SHADOW MINISTER REJECTS ‘APPALLING’ SUGGESTION TO GIVE ILLEGAL MIGRANTS THE VOTE
A Conservative MP has described the idea to give the vote to illegal migrants as “appalling”.
Speaking to GB News, Shadow Education Minister Neil O’Brien said: “I think we have to have citizenship in this country which means something. I don’t think that anybody who just happens to be in the country on the day that there’s an election should be allowed to vote if they have no stake in the future of this country and may not even be here for a very long time.
“More generally, I think there is an issue that this country gives out citizenship much more readily than a lot of our European peers. For example, in Denmark, if you’ve committed a crime, or if you become welfare dependent, you won’t be on that path from arriving to citizenship.
“And I’ve been really glad that Kemi Badenoch’s opened up a conversation about this. [In Europe], if you commit relatively small crimes, you aren’t going to become a citizen, whereas in the UK, you can get away with all kinds of stuff and still get the right to vote, get a British passport, get all the benefits, all these other things that come with citizenship.
“Citizenship needs to go back to meaning something; has to be something you earn rather than something you just get handed out to you because you’re here.
“I think this idea that simply absolutely everybody should have the right to vote in our general elections, including those who force their way into the country illegally, is pretty appalling. You’re rewarding people for doing the wrong thing.
“There’s a lot of politics behind this, to be honest with you. There’s a lot of ‘we’re just going to change the electorate to change the country’ and I find that very disturbing.
“It’s not really Brexit related in this case, because the majority of the people that the authors want to give the vote to would be coming from the rest of the world outside the EU.
“Since Keir Starmer took office the number of people coming across the channel has exploded. And despite all his stuff about smashing the gangs, ultimately the gangs are smashing him. There’s more and more people coming.
“It has got literally worse under his time as prime minister. It was bad enough under us, and I think we should have been tougher. I think we are now moving to a tougher position, which is good.
“But he said he would shut all these asylum hotels. He’s actually opening more hotels. He’s also, on top of that, dispersing people out into rented accommodation.
“So you have British people paying their tax and their money being given to other people to compete with them in the housing market.
“Despite having never paid into the system in their whole lives, they’re effectively going straight to the front of the queue in many cases. And I think a lot of people find that wrong, and it is wrong.
“And the truth is that none of these problems and the ever growing number of people invading the country across the channel, it’s not going to get fixed until we come out of the thicket of human rights law, which people like Sir Keir Starmer love.
“He’s been a human rights lawyer his whole life. That is the thing he believes in most. And the only time you ever see his eyes really light up in parliament is when he’s talking about these things. The thing he really loves and believes in is human rights law, and that is the problem.
“It is because people know that if they can just get to the UK, they will stay here by hook or by crook, and until we fix that, come out of all this stuff more and more people will come.”
