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A story in Reuters this week told of a young Indian gentleman who arrived in the UK in February of last year on a student visa.
He is described as being “excited to cast his vote after missing the election in his native India.”
Arriving on a student visa can entitle a foreign national to vote in British elections.
He is one of many such recent arrivals described in the article as “hoping they can influence change in the country that they have chosen to call home.”
Also mentioned in the article’ is a 33-year-old Malaysian student. Whilst she reportedly “did not see much difference between the two main parties,” she was however “keen to vote for a party that is more receptive to immigrants.”
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 three are perfectly entitled to vote as they are ‘qualifying Commonwealth citizens’: that is, they come from one of the 56 qualifying Commonwealth nations, which have a combined population of 2.5 billion.
Citizens of Fiji and Zimbabwe also retain their voting rights despite the two countries having been suspended from the Commonwealth.
In a political landscape in which immigration is a major issue – if not the major issue – for many, is it right for non UK citizens, whose main concern is to make life better for immigrants, to be allowed to vote for the government?
Is this an arrangement that the UK might be wise to consider ending.
The list of ‘qualifying Commonwealth citizens’ includes those from Islamist Pakistan, a country with an appalling human human rights record, and a “Blasphemy Law” under which Christians are regularly persecuted, imprisoned, and even lynched.
While London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan may have his own thoughts on this, does the indigenous British population really want people who blindly accept such laws and practices “voting for change” in UK general elections?
As for UK voters living overseas, there is little expectation that the system will work for them, and it appears uncertain that postal votes will reach the UK in time for the votes of many Britons living overseas to count in the election.
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Main Image: GeoMancer448 via Wikipedia
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