As the list of options dwindles in a snowed-in house I got to the bottom of boring jobs to be done this weekend. One of these was to fill in the form which will give me the right to vote in a British national election. And I can look forward to never having to fill in one of these forms again as we will soon have been away from the UK over 15 years which is the cut-off point after which we lose the right to vote.
Thanks to a European ruling we can vote in local elections here in Denmark and we also have the right to vote for our European members of Parliament. But we shall no longer have the right to vote in any national election anywhere in the world.
I decided to take this up as a one woman crusade at the last British general election in 2005 and managed to get a letter published in one of the UK Nationals as well as writing to my British MP, my British MEPs and my Danish MEPs. Unsurprisingly, these busy people had much more important things to think about but the range of reactions was interesting.
With the Danes it was blank incomprehension because in Denmark you lose the right to vote as soon as you set foot off Danish soil so the reaction there was that I was jolly lucky to have been given 15 years by the Brits. But I aspire to the French and American models where you retain the right to vote for life as long as you retain those nationalities.
For my British national representative he was polite but it was hardly at the top of his political agenda. The most interesting was contacting the British Members of the European Parliament for my region (which is the South West because my last place of residence in the UK was Gloucestershire) because several of these were UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) whose main platform is to get Britain out of the European Union. I couldn't help but smile at the dilemma I must have put these people in by requesting their aid, which they are duty bound to give, in a matter which they are campaigning to get rid of. One of them rather foolishly replied that he hoped he would not have to continue this correspondance with me because he anticpated being elected as a national MP very soon. Of course he wasn't and so couldn't avoid having to explain to me why denying me the vote was a good thing.
For me, the most surprising reaction was 'If you're so desperate to vote, why don't you just become Danish?' I don't think that changing your nationality is as casual as this. We are in Denmark solely because of a job opportunity. We seriously considered moving to Canada about 5 years ago and who's to say that the opportunity of a lifetime might not be on offer in Rome next week? Are we meant to change nationality everytime we change jobs? Part of the European ideal is supposed to be a free labour market as well as a free market in goods. Antagonists to the European Union often cite the so-called democratic deficit citing the lack of accountability in the way in which decisions are taken at Commission level. But while this has got much more accountable, no-one seems to care that (some of ) Europe's citizens are losing their political influence when they exercise their right to work in any other member state.
The truth is that interest in taking part in the political process is waning rapidly among the stay at home Britons and that of the millions of expatriate Britons round the world it is only a very few tens of thousands who bother to fill in those forms once a year, still less exercise their right to vote when the opportunity arises. No UK result was ever swung on the expat vote in the way that the American expat vote is very strongly contested.
So this is just my last attempt at publicising my concerns. There are more pressing world problems to attend to at the moment, one of them ironically enough, caused by bringing democracy forcibly to Iraq.
technorati tags:democracy, nationality, EU
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