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Courtesy of the Times.
Up to three million EU citizens who are expected to acquire settled status in the UK after Brexit will be allowed to vote in British elections, leaked government plans suggest. Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Brexiteer MEP, said that he had seen an extract of the UK’s draft withdrawal agreement that he said gave voting rights to EU citizens after Brexit. In a WhatsApp message to other MEPs, that was leaked to The Guardian, Mr Hannan said that the agreement would give voting rights to all EU citizens in England and Northern Ireland. He went on to say that voting rights were devolved in Scotland and Wales. He questioned why the government had struck the deal saying it should have negotiated separate agreements with each EU country.
The disclosure of the message will raise questions as to why Mr Hannan seems to have been given sight of sensitive internal government documents. However, it will raise the hopes of millions of EU citizens living in the UK who were unsure whether they would be able to vote in future elections.
“I just saw an extract of the draft withdrawal agreement. Britain has decided to enfranchise all EU nationals (at least in England and NI — it’s devolved in Scotland and Wales.) What an odd decision: why offer a blanket deal instead of country by country bilaterals? For what it’s worth, it will significantly bolster the non-Tory electorate,” he wrote. Speaking in the Commons, Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, declined to spell out what rights EU citizens would have in the case of both a negotiated agreement and no deal. “The issue of citizens’ rights is on a scale and a level of importance and sensitivity which means it will not be done in technical notices but in a different format,” he said.
Labour said that the Brexit department’s refusal to issue a technical notice was a broken promise, pointing to a Department of Transport notice that said “a technical notice on EU citizens in the UK will be published soon”. Though EU citizens currently in the UK received a guarantee that they would receive settled status after Brexit, negotiations about some future rights are continuing, including their right to return to live in Britain even if they leave the country for some years. The House of Commons’ Brexit select committee noted in July that voting rights were a sticking point in negotiations and that the EU had “declined to consider a reciprocal agreement for the continuation of voting rights as part of the withdrawal agreement negotiations”.
A government spokesperson said: “This is not within the scope of the Withdrawal Agreement. We have always been clear that the voting rights of both UK nationals living in the EU and UK nationals living in the EU should be considered together and that we’re committed to doing bilateral deals to achieve this.”