Voting rights and emigrants

I've been mulling over the issue of voting rights ever since the European judgement and the subsequent vote in the House of Commons on the issue of prisoners and voting. I then more recently engaged in a thoughtful twitter exchange with Noreen Bowden who has been campaigning on the subject of the rights of Irish citizens to vote while they are abroad.

Just to reiterate my own position and situation - I am a British citizen, raised in Ireland and currently based in Singapore. Having lived in Brentwood for six years, and with every intention of returning, I am registered overseas as a voter in the parliamentary constituency of Brentwood and Ongar. This gives me the right to vote in General Elections and referenda, but not local elections in Brentwood.

Despite some of the rhetoric used, I've come to the conclusion that voting is not a human right - at least not in the sense that the right to freedom of religion or the right to be fed and sheltered is. I base this on a number of reasons, but the most obvious one is that a French citizen living in the UK or Ireland does not get the vote. Instead of which, the right to vote is a privilege of the citizenship you hold - and further, other restrictions can apply to that right (eg an Irish citizen must actually be resident in the UK to exercise the right of an Irish citizen to vote in a UK election).

It is however clear to me that any restrictions on voting rights must be clearly objective in a proper democracy (the European Court ruling on prisoners voting rights implied it was okay to stop them voting if their sentence was more than four years). British rules on emigrant voting rights are clear - the overseas vote is only allowed for 15 years.

The second point that needs to be raised is that under the electoral systems used in much of the former British Empire (which includes the US and Ireland) you typically vote for the representative in a specific area. When I cast my vote in the next UK election, the only thing I'm actually voting on is whether or not I want Eric Pickles or one of his opponents to represent Brentwood and Ongar in the House of Commons - I am not voting on whether I'd prefer David Cameron or Ed Miliband to be Prime Minister (though the position of the candidates themselves on that issue might influence my voting decision).

The final point is that the issue of overseas citizens voting gets even more complicated when one considers citizenship by descent - despite the failings of successive Fianna Fail governments, I doubt Ireland would have been better off if in the 1980s the romanticised view of Ireland amongst Irish Americans had ended up leading to second and third generation Irish American votes effectively imposing Sinn Fein on the voters who would have had to live with the day to day consequences of that decision.[1]

Noreen Bowden has made the point that the young Irish people who have had to emigrate as a result of the Irish economy imploding don't get a chance to determine the government who might be able to fix the mess so that they could come back in a few years[2]. She's right - but I do think there needs to be a balance between those who have the intention to return and those who ultimately decide to remain abroad for the remainder of their lives. Ultimately, in my view, there needs to be a balance between those who may or will be affected in their day to day lives by the decisions made at election at time, and those for whom the biggest impact may be reduced consular services in Timbuktu. I do think tax liability plays a part here - the US taxes American citizens abroad, Ireland and the UK do not.[3]

So how do you tell when a leaver has the intent to return? Well, that's actually in itself horribly subjective - and open to change. So you can't. Instead, you end up having to approximate - suggesting that there's a fixed period of time within which you retain the right to vote, but after that it's accepted you don't. In other words, I think the UK has it more or less right - British citizens retain the right for 15 years after departure. You can argue about the specific length (why not 10 or 20) but in general, I think the balance is right.

That's not to say there aren't other opportunities to engage emigrants in the political process. It has always been my view that having a two house legislature where both are elected on a proportional basis is a bad idea - the "Lower" house[4], which tends to be more representative of how votes are cast, should always have the precedence - and if both houses are fully and directly elected it's then unclear which has the mandate and precedence. The role of the upper house needs to be to act as a restraint on politicians simply passing idiotic populist legislation and to provide alternative voices within the system. My advice therefore to my Irish friends is that they should campaign for the right to vote to be retained for a fixed number of years, and that as part of the reform of the Seanad, they could also have a specific number of Senators to represent the views of Irish citizens abroad.

What do you think?

[1] Yes, I know there's a few big ifs in there, but I don't think by themselves they are unreasonable.

[2] Ironically, despite the tendency of Singaporeans to label those who do move abroad as quitters, there's actually a concerted effort to get those citizens to vote as overseas voters in the elections. And that's despite the evidence that overseas voters are much more likely to vote for Opposition candidates.

[3] The issue of tax liability is not of course the determining factor in itself. Plenty of emigrants still have investments back in the homeland, but that's a factor in how they deploy their investments, it's not automatic.

[4] Another artifact of the British legacy?

Um... it's called democracy...

The Telegraph reports that despite the attempt to railroad the Lisbon Treaty through by holding a second referendum in Ireland it may be delayed until after the British general election because the Czechs have some legal issues to be resolved.

