Boudicca. Ambrosius. Hereward the Wake.
What do these three British characters have in common?
According to legend, all three put up stiff, if doomed, fights against foreign aggressors – the Romans, Saxons and Normans respectively.
Yet none was of “native” British stock: Hereward was an Anglo-Saxon, Ambrosius a Roman, and even Boudicca’s Celtic ancestors had displaced the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge.
Their story is that of Britain: a nation of incomers, each wave resisting the next before finally mingling with it.
Now we’re at it again. The government has announced plans for a new citizenship test, which hopeful immigrants must overcome before becoming British.
In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, Prime Minister Gordon Brown cast the proposed test as a means of ensuring that all new citizens embrace “the ties - indeed the shared values - that make us more than a collection of people but a country.”
However, the government’s real motive is most likely growing public concern over immigration levels, which ambitious politicians of all stripes have played on in recent years.
The Conservative party calls the new plans “a gimmick” and proposes a simple yearly cap on immigration instead as the best way to curb inflows of people.
This is nonsense, since Britain’s EU membership obliges it to allow the European Economic Area’s 500 million citizens to settle and work for as long as they want – immigration cap or no.
Similarly, the government has said the proposed citizenship test will not apply to citizens of the 26 other European Union member states.
There are viable cases both for unfettered movement of workers and eased access to citizenship, and for more controlled immigration.
But with the UK’s borders propped wide open by EU treaty obligations, debates about immigration have largely become an exercise in political PR.
Comments (1)
'Their story is that of Britain: a nation of incomers, each wave resisting the next before finally mingling with it.'
A rather reductionist view of Britain, isn't it, considering the last invasion (or 'mass immigration') was a thousand years ago?
Posted by ChrisC | February 21, 2008 9:04 AM
Posted on February 21, 2008 09:04