The lack of a clear connection in law between British citizenship and the right to vote has permitted successive British governments to allow the following injustice.
Fellow but expatriate British citizens are rather arbitrarily in law deprived of their right to vote in UK elections after 15 years abroad but an estimated 1 million non-British citizens from 54 Commonwealth countries currently resident in the UK will be entitled to vote in , and possibly influence, the 2015 general election.
According to the press article referenced below, in 2007 the then Labour government ordered a review of British citizenship laws by Lord Goldsmith QC, the Attorney General, but did not act on his advice that it should make a ?clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote?. MigrationWatch, which campaigns for lower immigration, is also quoted in this article as suggesting that Labour refused to act because voters from black and minority ethnic communities were more likely to vote Labour than Liberal Democrat or Conservative.
Shouldn’t the Conservative party be pressing for a clearer connection in law between British citizenship and the right to vote in UK elections as part of its overall immigration policy?
Reference: Commonwealth citizens ‘should lose the right to vote’, The Times, 28th August, 2013