parliamentary seat. Insane of course, but entirely legal. He would have to be over 18 of course.
Radford makes a good point. The membership of the mainstream parties is shrinking fast. Maybe that will open the door for new entrants, and maybe that is no bad thing
If people would only take a chance on UKIP … I mean, good grief, they voted for Tony Blair! … we would see some sanity, and less delusional, distracted behaviour undertaken with one eye on the main chance, a Luxury Class seat on the Brussels choo-choo and a matey seat at the top table in Les Amis des Bruxelles Club.
At least enough voters saw through Dave Shameron to deny him a majority, so he is actually no more an elected PM than Gordon Brown was. He has absolutely no hope of winning the next election. In these circumstances, there should be a provision for Shameron to have been made “Acting Prime Minister” for one year only, while another election was organised. In fact, he should have been made a caretaker PM, with no ability to introduce legislation except in a dire emergency, in which case he would have to get the permission of the other major party.
The man has no legitimacy, which can only be conferred by the voters, and they withheld it.
UKIP is just Farage. You can’t vote for one man. Who else is there that any of us have heard of? A national party needs more than one capable man.
P from M – I don´t know as I don’t live there are don’t follow local news, but they do seem to stand in elections. I think the press hates UKIP, which is why other candidates don’t get the publicity they should. There seems to be a whiteout during elections on UKIP coverage, although they field candidates.
P from M … Re UKIP, may I suggest that you approach the excellent Boudicca, who seems to post primarily in The Telegraph as an advocate of UKIP? She always gets lots of responses and her writing is lucid and very clever. I don’t know how you would find her, but I’ll bet an email to UKIP HQ would produce a result. You might offer her blogging privileges … as in writing original blogs now and then. Just an idea.
You’re quite right to draw attention to this subject. Voting rights should be restricted to domiciled UK citizens.
And yes the postal vote system needs to be reformed. It should be restricted to persons aged 70 and over.