As far as the qualification to vote is concerned, the legacy of Britain’s imperial past has left an anomaly. Citizens of the Republic of Ireland who are resident in the UK and citizens of Commonwealth nations resident in the UK are entitled to vote in British elections. UK citizens do not possess the same privilege when they reside in most of those countries. It surely is reasonable to expect that those entitled to vote in national elections should be the citizens. It is to be hoped that the anomaly will disappear when the revision of election law now being prepared by the Law Commission is implemented.

The franchise for Irish and Commonwealth residents also creates administrative problems. A considerable proportion of them do not know that they may cast a ballot in UK elections or, if they do realise it, are not interested in doing so. The consequence is that a high proportion of them fail to register (as they are legally obliged to do).

This is by no means the only difficulty concerning the electoral roll. There is no official estimate of the number of errors on the electoral registers at the time of the 2015 general election. The neglect of assessing this is itself an indication of administrative shortcoming. If the situation remained unchanged from 2014, there were as many as 15 million errors with more than 8 million qualified electors (including Irish and Commonwealth citizens) omitted and more than 6 million names of persons not resident at the addresses shown on the registers included. This staggering degree of error means that 12 per cent of registered names were incorrect; approximately 14 per cent of qualified electors were unregistered either at their current address or at a former address. The error rate was the same as in the US and lower than in Canada. Moreover, there has been a huge decline both in the accuracy and completeness of the UK voter rolls over recent decades. The British public and, more importantly and deplorably, British officialdom has been far too complacent about these statistics.

Contributing to this lack of attention and commitment to electoral process and a lack of pride in the Westminster model may well be the instinctive feeling that elections no longer matter all that much except to professional members of the political class. Though an exaggeration, there is much truth in this. The UK has stumbled into a position of semi-sovereignty. Successive governments have been careful to conceal this from the public. There is a danger that campaigning before the promised referendum on British membership of the European Union will focus unduly on economics, disguising the basic question about sovereignty.

It was during the premiership of Sir John Major that a curious set of events made this clear to me. There had been a bus crash in Kent resulting in a high death toll. This raised the issue of why there was then no legal requirement for passengers to wear seat belts. It turned out that this was an EU responsibility and that the UK could not take action on its own. What other questions of transport policy (and, indeed, policies within areas covered by other government departments) fell under EU rather than UK jurisdiction? The Times asked me to investigate, and I published a piece on the long reach of the EU in transport matters before proceeding to look into the position concerning other departments. There followed an invitation to meet with a senior member of the Cabinet Secretariat who would help me. When I arrived, he took little time to let me know that instructions had been given throughout Whitehall that only departmental press officers were to speak to me. There were to be no direct contacts with civil servants on the lines I had enjoyed with the Department of Transport.