Scottish Greens hit back after speculation on visa status of new MSP

Posted by n00bi3pjs

3 Comments

  1. upthetruth1 on

    Scotland and Wales expanded voting rights to all immigrants. Anyway, this has always been legal in the UK for immigrants from Commonwealth countries on visas that last more than 1 year to not only vote in all elections in the UK but also to stand to be elected. This goes back over a century to the British Empire and continued under the Commonwealth. Even in law, Commonwealth immigrants are not treated as “alien”, they’re effectively second-class citizens who can only access their rights if they have a visa or ILR. Plus, we have the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. To this day, “alien” in British law refers to someone who is not a Commonwealth citizen, an Irish citizen or a British citizen/national. However, Commonwealth citizens are obviously subject to immigration control, but as non-aliens, they have voting rights.

    This person is from India (Commonwealth country) and is on a student visas, so they have the right to vote and stand for election.

    The UK might have the most open democracy on the planet, in the sense that literally over 1 billion people can technically vote (if they can get a visa that lasts more than 1 year).

    We literally have Australian, Indian, Canadian, Nigerian etc. citizens (not dual citizens) etc. in Westminster and Holyrood, although this person might be the first with just a visa, typically such Parliamentarians at least have ILR.

    Of course now we have Reform wanting to abolish ILR and Commonwealth voting rights, which not even anti-immigration Thatcher did.

  2. fredleung412612 on

    An awesome bit of trolling from the Greens. Reminds me of Zohran Mamdani being everything they falsely accused Obama of being.

    The Scottish Greens have some dogshit policies but I gotta give them credit for this.

  3. like-humans-do on

    the success of scottish green candidates this election has been one of the few positive signs the lgbtq community in scotland has had in recent years, especially after labour joining the reform/tory anti-lgbt bandwagon in england and the SNP not having a clue what it stands for on the issue since the gender recognition act failedĀ 

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