Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

It is a pleasure to rise to speak briefly to amendments 59, 60 and 61, which stand in my name and those of my hon. Friends. We frequently make the mistake in this House of legislating in haste and repenting at leisure, but that is an even greater danger when we are engaged in legislation that can change the whole constitution of our country and that is what these amendments seek to address. I fear that in the legislation as it stands, we risk putting the cart before the horse, and I want to reorder those in the appropriate way. In a nutshell, the import of my amendments would be that, first, only British citizens should be able to vote in the referendum and, secondly, that British citizens should be able to vote wherever they may be in the world. That would necessitate a number of changes, because my hon. Friend the Minister is proposing simply to take the franchise that we currently use for general elections and bolt it on to the referendum legislation. We should also be asking whether we should revisit the whole basis of the franchise that we use in general elections, which is the result of layer upon layer of historical accident. There has never been any real thought or logic applied to it; it is simply a gradual accretion of different rules that affect the franchise. This is of vital importance when it comes to general elections. There are now tens of thousands of non-British citizens who are able to vote in general elections in this country by virtue of being citizens of Commonwealth countries or the Irish Republic. In some individual cities and towns, the electoral roll contain tens of thousands such people, and the total across the whole country must amount to several hundred thousand. That is certainly sufficient to swing the outcome of a general election and, without doubt, to do the same in a referendum that is likely to have a very low turnout, owing to the small part of the public who are engaged with the issue and likely to participate when we vote on it next year. The outcome of that referendum could be determined by people who are not citizens of the United Kingdom. I know that the Conservative party is sympathetic to the point raised in my amendment 61, and I hope the coalition Government will be as well. While we allow a number of people who are not British citizens to participate in elections in this country, we also prohibit a large number of expatriate British citizens from participating in our democracy because they have been living overseas for more than 15 years. I hope that the Government will in due course address this question in relation to general elections, but the issue is all the more important when we are discussing a referendum that will change the very constitution of our country. One could argue that people who choose to live outside the United Kingdom have less interest in, and a less direct concern with, what we might loosely describe as the management of the government of the country for the immediate future, but many of those expatriate citizens intend to return to the United Kingdom when their work commitments come to an end. They intend to return to their country of origin, the country that they continue to regard as their home. They still want to participate fully as citizens of this country. To change the rules on which our democracy is based without consulting them about their own country and democracy would be wrong.