#eu ref

The regulations for the EU referendum meant that you had to be a British citizen or have been on the voting register for 15 years and as I am not a British citizen and only registered to vote when I was 17 I was unable to vote in the referendum. Now I haven’t done any research but I believe these are just the general rules for a referendum but when they were put into effect here they practically meant that immigrants that haven’t become British citizens or have been living here for 16+ years after the age of 17 couldn’t vote. 

Furthermore to become a British citizen you need to have lived in the UK for five years, take a test and pay for citizenship so people who haven’t been living in the UK for that time, don’t have the money to pay, aren’t proficient enough in English to take that test and who just don’t want to become British citizens could not vote. This ends up excluding a lot of EU immigrants because they don’t need a visa to live in the UK, I know this pretty well because when I emigrated to the UK I literally just turned up with my family and started living here normally and until now there was no reason that I needed or wanted British citizenship. 

And I have more! My boyfriend brought up the point of it might have been to stop people from coming over to the UK and voting if they didn’t live here but unfortunately he’s wrong. To register to vote you have to be a UK resident i.e. live in the UK for a year and do so with the intention of living and working here and I really can’t think that most people would go to that level of effort to vote in one election and then not stay in the UK?

So these laws excluded a lot of immigrants, especially from the EU, of whom most of the the EU immigrants and I would assume the same of the others would have voted to remain in the EU but couldn’t because of these stupid rules. Even if these rules weren’t made for this election they seem to have been made with the express intention of keeping immigrants from voting in elections. Thanks for taking the vote out of my hands and fucking up the country that I live in.