Particularly intriguing is this quote:

Mr Sarkozy then threatened the Czech leader with unspecified "consequences" if Prague allowed the delay to trigger a British referendum that would probably lead to the Lisbon Treaty's rejection.

So, thats the clear admission then. The attempt is to get this Treaty through before the Tories can "wreck" it by actually reflecting the will of the British people on the treaty (anti Lisbon parties easily took over 50% of the votes in this years Euro elections).

Pit bulls and border controls

Last weeks Panorama on illegal dog fighting was fascinating - partly because it demonstrated the flaw in the constant flag waving about a border police by various members of the cabinet, including the PM himself.

For those of you who didn't see, the BBC reporter easily smuggled a pit bull into the UK by the crafty means of flying the dog to Dublin, where it was the driven up to Northern Ireland and carried accross to the UK on a sailing from Larne to Stranraer. (Note to future BBC reporters doing this trick - it's quicker to take the dog to Liverpool on the fast ferry from Dublin port either direct to Liverpool or to Holyhead and driving through North Wales. You've about as much chance of being stopped as well - at least if our experience of driving through Holyhead is anything to go by).

And this is the fundmental flaw with the Border controls - the UK has a common travel area with the Irish Republic. Even if you police the ports into Britain, you still have this very long land border along which there are no effective controls.

To impose them would be to undermine much of the work that has been done in Ireland - the Irish Nationalists would regard it as a show of bad faith, and the Unionists would be annoyed at losing access to the cheaper petrol in the Republic. The only sensible solution is for the two governments to combine together to agree a common policy for the combined borders, and allow freedom of movement within the two islands.

So why is it the only reference for "immigration" on the British Irish Council Website is about immigration into the Isle of Man?

Living in England....

Iain Dale's post and the comments thread left me somewhat bemused at the long discussion of why people are leaving the UK. It's worth noting for a start that net immigration is still positive, and that nearly half of those leaving the country are foreigners returning home.

But it got me thinking - a number of the commenters were commenting on leaving England for Ireland. There were a number of reasons I did the opposite move, partly due to the Darling Wife, but also due to the fact that there were more opportunities and better money in the field I work - I'm a CCIE in case you're curious which (supposedly) means I'm very good with those network things. Having been born in England to British parents, I'd always felt an affinity to England and had wanted to work over here for some time before finally making the move. Despite all that, when I did move over, I had moved with thoughts about moving back to Ireland after a few years. Those plans have been put on hold for the foreseeable future.

The reasons though run deeper - for all the complaints about the reliability and the punctuality of the train service from Ingatestone to London, it's no worse than commuting on the DART was in Dublin. Yes its more expensive, but I get paid a lot more over here, so I can live with that. Property prices in Dublin are as bad as most of London. The Republic's electoral system gives you essentially a choice between Fianna Fail and the "Not Fianna Fail" coalition[1] - at least in Britain there are two main parties, even if it is getting harder to tell them apart. The overall tax burden isn't much different. The weather is a lot worse (there are actually vineyards near Chelmsford - there isn't enough sun or heat in Ireland to grow grapes).

Dublin itself is also getting over crowded - the city has been badly planned - there are major issues with layouts, and the M50 is apparently driven in first gear all the way from Bray to Dublin airport if you're travelling during the morning rush hour - presumably because some loon thought two lanes on the main motorway around Dublin was enough. The planning process for new roads is a nightmare - in that plans are made, approved, go through a public enquiry, and then just as the builders turn up to make the road, somebody discovers a medieval rubbish dump and insist the road be rerouted or delayed for two years while it's excavated. And all this under a system where the government spent a lot of money hiring a consultant from Madrid to tell them if they could avoid the three year planning process and worked 24 hours a day on building infrastructure as opposed to working 8 hour days they'd get stuff done within a year instead of taking five years.

In addition, the huge influx of Polish immigration is putting additional stress on, well, everything. Housing, transport, education - one calculation is that 5% of the Irish population is now Polish. [2]

Last year, my sister and I did our first driving tests within a couple of weeks of each other. We both failed. I failed several more attempts before finally passing earlier this year. My sister is still waiting for her second attempt.

And while we're on the subject of public services, the NHS, with all its faults, is a huge improvement on the Irish Health Service. I had to pay €40 for the privilege of visiting a doctor the last time I went to one before moving over - not paying my NHS doctor was a mighty relief and the removal of a source of stress.

There is an old saying, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. It may look like the grass is greener on the other side of the Irish Sea - but in Dublin at least, it's definitely not much an improvement on London and the South East.

