“We don’t really have control on our borders,” he said. “We have illegal migration and then what ends up happening is some of these illegal migrants go into the poorer, more deprived areas, and then the resources get strained in [those] areas.”
“And I think that’s one of the reasons, you know, our party wants to maybe, you know, have a debate about is it really necessary to be in NATO or not.”
Heappey took to social media saying it was a "shame to see him reduced to this".
Panesar is not the first cricketer to flirt with politics. Alfred Lyttelton, who played four Tests against Australia, was secretary of state for the colonies between 1903 and 1905. Former prime minister David Cameron made fruitless attempts to recruit Panesar’s contemporaries Darren Gough and Andrew Strauss as Conservative candidates.
Test greats Ian Botham and Colin Cowdrey have both sat in the House of Lords as well as Learie Constantine, the great Trinidadian all-rounder and activist against racial discrimination.
Panesar’s star quality as a candidate has commentators saying he has a chance, albeit one at long odds, to win the seat. His high name recognition, engaging personality and Sikh background will do him no harm in a constituency with the largest Sikh population of any in the UK.
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On the negative side is the sheer size of the Labour majority won by Virendra Sharma in 2019: 16,084, or 38.1 per cent. The hard-left Workers Party of Britain hasn’t contested the seat before, and Panesar and Galloway will need to build a local organisation and win support for their controversial policies.
Panesar wants to end foreign billionaires owning football clubs, instead putting them into the hands of fans and wants to scrap London’s contentious Ultra Low Emission Zone for vehicles. He said he’d close the gap between rich and poor with a one-off wealth 1 per cent tax on estates over £10 million, and direct it to health and housing funding.
Revealing he has never voted at an election, Panesar argued he had joined the Workers Party to “give people a choice before they just go for either Tory or Labour”.
He has experienced high-profile off-field troubles, including a bitter divorce following a row with his wife in a pub car park in 2011 and problems with alcohol. In 2013 he was fined by police after urinating on nightclub bouncers in Brighton.
“I’m here to represent the working-class people of this country,” Panesar said at his unveiling. “When I played cricket for England I know that I got so much support from the public, and now it’s my time to give back, give back to the working class, make sure the gap between the rich and poor gets closer.”
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