LETTER FROM Nick Clegg,MP. Deputy Prime Minister

Dear XXXXXXX

Thank you for contacting Nick Clegg MP about the voting rights of expatriates. I am replying on his behalf.

Nick appreciates that there are some British expatriates who have lived abroad for over 15 years and who want to vote in British elections. However, as you may know, Nick supports the existing legislation on this issue, including the removal of the right to vote after 15 years of living abroad. If a Briton has settled in another country, it is intuitive that they would know about and be directly affected by the issues of that country. If they want to become politically active, then they ought to register to vote in the country they have settled in.

Thank you for contacting Nick on this important issue.

Best wishes,

Rory Belcher

Office of Nick Clegg MP

Nick Clegg

Clegg was born in 1967 in Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. His Father is Nicholas Peter Clegg, CBE, the chairman of United Trust Bank, and a former trustee of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation On his father's side of the family Clegg, is related to Kira von Engelhardt, daughter of a Russian baron of German, Polish, and Ukrainian origin, Ignaty Zakrevsky, an attorney general of the Imperial Russian senate,the writer Moura Budberg,and his English grandfather Hugh Anthony Clegg, was editor of the British Medical Journal for 35 years.

Clegg's Dutch mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, was interned, along with her family, by the Japanese military in Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) during World War Two. She met Clegg's father during a visit to England in 1956, and they married on 1 August 1959.

Clegg is multilingual: he speaks English, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish. His background has formed his politics. He says, "There is simply not a shred of racism in me, as a person whose whole family is formed by flight from persecution, from different people in different generations. It’s what I am. It’s one of the reasons I am a liberal, but not when it come to voters right for his own people.

We have fought throughout the world to give democracy, and yet it is denied to our own citizens who choose to live outside the UK. I find it offensive that Nick Cleggs idea of democracy is that, our own citizens should take out a different nationality to be able to vote. I am British and will remain British to the day I die, despite living in France.