I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who sets out the case very effectively. This is not such a huge leap, although I accept that, on the face of it, people might baulk at the notion that a penalty should be imposed on those who fail to cast a vote without good reason. As my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly has pointed out, however, this is not necessarily such a big leap as people might first think it to be.
11.30 am
To return to my previous point, this is such a fundamentally important issue for the future of the United Kingdom that I would hope even those who are opposed to compulsory voting would understand the reasons behind the amendment—and, indeed, hopefully, support it and acknowledge how important it is, if a referendum takes place, to have an overwhelming turnout. I would hope that Government Members who want to see the UK withdraw from the EU would not want to do so on the basis of a tiny minority of the vote. I do not think they would want to do that on the basis of the abysmal turnout for the elections of police and crime commissioners, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South mentioned. Given how much is at stake here, surely it is important to all who believe in democracy that citizens of these islands actually participate in this great democratic opportunity to determine the fate of Britain in or out of the EU.
If we look around the world, we find that a number of countries have compulsory voting on their statute books. Before coming to the debate this morning, I had a look and found some examples of the nations that have a compulsory voting requirement. Australia is the probably the one with which most of us will be familiar, but there are others, as well: for example, Brazil is another one, as is Argentina, and then there is Ecuador. I think there are 10 countries around the globe that have enforced compulsory voting with a penalty.
There are others for which compulsory voting is on the statute book, but without any penalties in place for people who do not participate. According to my research, there are around 20 countries falling into that category—including places like Belgium and Greece. Perhaps we need to learn a lesson from these other nations, where it seems to have worked reasonably well and to have resulted in a bigger turnout in their elections.