After the Brexit Referendum (4) – Why UK-Resident EU Citizens Should Get the Vote

I’ve mentioned in my previous posts (Free Movement vs Migration; Free Movement vs Work Permit Schemes and the Mobile Classes vs the Rooted Classes) in this so far fortnightly series that EU citizens living in the UK should be fully enfranchised, that is, able to vote in General Elections as well as local and regional ones, not to mention in any referenda that may be held.  In this post I want to approach the issue from a different angle.

To be crystal clear, my proposal is that anyone – EU citizen or not – who has legally lived and worked in the UK for a qualifying period of let’s say 3 years should be entitled to vote in all elections and any referenda, the same as UK and Commonwealth citizens.  Essentially I agree with the “If you live here, you can vote here” position advocated by Jon Danzig, a man who clearly has more than the one blog.

Simple arithmetic suggests it may well be the case that the Brexit Referendum would not have been lost had EU citizens had the vote.  But I believe the disenfranchisement has had much more insidious effects on our political discourse.  As Danzig notes, we’ve been “talking about them as if they’re not in the room”, during the referendum campaign, even more so afterwards, but also for years before.  Had politicians had to take UK resident EU citizens’ votes into account the tone of election campaigning over the years might well have been very different and we might never have had the Brexit referendum at all.

We’ve become accustomed to talking about EU citizens as separate from our “communities” – thereby undoing half a century of community relations effort, as I’ll explain another time – but exactly how can we justify denying them the vote?

Do EU citizens living in the UK have less of a stake in the country’s future than do UK citizens?  Well, they are living here, paying their taxes and reliant on the rule of British law and the provision of state services exactly the same as UK citizens, though of course the details depend on everyone’s individual situation.

Are they here only temporarily?  Well, they might be, but the 3 year qualifying period for a vote suggests at least some commitment to the UK.  The majority will most likely stay considerably longer, not least because most of them are in work.  On the other hand, some UK citizens may emigrate, maybe to retire abroad.  We don’t deny categories of UK citizens the vote on the basis that they’re statistically more likely to move overseas.  Even if EU citizens are more likely to leave the UK in the 5 years after a General Election, the number leaving will be only a fraction of those who have been here 3 years or more already, many of them for a decade or more, so the possibility hardly seems to justify denying all of them the vote.  Besides, I could even argue that the EU citizens who leave the UK during the 5 years after a General Election in some sense “speak for” the EU citizens who may move to the UK after that election, not having had a vote.

So there doesn’t seem to be a rational justification for denying EU citizens a vote in General Elections (or referenda) on the basis that they have less stake in the outcome – or less responsibility for the decisions taken by the elected government, for example in terms of paying taxes.

What about other responsibilities?  I’m thinking of the Colonel Blimps who “fought for this country” or rather whose parents or grandparents did.  Well, many EU citizens could argue that their parents or grandparents fought on the same side in the same wars.  More fundamentally, do we really want to grant the vote only to those who pass some test as to the contribution of previous generations?

OK, so what about future responsibilities for the defence of the realm?  For the vast majority of us that simply comes down to paying the taxes that pay for professional armed forces, taxes that apply to EU migrant workers as much as to UK citizens.  We don’t have conscription any more, but even if we did, would it even exclude the 18 year old children of EU citizens who’ve settled in the UK, children who may well be British citizens?

So there doesn’t seem to be a case for denying the vote to EU citizens living in the UK on the basis that they have less responsibility towards the country or have done less for it in the past.

What about ancestry, then?  On one talk-show during the referendum campaign I heard a woman suggest that her family had been in the UK for 700 years and that this gave her greater rights than her interlocutor, who, as I recollect, could only claim a century or two.  Well, I rather suspect everyone’s ancestry is more complex than that, judging by my own family history and that of those celebs who’ve explored theirs on some TV programme, the name of which escapes me just now.  The practicality of DNA tests to measure Britishness would be undermined by the mongrel nature of our nation, as well as, perhaps, by the political need to ensure the Royal Family score highly.  The blood-line idea is twaddle, isn’t it?

That leaves us with the idea of citizenship.  But that is undermined on two counts:

First, EU citizens resident in the UK have never had to apply for UK citizenship.  They have been treated equally with UK citizens under EU treaties (incorporated into UK law), for example, in their entitlement to grants and loans for higher education.  They haven’t even had to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILTR) as some foreign residents need to.

