New Labour and Constitutional Reform: Why not Introduce Compulsory Voting in all Elections? (2000)

Abstract

New Labour, though keen to reform the United Kingdom constitution (or lack of it), has never considered one obvious, simple constitutional change which is democratically desirable and helpful to New Labour’s cause – the introduction of compulsory voting in all elections.† When I first came to the United Kingdom in 1955 as a research student in economics at King’s College, Cambridge, I was amazed to learn that voting was voluntary, not compulsory as it was in my native Australia. (That the polling day was on Thursday, a working week day, at least for part of it, not on Saturday, was also a surprise.)

Originally published in Soundings, Issue 16, Autumn 2000, pp. 35–39.