Who gets to vote?
By banning Commonwealth voting, Reform is offering to return Britain’s democracy to its citizens
Who should choose a country’s government? In most democracies the answer is “adult citizens”, on the basis that people who have ties and owe loyalty to a nation should choose who rules over them. Britain has long been an outlier, allowing any citizen of the Commonwealth — 56 countries, 2.7 billion people — to vote in our elections, so long as they are here legally.
This creates a situation where foreign nationals, even on temporary visas and perhaps not speaking English, are legally entitled to vote in local elections, general elections and even referendums. Based on ONS estimates, there are at least 2.6m Commonwealth citizens who do not also hold British citizenship in the UK. The Electoral Commission estimates that around two-thirds of eligible Commonwealth citizens register to vote, meaning there are at least 1.7 million such registered voters now in the country. For context this is 6 per cent of the total votes cast in the 2024 General Election, and as such groups are often geographically concentrated they are absolutely capable of determining results in certain constituencies.
The sectarian election advertising like those produced by the Greens in Gorton and Denton may just be the start
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The idea that foreigners living here temporarily can choose our governments is so ridiculous that many seem not to believe it. But it is how our system works. This defect in British electoral law is a hangover from the Empire, when all Imperial subjects held the same status, and so when the Commonwealth was founded voting rights were grandfathered in.
Now, Reform have committed to fixing this. In a significant policy announcement on Sunday, the party announced that they will change the rules so that only British (and Irish) citizens will be allowed to vote in our parliamentary elections. Nigel Farage has explained that the current system “undermines national sovereignty and leads to elections being fought on international issues rather than domestic ones”, and that “allowing non-Brits — people with zero connection to this country — to vote on our future is absurd. It is right that only British citizens should be able to vote in British parliamentary elections”.
They will also move to end our quarter-century experiment with widespread postal voting. Introduced under Blair in 2000, there have been concerns about the “farming” of postal votes for decades, with the system making coercion easier, being said to “undermine the integrity of the voting system in London”, and leading to criminal convictions for electoral fraud. That these fraudulent and coercive practices are concentrated in particularly clannish communities might explain why the state has turned a blind eye for so long. Or perhaps it’s that the mainstream parties were happy so long as bloc votes turned out for them, and it has only become a problem now that the Greens are benefiting.
As Farage says, “for too long postal voting has allowed our elections to be turned into a laughing stock, riddled with fraud, intimidation and outright cheating. It’s been allowed to go on for years and has poisoned trust in our democracy”.
These policies are both radical and pragmatic. Reform are showing willingness to break the legislative and administrative cage we have been stuck in for decades. In the past two weeks the party has announced policies to fix our broken electoral law, make deportation matters non-justiciable and break up the role of the Cabinet Secretary. In each case they are showing that they will not be stuck in the past, in stark contrast to the other parties.
Even the Greens are really just offering what hasn’t worked for decades, but faster, and with more drugs. Only Reform seem to genuinely be in opposition, not just to the government, but the system itself. Their flurry of substantive, serious and radical policies is very welcome.
There are risks though. A manifesto commitment to disenfranchise millions of voters may well radicalise and unify those voters, creating an electoral coalition against Reform. Similarly other parties, particularly those on the Left, will no doubt campaign on this issue. Could those few million foreign voters decide the 2029 election, and keep Reform from power? Frankly, the fact that it’s necessary to ask that question shows how important these reforms are.
If we continue to allow foreign people to participate in choosing our governments then our foreign and domestic policies will continue to be bent towards the interests of other nations and other peoples. Our politicians will increasingly campaign in foreign tongues, making reference to foreign disputes. One Green campaign video in Gorton and Denton featured Starmer standing with Modi, as a clear signal to Muslim voters that the Prime Minister is friends with a Hindu nationalist. Without these changes to electoral law, we can expect far more of this sort of sectarian, dangerous campaigning.
It’s worth reflecting on how sensible Reform’s policies are. Under their government, elections will be decided by citizens, voting in person unless they have a very good reason not to. Our borders will be secure and immigration courts won’t be able to prevent the deportations of foreign criminals. The civil service will serve governments, not control them. Put like that it’s astonishing how normal what we’re being offered is, and how abnormal (and disastrous) the Yookay experiment has been. If there’s a Reform philosophy emerging then, perhaps it’s “radical normality”. It sounds far more appealing than “more of the same”.
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