Jeremy Smith's friends on Facebook are all flagging themselves as "I am a voter".
So here's my Facebook response:
"Jeremy Smith is NOT a voter, and has not been for 28 years. The reason he has not voted is that Jeremy has not been allowed to become a citizen anywhere other than the UK despite having spent ten years in one country (France), eight in the second (Germany) and now ten in the third (USA). During that time he paid a lot of taxes to governments that did not represent him. In contrast, he has paid nothing to the UK government, whose policies he had the right to vote upon even for fifteen years after having left the country, until the ultimate, global revocation of his right to suffrage.
Ten years must be considered to be rather long for a 'visit' and so Jeremy hesitates to think of himself as a 'visitor'. Rather, Jeremy thinks that if somebody lives and pays taxes in a country then they should vote there, and not according to some arbitrary definition of citizenship."
You are not alone. We voted for the first time in 22 years last month. And these were local, not national, elections - those are still barred to us. Rather amusingly in the circumstances I was asked to stand as a councillor in this local election, which does go to show that xenophobia is not universal.
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