I am not a conspiracy theorist, although I love conspiracy theories. Ever since the X Files I have been fascinated by them. I don’t, however, feel the need to believe in them.
Except maybe for one political conspiracy theory, about how someone might rig a UK General Election.
In 1985 the Representation of the People Act was amended to define who would qualify as an overseas elector; this expanded the number of people outside the UK who could vote in a GE. At the time Norman Tebbit MP was Conservative Party Chairman and he set up a campaign to register the newly enfranchised overseas citizens, working under the wing of Sir Jim Spicer MP. There was no guidance on what they could or couldn’t do, and so they wrote thir own rule book, setting up local groups across the globe making it part of the social fabric of many overseas British communities. Cabinet Ministers made visits, including Margaret Thatcher.
The Conservatives enthusiasm for overseas voting is predictable – the vast majority of UK overseas voters are right wing. The stereotypes about Brits abroad, reading the Daily Mail while moaning about immigrants and foreigners, has strong roots in reality
In the 1992 general election Conservatives Abroad registered 50,000 voters and used a loophole in the law to allocate many of those votes into marginal constituencies. It is very hard to prove that this changed the outcome given that the Conservatives won several million more votes than labour. But something odd did happen – the result was massively out of step with opinion polls, and there was a very odd distribution of votes around constituencies. Of all of the Conservative MPs who were elected with majorities of less than 100 in the last 40 years more than half of them were elected in 1992, the same for majorities of less than 1000. The Conservatives went on the lose all 8 of the by-elections they contested between 1992 and 1997. Overseas voters can’t vote in by-elections the way they in General Elections.
After the 1997 General Election the law was changed to close the loophole, and prevent overseas votes being used to change election results.
In January 2024 the UK Government made a change to the law allowing Brits who had been out of the country for more than 15 years the permanent right to vote in UK General Elections. This was the result of a long standing campaign by the Daily Mail.
The recent change looks pretty small on paper, but it makes a huge difference to the numbers of people eligible to vote – potentially 3.5m more voters, the majority of them Tories. A well funded campaign to harvest these votes could give the Tories millions of extra votes. They wouldn’t be able to allocate them the way they could in 1997, but with that many votes they wouldn’t need do. An extra 5000 votes per constituency in England, Wales and Scotland, more than the majority of 175 UK MPs at the moment.
If only there was someone outthere with lots of money and a vested interest in changing the outcome of the next GE.
Of couse, this is all a conspiracy theory
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05923/SN05923.pdf
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/news-and-views/elections-act/changes-overseas-voting
https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40878-021-00238-0
https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-information-office/m13.pdf
A couple of observations:
1. don’t overseas voters need to be registered in the constituency of their last domicile?
2. Many of the overseas British residents were EU-based, and therefore disenfranchised during the 2016 Referendum (and deliberately remained so, despite the EU Referendum Bill tinkering with the demos and allowing Lords to vote). Can it actually be assumed that newly-enfranchised overseas voters will therefore vote Conservative?
To me, the only ‘conspiracy’ that holds water is using the change to allow more overseas funding to come to the Conservative Party
1. They do under the new rules, they didn’t neccesarily in 1992. But that doesn’t stop the Conservatives from targeting their efforts to recruit overseas Tories in marginal seats.
2. There might have been a shift against the Tories due to the referendum, but that doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of overseas Brits are Conservatives. That is why the Government past this legislation.
And I agree about allowing funding from aboard. I was being slightly tongue in cheek about calling it a conspiracy theory, but it wouldn’t take 3m votes in the right seats to change the outcome of the GE, particularly when the electoral commission don’t have the resources to police such numbers