Plaid Cymru launches petition to safeguard European citizenship for UK nationals

Individuals should be allowed to keep their European citizenship after Brexit, Plaid Cymru says, as it launches an online petition.

Plaid Cymru wants Welsh, Scottish, English and northern Irish citizens to be allowed to keep their European identity and citizenship after the UK leaves the EU, through either protecting existing agreements or the development of a new ‘Associate European Citizenship’ model.
 
European citizenship gives holders the right to travel, live, study and work anywhere in the EU and a wide range of other rights under EU law regarding health, education, work and social security.

Launching the petition, Plaid Cymru's Brexit spokesperson, Hywel Williams MP said:

"The Westminster Government's Brexit plans needlessly strip us of our European citizenship and, in many respects, our European identity.

"It means your right to travel, live, work and study in any of the 27 European countries will be curtailed. It means your right to study and not be discriminated against based on your nationality will be lost. It means that you will no longer be a European. 

"Stripping people of their citizenship against their will is not only wrong but according to legal experts, illegal under international law. How can Westminster take away your rights and your identity against your will? How can they take away, against your will, the citizenship with which you were born?

"The Westminster Government not only wants to risk people's wages, mortages and pensions through leaving the Single Market and Customs Union; it wants to take away who we are and how we define ourselves - our identity.

"I am a European - a Welsh European, and no government, state or Brexiteer should be allowed to take that away from me or anyone else."

Will you join us in telling Westminster that we are European? Sign the petition here.

And come and join us in Westminster on Wednesday 7th of March at 11:00am before Prime Minster's Questions, to demonstrate outside Parliament. Join the Facebook event here.

If you can't make it, make sure you sign-up to our Thunderclap here

This starts with you

They have the money but we have the people. If everyone who visits this website joins our movement, there's nothing we can't accomplish together.