It’s time to end Commonwealth voting | Chris Bayliss

Britain is relatively unusual in granting the right to vote in national elections to large numbers of non-citizens. Our history gives us a far more blurred line between the domestic and the foreign than other places, but in some cases we chose to overlook this distinction entirely. 

Technically, Commonwealth member states do not consider one another to be fully foreign; member states do not host embassies of other member states nor send ambassadors. Instead, the term High Commission(er) is used, embassies being the term for foreign missions. But this is mainly symbolic; for most practical matters such as trade and immigration, Commonwealth member states are fully functioning independent nations that treat each other as such. 

The one major outlier in this is the United Kingdom’s unilateral gesture of offering full voting rights to Commonwealth citizens in all elections, including national general elections. Any national of any Commonwealth member country present legally in the UK is eligible to register to vote in British elections, regardless of their status as a British citizen. It is difficult to know exactly how many people this might mean are eligible to vote solely by virtue of their Commonwealth citizenship at any given time; a paper by Migration Watch in 2013 estimated the figure at just below one million. This is likely to be substantially higher now. 

No other Commonwealth country offers this right automatically to citizens of other Commonwealth countries. Of the relatively few countries in the Commonwealth that allow non-citizen voting at any level, most tie it to residence status. New Zealand is the most generous, offering anybody who has been resident in the country for more than one year the right to vote in national and local elections, from the Commonwealth or not. In Australia, permanent residents who enrolled as British subjects before the relevant legislation was updated in 1984 are the only non-citizens who can vote. In Canada, only citizens may vote for the time being. Malawi allows permanent residents who have been in the country more than seven years to vote, but beyond that, it does not seem that any other Commonwealth country allows non-citizens to register on the electoral roll. 

In constituencies with large Muslim populations, there is an increasingly assertive anti-Labour vote emerging

Up until now, this anomaly has gone largely unnoticed. For many years, the numbers weren’t especially large, and because this eligibility was little known and largely unpublicised, many non-citizens would not have exercised the right to vote. Even as the numbers of Commonwealth nationals who were not British citizens grew, there has been little political pressure associated with it and it has largely escaped controversy. 

During the years leading up to the 2016 referendum, immigration from the EU was the main source of controversy rather than that from the Commonwealth. The Conservatives had little incentive to cause a fuss about the subject, even if non-citizen Commonwealth votes did tend to skew toward Labour, they were generally piled up in safe Labour seats in the inner city where they weren’t a threat to the Tories. In opposition under David Cameron, campaigning against the rights of Commonwealth citizens to vote would have been exactly the kind of reactionary-sounding idea the Tory modernisers would have been keen to distance themselves from. And once in power, they had no incentive to draw attention to the rising number of arrivals from outside the EU. And besides, the Tories have always had a soft spot for the Commonwealth. 

For the Left, there was even less incentive to focus on the issue. For many years, Labour has consistently done substantially better among ethnic minority voters generally than it has among the electorate as a whole. During the 2010s, it became increasingly clear that the Tories were winning elections based almost entirely on older cohorts of white voters, and that broadening the electorate out in almost any direction was likely to benefit Labour — especially during the period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. And in any case, allowing people to vote if they were here felt like the progressive thing to do. 

Beyond this, the growing number of arrivals from outside of Europe were people on a variety of work or study visa tracks, or as dependents of those people. After five years, most such people were entitled to undertake the “Life in the UK” test and be granted Indefinite Leave to Remain; thereafter, the pathway was open to British citizenship, which would of course have entitled them to the right to vote. On either side, it made little political sense to alienate such individuals by campaigning to block them from voting in one election, if they were then going to be able to vote as citizens in the subsequent election. 

But with Keir Starmer’s decision to extend the minimum ILR period out to ten years, there may be more strategic minds within Labour who judge that the time is now right for a bolder approach to Commonwealth voting rights. Despite Labour’s traditional advantage among Commonwealth voters as a whole, the party may have less to lose than ever from tightening up the franchise, along with some concentrated potential gains. Not least, among average voters who are likely to be surprised to discover that a significant number of people are allowed to vote in British elections who are not citizens, and who may not necessarily have any formal status in the country other than a visa and a place to stay. Closing this loophole would be likely to lend the Government’s tougher stance on immigration substantial credibility; improving the party’s position against Reform. Furthermore, doing so at this still fairly early stage in the parliament would add to the impression of the Tories as complacent and lazy.

