“THE votes of a million immigrants from the Commonwealth could decide the outcome of the next general election – even though they do not hold British passports.   They could even sway the result of the promised referendum on Britain’s EU membership, campaign group MigrationWatch UK warned last night, as it called for a change in the rules to remove voting rights from non-­citizens.

Commonwealth migrants from 54 states including ­Australia, Canada, India, Pakistan and Nigeria can join the electoral roll on arrival in the UK as long as they have an address here. MigrationWatch said the 2011 Census for England and Wales indicated there were an estimated 960,000 Commonwealth citizens without British passports living here who would be old enough to vote in the 2015 election and even more by the EU referendum planned for 2017. Yet in most cases their own countries do not give UK citizens voting rights. Only a few Caribbean Commonwealth nations, including Jamaica and Barbados, let non-­citizen British residents take part in their polls.”

Daily Express.