And, as I mentioned in previous posts, people don’t change their citizenship unless they have to.  Doing so may involve giving up some rights in their country of origin.  People don’t necessarily make a decision to stay permanently – that is something that just happens.  And they may reason that, depending on how the UK and other economies do, they might need to look for work in another EU country, Germany say, sometime in the future.  It wouldn’t make sense applying for a UK passport.  Besides, it costs around £1000 (for EU citizens) in the UK nowadays (an agenda item for the Brexit discussions, perhaps) and you have to do a stupid test, involving, I understand, the need to memorise the names of the Eastenders and Coronation Street pubs.  If the only advantage is getting a vote, the price is too high for most people.

The right to participate in the democratic process is surely a right, not something you may have to pay for.

Second, and here’s the kicker, other UK residents born overseas do get a vote, even if they’ve been here less time than EU citizens.  In general, non-EU citizens who want to reside in the UK either have to become UK citizens, giving them the right to vote, or apply for ILTR, which doesn’t confer the right to vote but is usually a necessary step to naturalisation.

So an EU citizen may have lived and worked in the UK for 10 years, the same as an American.  But the American has had more incentive to naturalise, since doing so may be necessary to ensure continued residency, for example, if they wish to spend time outside the UK (which could result in ILTR status lapsing).  Though, as I said at the outset, the American should have the right to vote even if they haven’t taken UK citizenship or even obtained ILTR.

And while we’re at it, why should one American living in the UK with ILTR status (or even without such status) not have a vote, while another who has become a UK citizen does have one?  Especially if the American who has become a UK citizen has done so because they wished to spend a few years abroad before returning to the UK?!

It’s absurd that the right to participate in the UK’s democracy depends on the details of the process you have to follow to maintain residency rights.

The big inconsistency, though, is with Commonwealth and Irish citizens.  When I first looked into this I thought Commonwealth citizens needed ILTR status in order to vote.  I now realise when I read the relevant explanation more carefully that they only need to be in the UK legally:

“A qualifying Commonwealth citizen is someone who has leave to enter or remain in the UK, or does not require such leave.”

So, not only are Commonwealth-born UK residents more likely to have become UK citizens – in order to lock-in their right to reside in the UK – than are those from the EU who’ve come to live here under the EU’s free movement provisions and who haven’t needed to lock-in residency rights (at least up until the Brexit referendum), they don’t need to become a citizen to get a vote anyway.

It might be worth pointing out that the Commonwealth now includes some countries – Rwanda and Mozambique – that have no particular historic connection to the UK.  They’ve merely joined the Commonwealth, perhaps out of dissatisfaction with their own former colonial power or simply to enhance their international profile or even just to create more competitive opportunities for their sportspeople!  Of course, in terms of affecting the outcome of elections or referenda, the number of UK resident Rwandan and Mozambique citizens is insignificant.  But it’s the principle that counts.

The franchise for UK general elections and national referenda is not only illogical but also discriminatory.

It should be amended forthwith on the principle of “If you live here, you can vote here”.

Furthermore, carelessness over this one detail may very well have cost us our EU membership, a disaster the scale of which only history will be able to judge, though perhaps they should place the portrait of David Cameron that, following tradition, will soon adorn the walls of No 10, right next to that of Lord North.

How Not to Report a Weather Record: 13th September 2016

Last Sunday, the Guardian website suggested Tuesday 13th September would be jolly warm:

“If the mercury rises above 31.6C, the temperature was [sic] reached at Gatwick on 2 September 1961, it will be the hottest September day for 55 years.”

“No, no, no!!”, I was obliged to point out, adding, by way of explanation that:

“If the temperature rises above 31.6C it will be the hottest September day for more than 55 years, since 1961 was 55 years ago.

For it to be the hottest September day for 55 years it will only have to be hotter on Tuesday than the hottest September day since 1961.”

Good grief.

After that I was hardly surprised – since your average journo seems not even to be an average Joe, but, to be blunt, an innumerate plagiarist – to read in the Evening Standard on the 13th itself:

“If the heat rises above 31.6C, which was reached at Gatwick on September 2, 1961, then it will be the hottest [September] day for 55 years.”

See what they’ve done there?  With a bit of help from Mr Google, of course.

In the event, it reached 34.4C on 13th, making it the hottest September day for 105 years.

Much was also made of the fact that we had 3 days in a row last week when the temperature broke 30C for the first time in September in 87 years.

