Overseas representatives
France gives overseas territories seats in its Parliament. Its method is straightforward. Overseas departments, such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion, Mayotte, aren't colonies with a consultative voice. They're departments like any other, and they send deputies to the National Assembly and senators to the Senate on the same basis as Normandy or Provence.
Of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, 539 sit in metropolitan France and 27 in the overseas departments and territories. The overseas communities with lighter ties to Paris, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Wallis and Futuna, have their own deputies too, scaled to population rather than symbolism.
Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, with just 6,000 electors, still returns its own member. Separately again, French citizens living abroad, nothing to do with territories, elect 11 deputies and 12 senators of their own. Three different populations, three different mechanisms, one shared principle: if you're French and subject to French law, you have a vote on who makes it.
Britain does something close to the opposite. The fourteen Overseas Territories are subjects of the Crown, defended by the Crown, and legislated for by Westminster in reserved areas, yet they have no member of the Commons and no voice in the Lords. Gibraltar votes in UK general elections about as often as Mars does, never. The Falklands does the same. This isn't a small anomaly, it's taxation, defence policy and constitutional authority running one way, and representation running nowhere.
Populated territories worth naming include Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Pitcairn, and Saint Helena together with Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.
The others, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, have no settled population and no claim to a seat, whatever else might be said about them.
Applying the French principle sensibly means matching representation to population, not manufacturing equal seats for unequal places. Bermuda, at around 64,000 people, and Gibraltar, at around 32,000, could plausibly carry a seat each. The Cayman Islands could too.
Anguilla, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos, the Falklands and Pitcairn are each too small to justify a seat alone under any normal constituency formula. What they currently lack is someone in Parliament who can speak for them and answer to them rather than merely administer them.
This could be solved by appointing one of them to a peerage, non-party, to represent their interests in Parliament.
The objection always raised is that these places already have self-government, and a Westminster seat would be redundant. It misses the point. Self-government covers island matters. Defence, foreign affairs, and increasingly financial regulation are decided in London whether the territories like it or not, and they currently have no more say in that than a Yorkshire village would have over French agricultural policy. Representation without taxation would be one kind of anomaly. What the territories actually have, obligation without representation, is the older and worse one, the one the American colonists had rather more to say about.
There's also a quieter argument in Gibraltar's favour specifically. It voted in European Parliament elections as part of South West England for over a decade, so the machinery for folding an overseas territory into a British constituency has already been built and tested. It isn't a novelty. It's a precedent waiting to be reused.
None of this requires copying France wholesale because a written constitution helps them do things by simple statute that we would have to do by more roundabout means. But the underlying principle travels perfectly well across the Channel. If Westminster can tax a place and defend a place, it can find room for a few more representatives on the green benches and on the red ones.
Madsen Pirie