Making our democracy work: the campaigners seeking to extend voting rights in England

This interview appears in the latest edition of the UCL Policy Lab magazine. To find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events, sign up for their newsletter here. 

There are about one million people in England and Northern Ireland who live, work, participate in communities, but would be turned away from polling stations if they tried to vote. This is not a punishment or a mistake. The reason is their immigration status.

Residents in England and Northern Ireland born outside the EU, Ireland, or the Commonwealth have never had the vote, even if they are here permanently. After Brexit, the number of resident migrants without the vote increased when the Parliament Act barred some EU citizens in the UK from voting in local elections as they had been able to do previously. 

But the campaign to win back those rights has begun. Alex Bulat and Lara Parizotto do not just want to win back some voting rights for resident EU citizens; they also want to extend it to non-EU residents too. We met on a sunny morning at Policy Lab’s HQ in UCL to talk about their campaign’s journey so far, their plans for the future and what they think their work has to say about our democracy. 

Alex Bulat moved to the UK aged eighteen. “Lots of people leave countries like Romania, like I did, in the hope of a better future,” she says. She got involved in the campaign for democratic reform when, years later, she applied for permanent residence. Checking her email one lunch break, she found an email from the Home Office rejecting her application because she didn’t have sufficient evidence for something called Comprehensive Sickness Insurance. “I thought: ‘if I’m having such a difficult time - someone who could speak English well and is doing a PhD – how about so many other people from my community who don’t have the same privileges in terms of language and information? So I became really active.” 

She started touring universities to talk about this issue, which is how she met Lara Parizotto, then an undergraduate. “I was sitting in the audience for Alex’s talk about the comprehensive sickness insurance requirement thinking ‘I’m going to get kicked out of the country,” she remembers. They decided to work together. “There was that spark of finding community,” Parizotto remembers. “You might not have the immediate answers, but you need to figure it out.” Figuring it out turned into volunteering, which turned into campaigning. “I’m from Brazil,” says Parizotto, “And a lot of people like me have never had the right to vote in the UK.”

The Elections Bill of April 2021 took away local election voting rights from some EU citizens in England and Northern Ireland. Scotland and Wales chose differently, so all residents of any nationality living there can still vote in local and devolved elections. After May 2024, EU citizens’ right to vote and stand in local elections will depend on when they moved here and where they are from. 

“At that point, we thought: well, now that people are going to actively lose their right to vote, we can build a campaign around that. Why not go forward and not only say "don’t take away voting rights’, but let’s extend the right to vote.” Working alongside other campaigning groups such as the ‘the3million’ and ‘POMOC,’ a Polish migrants’ group, they founded the Migrant Democracy Project in 2022 to fill the gap in the participation and representation of migrants in the UK.

“It felt exhausting trying to get other people to listen to us,” Parizotto recalled. “During the Committee stage of the Elections Bill, I was sending amendment suggestions to the political parties calling for extending the right to vote to every resident. They would send back their version, amended to support just those voting rights for EU citizens. I wanted to say: no! Great that you want to do that, but we're talking about all migrants."

To date, they have persuaded six local authorities to pass motions supporting this extension of the right to vote, including the London Assembly. They have also persuaded the Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green parties to pass supportive amendments at various key policy fora. “If the next government is a Labour government, we can say ‘you supported this in the past, we hope you will continue supporting it now,’” says Parizotto.

Changing voting rights for residents could go some way to ensuring that people living here in Britain feel truly respected by our democratic system.

And these changes are also good for communities as a whole. As Dr Gloria Gennaro, from UCL Political Science points out. 

“Research on a few cases where immigrants are granted the right to vote in local elections -in countries like Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland- has shown that granting voting rights can boost integration.”

As Bulat and Parizottos campaign gathered momentum, they realised that improving migrant representation should not just be about campaigning for the right to vote, it also had to be about persuading communities to use it.

This requires a different approach. The reasons young migrants often turn away from political participation are varied and subtle. First off, the system is complex, and it’s often hard to know what your voting rights are. “It depends on which country you're from, and which part of the UK you live in,” explains Bulat. “It’s not as if you get a nice welcome pack and a leaflet. I originally had no idea you had to register to vote until a random person in a pub told me about it.” Second, people often don’t see themselves represented in politics or feel that a vote might make any difference. 

Most insidious of all, Bulat and Parizotto fear that there is often a feeling in communities about what a ‘good immigrant’ should do: keep their head down, not participate too much, and certainly not complain. “When my application for residency was in progress,” Bulat recalls, “many friends from Romania messaged me telling me to stop criticising the government on Twitter, to stop campaigning. ‘What if the government sees and rejects your application?’ they would say. The Hostile Environment policy exacerbated this, leading many in migrant communities to expect contact with any public body to be hostile.

Their organisation works to give people confidence that, on the contrary, activism is itself a potent form of integration. “After all, you’re complaining, like any other resident would do,” Bulat says. 

They do this first by asking people what they care about as a core part of their campaign. For one Brazilian they met, it was a nearby road they thought was too dangerous to cross. They encouraged her to contact her councillor about it, whose reply promising a zebra crossing offered a first taste of successful democratic participation. They also offer tours of Parliament where they introduce disenfranchised migrants to sympathetic MPs so the migrants can start to feel welcome at the centre of the UK’s democracy and ask MPs directly to support the campaign for the vote. 

“We also have a huge symbolic ballot box we take to our events,” says Parizotto. “We tell people they can write to their representatives, put their messages in the box, and we will send it on their behalf. These small democratic acts show them there are people out there who will help them, and that regardless of their nationality, they can be heard.”

This interview appears in the latest edition of the UCL Policy Lab magazine. To find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events, sign up for their newsletter here.