But the significance of the 34.4C last Tuesday was understated.

The important record was that the temperature last Tuesday was the highest ever recorded so late in the year, since the only higher temperatures – 34.6C on 8th September 1911 (the year of the “Perfect Summer”, with the word “Perfect” used as in “Perfect Storm”) and 35.0C on 1st rising to 35.6C on 2nd during the Great Heatwave of 1906 – all occurred earlier in the month.  By the way, in 1906 it also reached 34.2C on 3rd September.  That’s 3 days in a row over 34C.  Take that 2016.  They recorded 34.9C on 31st August 1906 to boot, as they might well have put it back then.

No, what’s really significant this year is that we now know it’s possible for the temperature to reach 34.4C as late as 13th September which we didn’t know before.

I’m going to call this a “date record”, for want of a better term.  Any date record suggests either a once in 140 years freak event (since daily temperature records go back that far, according to my trusty copy of The Wrong Kind of Snow) or that it’s getting warmer.

One way to demonstrate global warming statistically is to analyse the distribution of record daily temperatures, i.e. the hottest 1st Jan, 2nd Jan and so on.  Now, if the climate has remained stable, you’d expect these daily records to be evenly distributed over time, a similar number each decade, for example, since 1875 when the records were first properly kept.  But if the climate is warming you’d expect more such records in recent decades.  I haven’t carried out the exercise, but I’d be surprised if we haven’t had more daily records per decade since 1990, say, than in the previous 115 years.

It occurs to me that another, perhaps quicker, way to carry out a similar exercise would be to look at the date records.  You’d score these based on how many days they apply for.  For example, the 34.4C on 13th September 2016 is also higher than the record daily temperatures for 12th, 11th, 10th and 9th September, back to that 34.6C on 8th September 1911.  So 13th September 2016 “scores” 5 days.

Here’s a list of date records starting with the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK:

38.1C – 10th August 2003 – counts for 1 day, since, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we have to assume 10th August is the day when it “should” be hottest

36.1C – 19th August 1932 – 9 days

35.6C – 2nd September 1906 – 14 days

34.6C – 8th September 1911 – 6 days

34.4C – 13th September 2016 – 5 days

31.9C – 17th September 1898 – 4 days

31.7C – 19th September 1926 – 2 days

30.6C – 25th September 1895 – 6 days

30.6C – 27th September 1895 – 2 days

29.9C – 1st October 2011 – 4 days

29.3C – 2nd October 2011 – 1 day

28.9C – 5th October 1921 – 3 days

28.9C – 6th October 1921 – 1 day

27.8C – 9th October 1921 – 3 days

25.9C – 18th October 1997 – 9 days

And you could also compile a list of date records going back from 10th August, i.e. the earliest in the year given temperatures have been reached.

The list above covers a late summer/early autumn sample of just 70 days, but you can see already that the current decade accounts for 10 of those days, that is, around 14%, during 5% of the years.  The 2000s equal and the 1990s exceed expectations in this very unscientific exercise.

Obviously I need to analyse the whole year to draw firmer conclusions.  Maybe I’ll do that and report back, next time a heatwave grabs my attention.

It’s also interesting to note that the “freakiest” day in the series was 2nd September 1906, with a daily record temperature hotter than for any of the previous 13 days.  2nd freakiest was 19th August 1932 – suggesting (together with 2nd September 1906) that perhaps the real story is an absence of late August heatwaves in the global warming era – joint with 18th October 1997, a hot day perhaps made more extreme by climate change.

Am I just playing with numbers?  Or is there a serious reason for this exercise?

You bet there is.

I strongly suspect that there’s now the potential for a sustained UK summer heatwave with many days in the high 30Cs.  A “Perfect Summer” turbocharged by global warming could be seriously problematic.  I breathe a sigh of relief every year we dodge the bullet.

 

 

 

After the Brexit Referendum (3) – the Mobile Classes vs the Rooted Classes

I’ve worked out why I’m overcome with rage whenever I hear Frank Field championing the needs of the “ordinary white working class”, in the Guardian’s words (it’s not clear whether Field actually said “white”), besides, that is, his uncanny resemblance to Ian Richardson’s Francis Urquhart in the original UK early 1990s House of Cards series.  I suspect that Field and I see the world quite differently.  Hence my irritation.

