Opinion
Opinion: Why can’t I vote in the UK General Election?
Peter Kenworthy
April 19th, 2017
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This article is more than 7 years old.
Time for a change of policy, surely? (photo: Policy Exchange)
Why can’t I – a British citizen living abroad – register to vote in the next UK general elections, and why must I thus be denied the right to help determine the future of my country, and how it acts internationally, at a time when my vote matters more than ever?
Patriotic, but politically apathetic
I was born a British citizen in 1972 and have remained one to this day, although I have lived outside the UK (where I grew up in Cambridgeshire) since 1980. I eat Marmite on my toast, dream and swear in English, and hope England do well at every World Cup and Euro finals, even though they always end up underachieving.
I have always voted in local and European Parliament elections in my country of residence, Denmark, assured that the system of proportional representation would ensure that my vote would always count.
But I have never voted in a UK general election. Mainly because I have never found a party (-leader) that I agreed with enough to make the effort to become registered to do so, and because the first-past-the-post system means that anyone I might have considered voting for never stood even the remotest chance of actually winning the Cambridgeshire constituency that I belong(ed) to.
Time to be heard
All this has changed. The stakes are much higher with Brexit, both nationally and internationally, and the new Labour leader is not a New Labour leader.
I therefore rushed online to register to vote for the next election, only to be met with the following upsetting sentence on the electoral commission’s website: “If you were too young to register after you left the UK, you can still register as an overseas voter … as long as you left the UK no more than 15 years ago.”
Illogical reasoning
But why should it matter when I last voted, or if I have indeed ever voted in the UK, as long as I am a British citizen?
Why should I be denied the right to vote, simply because the first-past-the-post system in the UK means that anyone with a non-mainstream set of beliefs under normal circumstances might as well not bother voting?
And why can’t I be allowed to vote, now that my vote might for once actually help challenge a Thatcherite consensus that began before I left the UK at the age of seven, and has now lasted for nearly 40 years?
About
Peter Kenworthy
Peter is a British citizen who lives in Copenhagen. He went to primary school and spent his formative years in Cambridgeshire, UK, in the 1970s where he fostered a love-affair with lost causes such as the England football team, Marmite and post-punk. He holds a master’s degree in English and international development studies and a single subject bachelor’s in journalism. He has worked for several NGOs, municipalities and newspapers in Denmark and has furthermore written articles for an array of Danish and English-language publications.
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