Friday 21 November 2008
British citizenship smoke-and-mirrors
Posted on Wed 20 Feb 2008, 14:18
If you can't do anything else, launch a so-called Britishness test for immigrants - knowing the coverage will obscure the reality.
New govt plans for would-be British citizens to 'prove their worth' through long stay, good deeds, paying extra taxes and learning English are just smoke-and-mirrors bollocks.
The Home Office's own stats show that in 2006, just 154,095 people were granted British citizenship. That's the real number of people the govt would target with its new test.
The 683,000 people from the A8 countries (Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania etc) who have registered to work in the UK since the EU expansion in 2004 - 232,000 of them in 2006 - would not be included.
Nor would the estimated 317,000 - 570,000 illegal migrants (Home Office fig.) living here without registering.
But if we're talking about people earning the right to call themselves British (whoopee) how about extending the scheme to the thousands of 'Wayne and Waynettas' out there - UK born and bred but contributing nothing but aggro for their neighbours?
Disagree with "smoke & mirrors" analogy. Let's say it in plain, clear, good old Queen's English - it's cynical PR stunt by a government lost for things to do next in their drive to remain popular.
What they happily ignore, is not just the reality of sink-estate Britishness, but the massive ghetto's of immigrants and their extended families which inhabit towns like Leicester, Luton, Nottingham, Blackburn, Birmingham and last but not least Bradford.
So in picking on a minority of new arrivals, the government executes a discrete sidestep of the real underlying problem which a massive chunk of the British population which doesn't speak English, doesn't follow our mainstream religion and has a voracious desire to import all of their relatives to expand their population by stealth.
Neither Gordon or David have any intention of tackling the real problem of lost British culture.
It's simply too difficult for a politician and the only political effort expended will be in carefully avoiding the issue.
I don't like the new Britain. It's not what I grew up with.
I don't like the loutish behaviour of people in general - not just young white men, but folk of all ages and colours.
I don't like the fact that the UK establishment's policy of open, multi-cultural, British society is used by many immigrant communities to simply transplant themselves and their religions, politics and values into self contained islands across the UK.
Show me a politician prepared to tackle that, and I'll show you a soon to be redundant outcast.