A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 26th May 2014
In his perceptive article on how foreign London has become, Charles Moore mentions that many of the capital’s residents are “not British citizens and therefore cannot vote”.
In fact, all Commonwealth, EU and Irish citizens are permitted to vote in local and European Parliament elections.
Commonwealth citizens can vote in British general elections as well, a hangover from the Empire. In London around two million of the 5.5 million electors (36 per cent) are foreigners, a situation without parallel in any other country in the world.
A first step to making London a bit less of a foreign city would be to remove the bias in favour of continued high levels of immigration by restricting voting entitlement to British citizens only, fully accepting that this will only be possible in respect of European Union nationals when Britain leaves that organisation.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 16th April 1995.
Your correspondent A J McIlroy (Thursday) seems to think that because a Government supported survey of 18-29 year-olds among the 837,400 Irish citizens resident in this country showed them to have a higher proportion of university degrees than the same age group of British citizens, that this means the Irish are “brighter” than the British.
Mr McIlroy of course is not comparing like with like because a high proportion of the citizens of most Western countries working in other Western countries are there precisely because their university qualifications give them that opportunity. I daresay a survey of British residents in Sweden, say, would show a higher proportion of university graduates than among the Swedish population, but this says nothing about the relative “brightness” of the British and Swedish populations.
Leaving on one side whether the possession of an unspecified degree connotes “brightness”, what can be said definitely, is that nobody can take seriously the Department for Education’s everlasting claim to be short of funds when it spends money on such pointless “research”.
