Conservative Shadow Education Minister Neil O'Brien has described proposals to give voting rights to illegal migrants as "appalling".Speaking to GB News, O'Brien expressed strong opposition to the idea that "absolutely everybody should have the right to vote in our general elections".FULL STORY HERE.
00:00What's wrong with more people voting? Isn't that a good thing?
00:03I think we have to have citizenship of this country mean something.
00:06I don't think that anybody who just happens to be in the country on the day that there's an election
00:10should be allowed to vote if they have no stake in the future of this country
00:13and may not even be here for a very long time.
00:16More generally, I think there is an issue that this country gives out citizenship much more readily
00:22than a lot of our European peers.
00:25For example, in Denmark, if you've committed a crime or if you become welfare dependent,
00:29you won't be on that path from arriving to citizenship.
00:32I've been really glad that Kevin Beardnox opened up a conversation about this because we are.
00:36You earn it, don't you?
00:37Yeah, you've got to earn it in most of these other countries.
00:39If you commit relatively small crimes, you aren't going to become a citizen,
00:43whereas in the UK you can get away with all kinds of stuff and still get the right to vote,
00:47get a British passport, get all the benefits, all these other things that come with citizenship.
00:51So I think citizenship needs to go back to meaning something.
00:54It has to be something you earn rather than something you just get handed out to you because you're here.
00:58And I think this idea that simply absolutely everybody should have the right to vote in our general elections,
01:03including those who have forced their way into the country illegally,
01:06is pretty appalling, really.
01:07You're rewarding people for doing the wrong thing.
01:09And I think there's a lot of politics behind this, to be honest with you.
01:11There's a lot of, like, we're just going to change the electorate to change the country.
01:15And I find that very disturbing.
01:17Is it part of Brexit?
01:18There's also been talk about enfranchising younger people to vote for remain in a future vote on our status.
01:24It's not really Brexit-related in this case because the majority of the people that the authors want to give the vote to
01:30would be coming from the rest of the world outside the EU.
01:34Keir Starmer, a few years back, as you remember, was proposing to give the vote to all EU citizens in this country.
01:40It seems for now to have backtracked under the pressure of the election.
01:43We are now about to do this migration deal with the EU and we're going back into a kind of process of reintegration into the EU with Starmer.
01:51And so who knows what will happen to that old idea of his, which he was passionately in favour of only a couple of years ago.
01:57He wouldn't say it's reintegration.
01:59He would say it's just balancing and making it more of a workable solution on Brexit.
02:04You're smiling now for our radio listeners then.
02:06Look, I'm all in favour of working with our European friends, but I can see where this is going.
02:10You have a whole bunch of campaigns to rejoin.
02:13We're going to do a trade deal with them.
02:14We're going to have a migration deal with them.
02:15We're going to see blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
02:17And before you know it, you know, the whole thing's been undone.
02:20Yeah.
02:20Now, you mentioned now the issue of migrant illegal arrivals.
02:23Now, earlier I spoke to Sir Keir Starmer and asked him about where we'll house the over 10,000 migrants who arrived here illegally on the south coast.
02:33And here's what I had to say.
02:35Where are they all going to live?
02:36Will they be living in rented homes next door to GB News viewers?
02:40This is a serious problem.
02:41The last government lost control of our borders and it falls to us now to clear up that mess.
02:46I'm absolutely convinced that we have to take down the gangs that are running the vile trade of putting people into boats in the first place.
02:52That's why we're passing the borders bill, which will give our law enforcement much greater powers.
02:57The Conservatives voted against that bill, if you can believe it.
03:00That was Sir Keir Starmer talking to me earlier for GB News.
03:05And we'll be speaking to Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, tomorrow night, as well as Nigel Farage, the reformer UK leader.
03:12And, of course, the Tory leader, Kemi Badenek, on Wednesday, ahead of the big day for voting on Thursday.
03:18But Neil O'Brien, you heard what you had to say there.
03:20Do you worry, though, that putting migrants in rented accommodation lets them settle there, basically, and then following from that, you may be an issue of getting rights to vote?
03:31Yeah, absolutely.
03:31I mean, since Keir Starmer took office, the number of people coming across the Channel has exploded.
03:36It's massively increased.
03:37And despite all his stuff about, you know, smashing the gangs, ultimately the gangs are smashing him and more and more people coming.
03:43He said he would shut down...
03:44He blames you guys.
03:45He blames the Tory party for that.
03:46It has got literally worse under his time as Prime Minister.
03:49It was bad enough under us.
03:50And I think we should have been tougher.
03:51And I think we are now moving to a tougher position, which is good.
03:54But, you know, he said he would shut all these Assam hotels.
03:57He's actually opening more hotels.
03:59He's also, on top of that, dispersing people out into rented accommodation.
04:01So you have British people paying their tax, their money being given to other people to compete with them in the housing market, and you're effectively getting marched on both sides.
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