Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhosue is sponsoring the launch of a paper in Parliament, titled “What if everyone could vote?”, which proposes that every immigrant in Britain should be given the franchise.
The report says:
It is fundamental in a true democracy that people have a political voice. But in the UK, democracy is not equal nor universal.
Instead, Its state of affairs which results in millions of adults without local or national voting rights. Its state of affairs warps representation in Parliament as MP’s constituency boundaries are drawn to registered voters and not the actual number of people living there.
There are so many reasons that disenfranchisement harms both migrants, communities and our democracy. In calling for residence-based voting rights, Migrant Democracy Project recognises the importance of having the political voice and right to participate in our democracy.
1 in 6 residents in England and Wales were born abroad, 16% of the population. Our democracy must remain equal and representative for all in our society.
Every extension of the franchise has brought the UK forward. Moving and migration are positive and natural.
Our current voter eligibility system is a complex labyrinth of bespoke historic deals with different countries and treaties that vary depending on where in the UK you are. It is a messy and unfair system. The UK needs electoral reform, and the people support this change. The time is now.
Residence-based voting rights recognises that all people are equal and deserve a political stake in their home – regardless of where they were born or their nationality.
They also complain that:
The extension of voting rights to these citizens is, as Heather Lardy noted, ‘intimately connected with the colonial history of the United Kingdom.’ (10) There was a common law rule that ‘British Subjects’ (that is, those who are resident in the United Kingdom on the qualifying dates) could vote in parliamentary and local elections provided that they could meet the property and other qualifications. This was defined as those born within the British Empire and dominions who swore allegiance to the monarch. The British Nationality Act 1948 introduced a citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies to be referred to as ‘British subjects’. The Representation of the People Act 1949 then bestowed the right to vote to ‘British subjects and citizens of the Republic of Ireland’.
Great, let’s get rid of it, then.
“Unenfranchised” is a Rousseauian framing, as it presumes that absolute equality is the natural state of all mankind. It presumes a hidden hand of oppression that is causing people to have unequal outcomes. The authors of the report believe that to be refused the “right” to vote is to be arbitrarily excluded from the democratic process, because they begin from the ideological position that all human beings are cut from an identical universal cloth. If you give them the right to vote, it will result in the unanimous and predictable victory of parties which advocate for liberalism and equality.
I would like to reiterate Connor’s Law, which proposes that the Blank Slate is the proposition beneath most of modern politics.
As I wrote in a previous essay on the topic, for Courage Media:
What we must understand is that “democracy” to Democrats means something very different than one man, one vote. As Emily Finley explains in The Ideology of Democratism, those who exalt democracy as a shared ideal are “enchanted with an imaginative vision of democracy that at times is almost indistinguishable from religious belief”. The way Democrats speak of democracy when criticizing Donald Trump is akin to worshipping it as a good until itself; rather than preferring it as a process by which political representatives are selected with maximum accountability.
Finley explains the logic of these “Democratists” as follows:
[The] belief that the people are generally good leads to the idea that the people must only be awakened through some form of enlightenment to their true and rational interests. Then, it is assumed, they will elect leaders representing the policies that correspond with those interests. It is always assumed that the people’s best interests align with those valued by democratism. Politics is a matter of correct reasoning and judgment rather than a moral-ethical challenge.
Democracy is premised on the belief that human beings share an egalitarian nature, and are equipped with rational faculties to reach the same conclusion about what is in their best interest. Therefore, mass enfranchisement will produce a uniform, predictable, progressive outcome. Hence why Democrats abhor anyone imposing identity verification requirements, proof of citizenship, civics tests, or other criteria on access to voting.
The presumption that we all share interests derived from our egalitarian nature is why Adam Grant, also in the New York Times, wrote an essay advocating government by random lot, originally titled “Elections Are Bad for Democracy”. The article ends with:
The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead.
A random sampling of people will produce more progressive outcomes, according to Grant, because their natures have not been warped by interfacing with the institutions which produce politicians. The less contaminated by civilization man is, the better qualified they will be to govern according to our identical interests.
Democracy, then, to Liberal Democrats like Hobhouse, means: the system by which man’s free and equal nature is revealed to him, and expressed in identical fashion. As such, voting in a democracy is thought to be an exercise of everyone making the same choice over and over.
In response to the paper, Conservative MP Neil O'Brien said:
"Wera Hobhouse is sponsoring the launch of this report in the Commons later on. It argues we should give the vote to an extra 4.4 million people - including those who arrived illegally - because restricting voting to British citizens is 'colonial'."
A spokeswoman for Hobhouse told GB News:
“These claims are totally false. Sponsoring this event was to enable a discussion around voting rights for people who have legally made their lives here, work here and pay their taxes.”
The Liberal Democrats insist that extending the franchise to legal migrants is not party policy. However, as
has uncovered, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Trust have donated £878,024 to Liberal Democrat councillors and £694,145 to the central party since 2015. They also donate to the Migrant Democracy Project, who wrote the paper.
So, clearly the Rowntree Foundation Trust think there is significant enough overlap between the Liberal Democrats and Migrant Democracy Project to warrant spending hundreds of thousands on both.
There are many reasons to oppose the demographic gerrymandering of our democratic system (or at least, what’s left of it). But you would be well within your rights to oppose it due to the ugliness of the report alone:
As it happens, I discussed the philosophy behind this hideous Corporate Memphis art style — depicting amorphous multicultural blobs in a feat of what my friend
calls “Diversity Realism” — with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk this week."I think we could do without this hideous artwork which tells us Diversity built Britain, and that if you disagree you're a racist."
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