LONDON: The UK should have the right not to keep EU citizens who “do not work, never pay taxes or are beggars or criminals”, a senior Ukip spokesman has said.
Gerard Batten, an MEP with responsibility for Ukip’s Brexit policy, suggested on Monday that the UK should have the discretion to refuse some EU citizens the right to stay and backed Theresa May’s decision not to give any guarantees without reciprocal deals from other EU countries.
He explained his hardline stance while standing next to Paul Nuttall, the Ukip leader, who relaunched the party’s Brexit policy with his predecessor, Nigel Farage, sitting in the audience.
There is consensus among many prominent Brexit campaigners – from former cabinet minister Michael Gove to Labour MP Gisela Stuart that EU citizens should be guaranteed the right to stay in the UK.
Pressed about EU citizens, Batten suggested the UK should have the right to decline to keep some people.
“What the British government should do is write to every one of the other 27 EU member states and say we will guarantee your citizens’ rights if you guarantee our citizens’ rights. So, for example, in Poland we have about 30-odd thousand people and they have about 900,000 here. So why wouldn’t they do that? But I think that is the way the government needs to approach things on a country by country basis in order to protect our citizens’ rights so we also protect their rights.
“But we must also have the right not to keep people who for example do not work, never pay taxes or are beggars or criminals. I think it is an idiotic immigration policy that says we will take anybody irrespective of what value they may or may not produce to our country.”
He said most UK citizens on the continent “are either doing skilled jobs or are retirees spending their pensions; we don’t have an equivalence”.
“We have people who work in skilled jobs obviously from the continent and people doing low-paid jobs from the continent but we also have a lot of people who don’t do any jobs. I met one of them shoplifting in my local shop on Saturday. So I think we need to look at that problem,” he added.
In the past, Batten has suggested British Muslims should sign a “charter of understanding” and warned it was a big mistake for Europe to allow “an explosion of mosques across their land”. In his Brexit job, he advocates that the UK should leave the EU by simply repealing the 1972 European Communities Act without needing to trigger article 50.
Courtesy: The Guardian