The revelation that British troops serving in Afghanistan are unlikely to be able to vote in the forthcoming General Election represents an appalling failure on behalf of this Labour Government. When they changed the law in 2001 requiring annual registration (and also opening up postal voting to scandal and abuse) over 100,000 serving soldiers, airmen and sailors dropped off the register.This needs sorting. But this suggests it won't:
A recent strawpoll on the British Army Rumour Service, an unofficial military website, found that 57% of those canvassed planned to vote Tory, compared with 7% who said they would back Labour.
After all Mr Brown won't be wanting 50,000 or so Tory votes from service men and women now, would he?
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1 comment:
I commented on this topic on ConHome on Friday, deployed personnel should be encouraged to set up proxies. It's one of the responsibilities of commanders to make sure that personnel are aware of the various issues and have an appropriate solution in place, and postal votes aren't really practical.
My first couple of deployments I had postal votes set up and not once did the paperwork arrive before the election never mind in time to actually do anything with it. That was in the early 90s.
Ever since then I've had proxy arrangements, and encouraged those under my command to do the same.
I appreciate that politics has little to do with real life, particularly when it comes to defence issues, but this particular one is a joke. the whole issue about annual registration is a red herring. It's not difficult to achieve.
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