By Ann Higgins
Photo by Deniz Fuchidzhiev on Unsplash
Though chaos continues across the pond with the rights of everyone from legal migrants to US citizens being bulldozed on a daily basis, including the right of US citizens to vote, the UK government is fulfilling its manifesto promise to extend the right to vote to 16-17 year olds. It is also planning to reverse the Tory laws on Voter ID and the changes it made to the election methods for the election of municipal mayors and police and crime commissioners, reinstating the original Supplementary Vote method.
Talking of electoral reform, the latest British Social Attitudes survey reveals that a record 60% of the British public favours a change in our voting method from first-past-the-post to some form of proportional representation. For much more on that and other lessons, see the survey here.
This month I’ve tried to steer away from the increasing chaos across the pond as much as possible but it’s hard to miss the extreme lengths to which Trump will go to deflect attention away from his involvement with Epstein, which is already well documented in photographs and the evidence presented in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. One of his targets is former President Obama who he alleges was part of a treasonous plot or “coup” to deprive him of the presidency in 2016 by falsely alleging that his campaign had been assisted by Russia. He seems to have forgotten that, between 2017 and 2020, the then Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee published no less than five reports detailing the attempts of Russia to do just that. The Chair of that committee was the now Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Perhaps he should have a word with his boss.
Of course, we had our own alleged interference by Russia in our electoral process, which was addressed in two Parliamentary reports, both of which found that Russia had attempted to do just that. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, this led nowhere as then PM Boris Johnson opined that there was no evidence that they had succeeded. A small group of dissatisfied MPs including Ben Bradshaw and Caroline Lucas sought an order for judicial review. After a tortuous process lasting more than three years, it finally reached the European Court of Human Rights [ECtHR], where the case was ruled admissible but ultimately failed, as explained in this helpful summary:
“The case of Bradshaw and Others v. the United Kingdom concerned complaints that, despite the existence of credible allegations that Russia had sought to interfere in the UK’s democratic elections, including the 2019 general election, the Government had failed to fulfil its duty to investigate those allegations and had not put in place an effective legal and institutional framework in order to protect against the risk of such interference.
“The Court held that there had been no violation of the right to free elections. States had considerable latitude in their choice of how to counter such threats. While there had undoubtedly been shortcomings in the UK’s initial response, there had been two thorough and independent investigations, and the Government had since taken a number of legislative and operational measures to counter disinformation efforts and protect the democratic integrity of the UK.”
Regrettably, therefore, at least for the present we will simply have to speculate.