The contrast between Field and, for example, Gordon Brown could not be more stark.  It seems to me that Brown, and Blair for that matter, both share my view that, when in power, whilst they represented the British people – and they are patriotic – their concerns were not limited to the welfare of the British.  Others, Poles and Romanians, say, deserve no more or less than us Brits.  You could say that Brown, Blair and the many others who supported the Remain side, including myself, are internationalists, but there may be a more fundamental distinction – between open and closed thinking.  An example of closed system thinking is to carefully conduct a laboratory experiment, varying only one factor at a time; but the real world is an open system, with numerous uncontrollable variables.  Closed thinkers only want to worry about their own area of concern; open system thinkers grapple with complexity.  I’m sure Frank Field believes Poles deserve a good life just as much as Brits do.  I presume he just doesn’t think it’s his problem.

But that means Field has to ignore many of the people who make up today’s British society.  And it seems to me that the specific closed way in which he is thinking is to consider only what I will term the “rooted” classes, the people Labour has historically represented.  Perhaps this form of closed thinking explains in part why there’s not only a divide down the middle of the Conservative Party, but also a damaging – because the issue is so fundamental – schism in the Labour Party, the majority enthusiastic for Remain on one side and Field, Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey, John Mann and Dennis Skinner, to name the most high-profile Brexiteers – assuming we take Corbyn’s Remain stance at face value – on the other.

Just because the Tories are divided over Europe doesn’t mean Labour has to be.  The vocal minority of Labour Brexiteers (4% of their MPs said Field) have done untold damage to the Party, as well as skewed the referendum debate by portraying Labour as more evenly split on the issue than it in fact is.  I expect many enthusiastic Remainers will transfer their allegiance to the Lib Dems, especially if Corbyn stays on as Labour leader.

So, to the point I wanted to make in this post.  It seems to me that we have to begin with the observation that within each social class, in the UK specifically, but also elsewhere – however many classes you want to define – we have a significant subdivision that I would describe as “mobile”.  For simplicity’s sake, I contrast these people with those we might term “rooted”.  So we have skilled and unskilled or “blue collar” and “white collar” working class who will seek employment only near where they live, which is most likely where their parents live.  “Community” – a term which I find to be another source of irritation, since it is far too often glibly used to refer to all those living in an area, whether they ever talk to their neighbours or not – is all important to them.  But we also have skilled and unskilled, “blue collar” and “white collar” working class, however you want to divide them, who are prepared to travel across continents for employment.

Many of the uber-rich are extremely mobile, seemingly basing themselves in multiple global centres or even, to rub in the point, on £200m yachts, though some are undoubtedly more rooted than others.  Though having said that, it occurs to me that it’s not unknown for even royal families to spend a generation or two in exile.

For large numbers of professionals – the middle classes, if you like – the employment market is national, if not international or even global.  In fact, given the custom in the UK of leaving home to attend university, many of us relocate, at least temporarily, while still in education.

Some industries are so concentrated in small numbers of geographical clusters – consider Hollywood, the City of London, the English Premier League – that, if you want work, you’re pretty much obliged to relocate.  Great cities, such as London and New York, are magnets for the aspirational. Companies increasingly require employees to relocate, often across borders – I’ve been told myself that “international experience” may be necessary for career progression.

Of course, not everyone, not even a majority, move to another country, but mobility has been a feature of the last few decades of globalisation.

Although many have emigrated for centuries, in particular to the New World, to some extent renewed mobility has recently trickled down to what Frank Field would call the working classes.  Or let’s put it another way.  Many families have become rooted over the last century or so, particularly in those former industrial heartlands we hear about that voted Brexit so strongly.  Their ancestors, several generations ago, left the countryside during the era of urbanisation ushered in by the Industrial Revolution.

Other families, such as my own, have moved intermittently for generations, around the country and around the world.  For many, moving for work, or for personal reasons, is just something you do.  You make a life where you find yourself.  I have never had any expectation of remaining in the same locality for my whole life.

Here’s my proposition.  At the present time there is a conflict of interests, at least in the UK, between the rooted classes and the mobile classes.  This was a critical divide between Remainers and Leavers in the Brexit referendum.  The rooted classes see the mobile classes as a threat.  This is particularly the case amongst Field’s “ordinary white working class”.  And, indeed, in some ways they are a threat, since as a society we have allowed rights and privileges to accrue to the rooted classes, in particular entitlement to housing.  But, as in the Industrial Revolution, as in the urbanisation of modern China, economic growth and development has always thrived on mobility.  And the economy never stands still.  You can’t make a decision to freeze the economy as it is – you’ll be destroyed by competition.  The mobile classes are essential to the process of economic renewal, to support technological change.  That’s why it’s a mistake for policy to be determined solely by the needs of the rooted classes.

