Britain’s love-hate relationship with expats is lingering on as the government tries to encourage more voters living overseas to take part in the upcoming general election.
After a recent flop campaign to recruit expat voters by the Electoral Commission, another drive is under way in a bid to urge eligible overseas voters to sign up for the election.
The figures speak for themselves:
Britain has around 5.5 million expats living in other countries. Any who have been out of the UK for less than 15 years have the right to vote
Just 15,850 expats are registered to vote in the UK
Spectacular failure
The Electoral Commission set a target of signing up 25,000 new voters for the European and local elections in May 2014. Only 7,079 registered.
Now, the commission has set a huge 100,000 new registrations target for the general election on May 7.
However, since the spectacular failure last year, expats can sign up to vote online, which has resulted in more than 17,000 fresh applications to join the electoral roll from overseas.
Not all these expats will qualify to join the voting list, says the commission.
Prime Minister David Cameron has tried to boost the numbers by emailing expats on the Tory party mailing list to explain the benefits of casting a vote back home.
Alex Robertson, director of communications at the Electoral Commission, said: “We believe many expats do not realise they can still vote in the UK. In fact voting from abroad is easier now than ever and we just need to get that message across to expats.”
Unexcited expats
However, expats are not as excited about the proposition as the Electoral Commission.
Expat community bloggers in France, Spain and Cyprus are particularly upset that the government has axed the winter fuel allowance, while those further afield are angry that Britain freezes the state pension for expats in many countries instead of allowing annual cost-of-living increases.
“Politicians want us to vote but don’t seem to want to do anything for us,” said Harry Shindler.
Shindler lives in Italy and has worked hard to allow all expats to get the vote, not just those who have lived away for less than 15 years.
“I asked David Cameron to meet a delegation of expats to discuss this and he refused, saying he was too busy in the lead up to the election,” he said.
