Contribution
My Lords, I had not anticipated to be on my feet quite so quickly. I have been watching proceedings for the period that I have not been in the Chamber this afternoon, and there seems to have been a lot of—I would not quite call it hysteria—grave concern about financing. Of course, that is important, but I would rather concentrate on franchise—what elections are for, who can do it and how they do it. That has been very much opened up as a point that we can discuss within the Bill because of the attempt to reduce age of the franchise to 16. I agree wholeheartedly with the concerns of my noble friends Lady May and Lord Brady about 16, not least because we need to determine what is an age of attainment. If one at age 16 cannot use a sunbed, it is rather strange that one can suddenly vote, but that is a wider debate for when we are in Committee.
I would like to examine postal voting. The postal voting franchise was massively widened in 2001 by the Blair Government, who were, I think, concerned that the volume and numbers of people voting had been on a steady decline. I have to say that the state we are in is not better than where we once were. In the old days, postal voting was available if one was unwell, going on holiday, or had a degree of frailty. I do not know about anybody else in this House, but I find it not that difficult to go down to the Co-op or a convenience store in the evening, so I find it hard to believe that on election day, given that there are 15 hours to do it, one cannot find the time to go and vote.
The opportunities for fraud and for postal vote harvesting are very well known, I am afraid. We have grave concerns about what happens in the actual polling booth, whether that is family assistance and all the rest of it. I do not have grave concerns about that, but I have grave concerns about what is happening behind doors where nobody can see. But that is a wider discussion, and I will probably lay amendments to that effect.
While we are on the issue of franchise, I ask: why do we have such a wide franchise? We have a number of states of attachment and relationship with the United Kingdom. We have British Crown dependencies, and we are familiar with those: the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. We have British Overseas Territories such as Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands—those types of very close relationships. We have a slight oddity with former Hong Kong citizens of the right age. They are all fairly small numbers, particularly in the British Overseas Territories, where there is a close relationship, and we still have governors and there is close working with the FCDO. But I looked rather more closely at which of those countries allow voting by British citizens who happen to be there: “very few” is the answer. Gibraltar does. Turks and Caicos most certainly does not; you have to attain an islander status before you are allowed to vote.
They are fairly small numbers, and I am not overly concerned. But I am very concerned about the Commonwealth—a Commonwealth of 2.7 billion people, a third of the entire global population. It includes places that, frankly, until I looked at this, I was not entirely sure existed. I am not entirely sure that I know where in Africa Eswatini is. I think my geography is pretty good, but I am not entirely sure where that is, or Vanuatu. Then there are very large populations such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and medium populations such as Australia and Canada. As long as one has a right to come to the country for work and has a visa, any of these people can vote in a UK election, parliamentary and local.
When we were in the European Union, we restricted the franchise to local elections. Arguably, because the powers that be at the time—they have been blunted, of course—were on the road to making us a single country of Europe, one could have argued, rather more closely, that European citizens should have had the franchise in the UK for all elections. But the franchise of the Commonwealth is a little quaint, in my view. Let us have it, by all means, as long as there is a reciprocation. I have looked a little closer. Ghana, under its 1992 constitution, does not allow British citizens to vote. Australia severed the link, particularly with the Australia Act 1986. Therefore, a British citizen who may be there for a long period, for all intents living there for ever, cannot vote. In Canada, that franchise was lost many decades ago.
We have opened the Pandora’s box on franchise. We are talking about 16 year-olds. I shall open Pandora’s box to talk about the franchise of Commonwealth citizens. I think the time has come for a new thought on this.