It’s time to decolonise Britain. And no, I’m not talking about tearing down statues of Victorian imperialists, or running roughshod over the school curriculum with self-flagellating historical revisionism. Instead, I’m talking about the fact that more than two billion people worldwide have the automatic right to vote in British elections, thanks to an archaic feature of our post-colonial citizenship laws.
Ludicrous as this might sound, Commonwealth citizens – that is, citizens of any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states – enjoy automatic voting rights in the UK, whatever their reason for settlement in the UK and regardless of their intention to seek citizenship. When the ballots are finally tallied at this year’s election, hundreds of thousands – potentially millions – of foreign citizens will have participated, diluting the democratic rights of British subjects in the process.
The right to vote enables those with a stake in society to have an influence over how it is run
The reason for this absurd loophole lies not in national masochism, but in the messy and asymmetric end of Britain’s empire. Before
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