[1] This is the reason Fianna Fail have ended up in government after every election since 1987. It was only a falling out with their coalition partners and the fact the numbers just worked that led to the only two and a half years they've not been in power in the last 20 years.

[2] It should be pointed out I don't think that Polish immigration is a bad thing - I just think that Dublin wasn't coping very well when I left three years ago, and I can't imagine a huge increase in the population since I left is doing the place any favours in terms of infrastructure.

EU Constitution

The original treaty proposing an EU Constitution was negotiated by the Irish during their Presidency of the EU (the Irish media at the time even referred to it as the Dublin treaty, hoping it would lead to Dublin taking its place amongst the other European Cities with a treaty named after it, such as Amsterdam, Maastricht, Nice and Rome).

So it's interesting to see that according to the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, "“The substance of what was agreed in 2004 has been retained" and “Really what is gone is the term constitution."

So although the Telegraph is wrong that the implications of Ireland having a referendum implies anything for the UK situation (Ireland always has referendums on the EU - they'd have a referendum if there was a treaty mandating the sort of chocolate biscuits to be served at the Council of Europe meetings), it does seem that the Irish have backed their main point.

This is clearly a disgraceful attempt by the EU to ignore the democratically expressed will of the French and Dutch people on the treaty. More to the point, the wiggling by Brown and Blair about their election promises is basically saying "we don't need to vote on the duck any more, because we're now calling it a chicken".

Which is a pretty good analogy for the two PMs.

Irish election reaction

Via Iain Dale, I came accross this rather interesting rant (warning - language alert) about the result of the Irish general election.

However, while the rant is not surprising, neither is the fact that large numbers of people voted for Fianna Fail (indeed, as a former member, it would have been the party I would have voted for, though I should also add that the two Fianna Fail TDs in my constitutency have never had their integrity questioned).

Michael Moore, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administrations mis handling of the crisis, posted a long rant, aimed at those who had voted for him, asking how they could now justify that decision and if they would still do it. The answer in many cases has to be "John Kerry". In much the same way, the Irish electorate were faced with two choices - keep Fianna Fail and Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach, or replace them with a Fine Gael led Rainbow Coalition led by Enda Kenny (a man by the way who is insisting that he can still form a government, but that almost certainly means he's either very bad at maths or he's keeping open the possibility of inviting Sinn Fein into government, neither of which reflects well on him).

To express surprise at the fact that the Irish electorate didn't punish Fianna Fail for their "corrupt" behaviour is to affect a total ignorance of how Irish politics has worked for years - especially outside Dublin. The fact that Michael Lowry has been returned for three successive elections despite being expelled from Fine Gael for corruption, and that Beverly Cooper Flynn was returned in Mayo after being slung out of Fianna Fail when she lost a libel case against RTE means that even today Irish voters will accept corrupt politicans assuming they look after their constituents (in addition, both have been able to play the Dublin elite trying to put down the culchies card). This is nothing new - it is a fact that Charles Haughey used to be met by his constituents as they left Mass on Sunday morning with the comments "Charlie, you're a corrupt man, but we love you anyway".

With all that in mind - its then no surprise that Fianna Fail held up its vote and its number of seats. They've always been good at "managing" the vote (a concept foreign to the UK political system where we have the First past the vote system - parties don't try to split their vote between your three candidates to maximise the effect). More to the point, despite the many issues identified in the rant, they've presided over one of the best periods of economic growth in Irish history - when I did my Leaving Cert 15 years ago, Ireland was still exporting people to the UK and the US, and there was concern about the knock on effect to Ireland of German reunification, which had effectively closed off one popular destination for Irish emigrants. Now, it's immigration that is the issue - the streets of Dublin when I left three years ago were filled with Chinese, Filipinos and Nigerians, and in the three years since EU enlargement Ireland has become 5% Polish. The alternative to Fianna Fail was the Rainbow coalition, led by Fine Gael. Plenty of people had reservations about Enda Kenny as Taoiseach (though to be fair, not as many as had them about Michael Noonan who led FG to their worst result in decades in 2002), but those with long memories would also remember that one of the worst periods for the economy in recent Irish history coincided with the FG/Labour coalition of 1982-1987 - one of only two periods in the last 30 years that Fianna Fail have not been in government. FG would have been leading a coalition made up of the Labour party and possibly the Greens. Its possible that many people thought that a coalition including left wing parties could be more damaging to the economy than the existing government.

If the answer to why lots of people voted for George Bush in 2004 was "John Kerry", then equally, the answer to why lots of people voted for Fianna Fail last Thursday is almost certainly "Rainbow Coalition".