Good morning. In the wake of the Green party’s victory in the Gorton and Denton byelection, Nigel Farage claimed his party would have won if the vote had been restricted to “British-born voters”. The Greens dismissed the suggestion as “dangerous, racist nonsense”.
But the argument has thrown fresh attention on a little-understood feature of the UK’s electoral system: who is actually allowed to vote. As it stands, some non-UK citizens – including certain Commonwealth nationals – can cast ballots in general elections, while millions of long-term residents cannot.