But at a more granular level, restricting the franchise only to citizens may actually come with specific electoral advantages to Labour in the 2029 election, and in local elections over the course of this parliament. Especially so if the Government goes through with its plan of limiting the number of newly-minted citizens by pushing back the window for ILR. Specifically, it might offer some protection to Labour from two emerging localised threats in specific constituencies.

First, in constituencies with large Muslim populations, there is an increasingly assertive anti-Labour vote emerging, driven by foreign policy issues; especially the Israel — Gaza conflict. Whatever the salience of that particular conflict by the time of the next election, it seems highly likely that Labour in government will have disappointed many of the Muslim voters who were attracted to the party by its Corbyn-era foreign policy stances. During the Blair years, a lot of Muslim voters shifted to alternatives such as George Galloway’s Respect Party as well as the Liberal Democrats, because of Blair’s support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Starmer does not appear set to embark on anything as adventurous as Blair’s neocon excursions in the Middle East, but anything short of a firm alignment against Israel and a legally dubious recognition of Palestinian “statehood” will leave large numbers of Muslim voters in Labour seats feeling short-changed. 

The core demographic of this type of politics is second generation Pakistani heritage voters who were born in the UK and hold British citizenship, however many of the areas where such voters are clusters have experienced considerable immigration during the Boriswave era since 2021. A considerable number of these arrivals are Muslims from Commonwealth countries. Furthermore, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities at any given time include a substantial percentage of first generation arrivals due to marriage and family reunion. This is not just the case in inner city areas such as Birmingham Yardley, which Jess Philips held on to narrowly for Labour in 2024 in the face of a determined Gaza-inspired rival, but also in smaller towns in Lancashire, West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester where Labour is facing a simultaneous challenge from Reform. 

But Labour’s woes do not stop there; even as the party’s insufficiently enthusiastic support for Muslim issues overseas bleeds votes out to sectarian independents in some seats, the party’s lingering association with the interests of the Pakistani community is costing it critical support from pro-Indian voters elsewhere. As Critic contributor and all-round bon oeuf Sam Bidwell has set out, Indians are not a reliable Tory demographic, but as with the Gaza independents, the threat is in individual seats with the right numbers for an opportunistic candidate to cultivate a sectarian interest bloc.

As the Tories’ electoral situation grows increasingly desperate, those remaining MPs with substantial Indian populations are more likely to be drawn to saffron-tinged politics, and organisations such as Hindus for Democracy and Overseas Friends of the BJP have seen the opening to create a counterweight to what they regard as a Pakistani-leaning Labour Party. A number of Conservative MPs signed up to the “Hindu Manifesto”, and Harrow East’s Bob Blackman went as far as to attend a rally for Narendra Modi in 2020. 

Whilst many of these Indian voters were born in the UK and hold British citizenship, Indians have been one of the dominant nationalities in the post-pandemic wave of mass migration, and many have naturally headed to areas that already have substantial settled Indian populations. Come the next election, Conservatives in marginal seats (i.e. all of them) are likely to discover an even greater temptation to find sectarian advantage among Indian communities whose ranks have been swollen by new arrivals. 

In neither case will restricting Commonwealth voting put these threats to Labour to bed; both of the key communities involved are mainly made up of voters holding British citizenship. But as we’ve seen in 2024, some of the seats are likely to come right down to the wire. Nowhere can the nature of this type of politics be seen as clearly as in Leicester, where a prominent Labour frontbencher lost his seat to an independent Muslim challenger, and his neighbouring Labour MP lost her seat to a pro-Indian Tory candidate; the Conservatives’ only gain of the night. 

Fundamentally, restricting the right to vote to citizens-only is likely to be a popular policy generally, and will be among the easiest wins available on the subject of migration and citizenship generally. While Progressives are inclined to keep the franchise as broad as possible, this policy could be justified to such voters as tidying-up an anachronistic hangover of the colonial era. And where once it might have come with marginal electoral disadvantages to Labour, the electoral calculation is now far more evenly balanced.