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Other countries do it, why don't we?
Good question! Why don’t we? Just as, over the years,
the UK has gradually widened the
definition of who is allowed to vote, by
lowering the minimum voting age from 25 to 21 to 18,
and giving the vote to
non-landowners and women, so most advanced democracies have
done likewise.
But most advanced democracies have also recognized
their own expat populations by
Spanish and Portuguese
expats gained their right to participate in the political affairs
of their home
country when they emerged from dictatorship. Italian expats gained theirs
in
2000.
The UK’s current clumsy, arbitrary arrangements originally date from
1985, and were
fumbled and fiddled with, arbitrarily and for no good reason, in
1989, 2000 and 2002.
It is high time the government put an end to the
fiddling and fumbling, and brought its
electoral legislation up to the standard
enjoyed by the world’s leading democracies, as
has been recommended time and
time again by international bodies such as the
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