Title: No vote, no voice: EU migrants and the general election
Headings: 
24 April 2015
No vote, no voice: EU migrants and the general election

Content: What the government says affects us in the same way,” Aleksandra says. She explains that she probably would not have voted if she had the choice. But she puts it like this: having a choice not to vote is better than having none. “No taxation without representation,” says Tommy Tomescu, president of the Europeans Party and dedicated to drawing awareness to the issue. Tomescu, originally from Romania, is a founding member of the party established in 2013 that aims to enforce the same voting rights as members of the Commonwealth for EU migrants living in the UK. The party believes that most of the political parties in the UK do not defend the interests of EU migrants. In last year’s European election the party gained around 10,700 votes. “The right to vote in the UK is not necessarily given by the citizenship,” says Tomescu, a dentist who moved to the UK in 2010. He bases his argument upon the fact that UK law says that UK nationals who live overseas for more than 15 years can no longer vote in the UK, even by post.