Yet another masterstroke in Rishi Sunak’s drive to net zero seats was not using his time in office to undo a shocking feature of Britain’s election rules — that members of the Commonwealth are able to vote in British elections from the moment they arrive here. These people are not British citizens, and do not need to even be on a pathway to British citizenship in order to decide who should be running the United Kingdom.

This vestigial hangover from the end of Empire, when a miniscule number of people from the then-new Commonwealth were living in the UK, has not been of much significance for decades. But with the completely unsustainable net migration numbers of recent years, many hundreds of thousands of whom are from the Commonwealth, this recent election will have seen huge numbers of non-citizens voting for the first time.

This is an almost completely unique feature of British elections, and this right is reciprocated by scarcely any other country; none of them are ridiculous enough to think it at all appropriate to let certain foreigners have a say in their elections. This is the kind of insane quirk that until a few years ago would have been stopped. Today, critics risk the ire of a loony left which brands any criticism of anything other than open borders and mass migration as racist.

Immigration is already considered too high by every age cohort and in every part of the UK. It explains Brexit, for good or ill. The damaging effects of mass migration have taken a toll on our economy, our society, our culture, our safety, our housing stock and quality, our school places, our hospital places, our criminal backlog, our national security, our productivity, and even the replacement of our automatic car washes. This is plain to see to all but the most “Treasury-brained”. But still our elites cannot accept that infinity migrants, even if they were all blessed with the talent of William Shakespeare, arriving in incredibly short order, might have some negative effects on any of the areas mentioned above.

The same trend is happening across the developed world; popular opposition against, but elite support for, mass migration is causing societal and electoral strife across the United States and Europe. Support for Trump, le Pen, the Alternative for Deutschland, and many other European parties is fuelled in large part by ordinary people who are scared and frustrated by the changes they see to their countries, but from which the elites in Brussels or Martha’s Vineyard are insulated.

But at least none of them has a pool of around two billion people across the world who could move there and immediately vote to speed up that process. That is a uniquely British problem. An eye-opening piece of reporting from Reuters confirmed this risk. They interviewed some people from the Commonwealth who planned to vote in Thursday’s General Election. 

What were these people voting on? The NHS? Our looming pensions time bomb? A desire for a more dynamic regulatory system or competitive taxes? Of course not; they wanted to vote to enable more “people like them” to be able to move to the UK more easily. The answers are worth quoting at length:

Teh Wen Sun, a 33-year-old Malaysian student from Salford said she did not see much difference between the two main parties, but she was keen to vote for a party that is more receptive to immigrants.

And:

Oyinkansola Dirisu, 31, a support worker from Manchester who came to Britain in 2022, said she was looking forward to voting for Labour, and said she wanted whoever won power to make it easier for people like her to move to Britain.

The implications for our democracy could not be more enormous, nor could this phenomenon come at a more damaging time. The massacre and rape of Israeli citizens by a genocidal, Islamist terrorist organisation last year resulted in constant parades of support for Palestine and a massive rise in Jew-hate in Britain. Then followed a steep rise in sectarianism in local, and now national, elections, by political candidates espousing policies focused on the conflict in Gaza and the “Muslim vote”.

Next, a “Hindu manifesto” centred around preferential treatment for Hindu priests and organisations (shamefully supported by several Conservative candidates) and even a Yoruba Party to “provide a political voice for the UK Yoruba community”. The amazingly talented Sam Bidwell, a keen contributor to these pages, has warned that this represents an incipient British version of the Ottoman millet system.

The only hope we have of this being fixed in the short-term is for Sir Keir Starmer to realise that his party being beholden to a particularly strident voting bloc, pursuing explicitly religious or sectarian issues is at best bad for his Party, and at worst a national security risk, and to therefore get real about the threat to democracy. 

This would involve removing the rights of Commonwealth citizens to vote as an obvious and moderate first step. What would need to happen next would be much more controversial, but no less essential to allow Britain to keep its national character, and to continue as a place where your skin colour, religion, or background should not be the defining characteristic of your personality, nor the party for whom you vote.

The government should seek to promote that which binds us together rather than falling back on the relentlessly divisive

Immigration will need to be drastically reduced, schools will need to look more seriously at the integration and assimilation of younger people while DEI will obviously have to be eliminated from the public and private sector. The government should seek to promote that which binds us together rather than falling back on the relentlessly divisive. 

Much like you, dear reader, I don’t see any real likelihood of this happening under Labour. And given the Conservatives’ desperation to turn their electoral fortunes around, they too may be tempted, like Isildur and Boromir before them, to succumb to the siren temptation of this power. One thing is certain, these voters will not add to the common wealth of our country.