A large part of the reason for the schism in the Labour Party, then, is that the Brexiteers, particularly the likes of Frank Field, see themselves as representing the rooted “ordinary white working class”.  And, to be honest, they have a point, if they take the narrow view that they represent those who vote for them.  Because we – the UK and the EU – have shamefully allowed the mobile classes to become disenfranchised.  Not only were citizens of other EU countries living, working and paying taxes in the UK denied a vote in the Brexit referendum, so, ludicrously, were UK citizens living overseas, even in Europe, if they’d left this country more than the arbitrary number of 15 years ago.

In part this disenfranchisement has occurred because the rooted classes are seen as privileged.  And see themselves that way too, no doubt – I’m sure there is a certain kind of Brit who would be apoplectic at the idea of giving the vote to “EU migrant workers”.  It’s this idea of the “nation” as a people, rather than a place, of course – an idea which perhaps another time I will argue is unsustainable, though I doubt I have anything new to say on such a longstanding and tediously emotive question – together with the idea of citizenship, which rather ignores the fact that a large part of the point of free movement of labour in the EU was to avoid the bureaucracy and emotional hurdle of the citizenship process.  The aim of course was to create a mobile workforce, with individuals perhaps working in the UK today and Germany tomorrow – something Brexit will no doubt make a more common experience!

But citizenship is only a piece of paper (or a bit in a Home Office computer these days, I suppose).  Granting citizenship to immigrants doesn’t necessarily reflect either commitment on the part of the new arrival, though of course it may often do so, nor assimilation into British society.  People become citizens in large part because they need to or perceive that they need to, especially given the significant cost involved to apply in the UK nowadays.  And EU citizens living in the UK under free movement provisions in EU treaties haven’t needed to become citizens, even though they may be just as committed to the UK and integrated into our society than arrivals from elsewhere who have taken citizenship.  In fact, EU citizens have not up to now had to apply for “indefinite leave to remain” in the UK, a status which gives citizens of Commonwealth countries the right to vote in General Elections and referenda.

Thus recent immigrants to the UK from non-EU countries who became UK citizens soon after arrival in this country were able to vote in the Brexit referendum, whereas citizens of EU countries who’d lived here for decades were not.  Compounding the problem, citizens of Commonwealth countries with UK residency status were also allowed to vote, even from those Commonwealth countries which were never British colonies, as in the case of francophone Rwanda and Mozambique, who seemingly joined the Commonwealth out of dissatisfaction with their own former colonial power.  And the status of citizens of Zimbabwe, suspended from the Commonwealth, was so unclear, I had considerable trouble finding out whether or not they were allowed a vote (for the record, I’m pretty sure they were)!  Most of these enfranchised non-UK citizens were also non-EU citizens, but there is in fact overlap between the Commonwealth and the EU, so citizens of Malta and Cyprus could vote.  As could many hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens living the in the UK, for separate historical reasons.  You could hardly make it up.

The electoral bias against the mobile classes arises not just from the electoral franchise, though.  Even when they have the vote, people may not know who to vote for.  They are likely to be unfamiliar with the UK’s political parties.  And our political structures are geographically based, favouring the rooted classes.  Those who have lived in an area for many years are much more likely to join political parties.  Not only will they have an understanding of local issues, they are also much more likely to see their involvement as a worthwhile investment of time.  The political agenda is consequently driven by the rooted classes.

The idea of the Brexit referendum, indeed, any electoral process, was to weigh the views of all those affected by the decision – in this case all those with a direct stake in the UK’s membership of the EU.  Excluding large numbers of the mobile classes simply biased the vote.  For the mobile classes the opportunities provided by the EU may outweigh any downsides, whereas for the rooted classes aspects of the EU may seem a threat, perhaps one not sufficiently counterbalanced by the benefits to the UK economy.  To reach the right decision all these individual experiences need to be taken into account.  And since the outcome was 52% plays 48% – a difference of a bit over a million votes – somewhat less than the number of EU citizens living in the UK but denied a vote, let alone the total if we also took into account the UK citizens who’ve been living abroad for more than 15 years, it’s very likely that we’ve actually reached the wrong answer as to what is best for the UK.