My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Green, has Covid. He emailed me this afternoon and asked if I could do this. I think he is fairly groggy, and I am sure noble Lords would wish to join me in wishing him a speedy recovery. I recognise, as the Deputy Speaker has just told us, that this is the last group. The horse is heading for the stable—or, more likely, the people are heading for the plane—so I will not detain the House too long. I will leave the other amendments for the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, to speak to. I will just deal with Amendment 43.
I will deal first with a couple of points the noble Lord, Lord Green, left for me. The amendment he tabled, which I put my name to in Committee, has been slimmed down, because he had a meeting, I understand, with the Minister, which I did not attend, in which it was made perfectly clear that we cannot make these sorts of changes on the fly. It will require a period of consultation with Commonwealth Governments
to see what the situation is and to make sure that we do not take their friendship and their links to this country for granted.
So the proposal in the revised amendment is that there should be a period of consultation and then a report to Parliament about the results of that consultation, with a view to implementing a process that was first recommended by a Labour former Attorney-General, now the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, in 2008. As the noble Lord, Lord Green, points out, it would encourage more Commonwealth citizens to become British citizens and generally, therefore, strengthen the status of citizenship in the UK. Of course, it would do so without creating an unlevel playing field, because it is proposed in the amendment that, where other countries offer reciprocal rights, their citizens will continue to be able to vote in our elections—a two-way street.
Those are essentially the points which the noble Lord, Lord Green, would have wished to make. I will now add a few words of my own. I support this proposal for two reasons. First, I absolutely accept that the right to vote is a right—a right which we want everyone to exercise, for the reasons we were discussing earlier—but it is also a privilege. The right to vote is not the same as the right to get a driving licence, a point I made earlier, because it is far more important. It gives each one of us a say on how our country is governed, the sort of society we want to be and the values we wish to follow and adopt. Therefore, it is a very precious right, and precious rights should not be spread around too easily.
I take issue with any proposal which extends the franchise to anyone who does not have close, persistent and recent links to the United Kingdom. That is why I could not support the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, in his proposal to extend the franchise to EU citizens. It is also why I do not believe my party was right to extend the franchise to British citizens who have gone to live overseas, allowing them to vote in UK general elections without a time limit. That is a bad thing with which I do not agree. Nevertheless, I recognise the issue of reciprocity and, as I say, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Green, reflects that.
Secondly, I support this amendment because it recognises the changing nature of this country’s relationships with other Commonwealth countries. As sovereign nations, many quite rightly and understandably wish to develop a constitutional position entirely independent of the United Kingdom, while maintaining close links of friendship, through family and friends, and the other things which tie us all together. We saw the manifestation of this in recent developments in the Bahamas and on the recent royal tour of the West Indies, so the time has come for a reset. This reset can be achieved—in the terms of the noble Lord’s amendment—by having a period of consultation to ensure that the friendships of the Commonwealth are not endangered or damaged, while understanding that it is likely to lead to a proposal to confine the right to vote in UK elections to those Commonwealth countries where “reciprocal” rights are available to UK citizens. In that way, we all respect the dignity and independence of each other as sovereign nations. I beg to move.