Tuesday briefing: Inside the increasingly heated debate about who can – and can’t – vote in the UK

In today’s newsletter: In the wake of this year’s Commonwealth Day, a look at the complex framework of voting rules in different parts of the UK Good morning. In the wake of the Green Party’s victory in the Gorton and Denton byelection, Nigel Farage claimed his party would have won if the vote had been restricted to “British-born voters”. The Greens dismissed the suggestion as “dangerous, racist nonsense”. But the argument has thrown fresh attention on a little-understood feature of the UK’s electoral system: who is actually allowed to vote. As it stands, some non-UK citizens – including certain Commonwealth nationals – can cast ballots in general elections, while millions of long-term residents cannot. Middle East crisis | Donald Trump has said the war in Iran is “very complete, pretty much” , as the conflict disrupts global oil trade and threatens to engulf the Middle East in a regional war. AI | A multibillion-pound drive to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy is riddled with “phantom investments” and shaky accounting, a Guardian investigation has found . UK politics | Ministers need to act more quickly to combat fast-changing threats from technology such as deepfakes, the technology secretary has said, as she warned about the risks women and girls face online. UK news | A woman who alleged she was raped by Andrew Malkinson admitted to police 22 years ago that she “wasn’t too sure it was the right man”, a court has heard . Malkinson spent 17 years in prison for an attack he did not commit in what jurors heard was a “most terrible” miscarriage of justice. Technology | Liverpool and Manchester United have complained to Elon Musk’s X after the Grok AI feature made offensive posts about Diogo Jota and the Hillsborough and Munich disasters. The posts were generated when users asked the AI tool to make hateful posts about the two football teams. Continue reading...