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.
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with more people voting. Isn't that a good thing
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I think we have to have citizenship of this country mean something. I don't think that anybody who just happens to be in the country
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on the day that there's an election should be allowed to vote if they have no stake in the future of this country
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and may not even be here for a very long time. More generally, I think there is an issue that this country
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gives out citizenship much more readily than a lot of our European peers
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For example, in Denmark, if you've committed a crime or if you become welfare dependent
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you won't be on that path from arriving to citizenship. And I've been really glad that Kemi Baden-Ox
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opened up a conversation about this, because we are. You earn it, don't you? Yeah, you've got to earn it in most of these other countries
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And, you know, if you commit relatively small crimes, you aren't going to become a citizen
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whereas in the UK you can get away with all kinds of stuff and still get the right to vote, get a British passport
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get all the benefits, all these other things that come with citizenship. So I think citizenship needs to go back to meaning something
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It has to be something you earned rather than something you just get handed out to you you here And I think this idea that simply absolutely everybody should have the right to vote in our general elections including those who have forced their way into the country illegally is pretty appalling really You rewarding people for doing the wrong thing
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and I think there's a lot of politics behind this, to be honest with you. There's a lot of, like, we're just going to change the electorate
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to change the country and I find that very disturbing. Is it part of Brexit
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There's also been talk about enfranchising younger people to vote for Remain and a future vote on our status
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It's not really Brexit-related in this case because the majority of the people that the authors want to give the vote to
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would be coming from the rest of the world outside the EU
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Keir Starmer a few years back, as you remember, was proposing to give the vote to all EU citizens in this country
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He seems for now to have backtracked under the pressure of the election. We are now about to do this migration deal with the EU
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and we're going back into a kind of process of reintegration into the EU with Starmer
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And 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
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He wouldn't say it's reintegration. He would say it just balancing and making it more of a workable solution on Brexit You smiling now for our radio listeners Look I all in favour of working with our European friends but I can see where this is going You have a whole bunch of campaigns to rejoin
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We're going to do a trade deal with them. We're going to have a migration deal with them. We're going to see... And before you know it, you know, the whole thing's being undone
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Yeah. Now, you mentioned the issue of migrant illegal arrivals. Now, earlier I spoke to Sir Keir Starmer
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and asked him about where he will house of the over 10,000 migrants who arrived here illegally on the south coast
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And here's what I had to say. Where are they all going to live? Will they be living in rented homes next door to GB News viewers
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This is a serious problem. The last government lost control of our borders and it falls to us now to clear up that mess
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I'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
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That's why we're passing the borders bill, which will give our law enforcement much greater powers
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the Conservatives voted against that bill if you can believe it That was Sir Keir Starmer talking to me earlier for GB News and we be speaking to Sir Ed Dayufi the Lib Dem leader tomorrow night as well as Nigel Farage the Reform UK leader and of course the Tory leader Kemi Badenak
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on Wednesday, ahead of the big day for voting on Thursday. But Neil O'Brien, you heard what you had to say there
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Do you worry, though, that putting migrants in rented accommodation lets them settle there, basically
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and then following from that, you may be an issue of getting rights to vote
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, since Keir Starmer took office, the number of people coming across the channel has exploded
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It's massively increased. And despite all his stuff about, you know, smashing the gangs
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ultimately the gangs are smashing him. There's more and more people coming. He said he would shut down... He blames you guys. He blames the Tory party for that
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It has got literally worse under his time as Prime Minister. It was bad enough under ours
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And I think we should have been tougher, and I think we are now moving to a tougher position, which is good
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But, you know, he said he would shut all these Assam hotels. He's actually opening more hotels
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He's also, on top of that, dispersing people out into rent accommodation. So you have British people paying their tax, their money being given to other people to compete with them in the housing market
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And you're effectively getting marched on both sides
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