The Daily Mail redefine being British*

February 26th, 2009 § 5 comments

Do you remember Gordon Browns’ Britishness ‘thing’ he had a while ago? Where we would all walk around being British and proud of it. But no-one could really define what being British was about. Every one had different ideas about being and to be British.

Well, the daily mail have had a fantastic wheeze and have come up with a very simple definition

According to the new statistics, published yesterday, foreign-born people make up one in nine of the population of the UK as a whole.

However although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants.

See? Easy isn’t it? If you are fresh into the country, with your new passport in hand, you’re not British. If you were born in Britain, but one or both of your parents were born outside this country, your not British. If you were born here in this green and pleasant (ha!) land but one or both of you grandparents weren’t, you’re not British.

Some nice clean straight forward rules, with no grey areas to confuse things. It helps to identify us from them and keep them them for a few generations to come so we have a nice underclass for all the horrible low paid jobs no one wants to do and someone to blame when the shit hits the fan.

Well, I have a better, simpler idea that would even the knuckledraggers of the BNP could understand, although would not like, but who cares, huh?

Anyone with a British passport is British.

What? You want more rules? Well, that’s it. Maybe for immigration figures the amount of new passports issued could be counted, but when a baby is born to British passport holders, that baby is British. Why would it be anything else? I hasn’t gone anywhere. It may have a Pakistani or Nigerian or Polish background in it’s upbringing, but what’s the problem with that? Seriously I’d like someone to explain in a way that doesn’t either make me want to laugh or punch them in the face.

I don’t know why, but it amazes me that after 70 years and 11 editors after the Mail sympathised with the Fascist that they would still be sitting on the same side of the fence, pushing the same agenda of hate and bile.

————–

An open letter to Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, from Sunder Katwala:

Dear Mr Dacre,

I was disappointed to read reported in today’s Daily Mail that the newspaper regards it as a mistake to consider that the children or grandchildren of immigrants are British, but rather would classify us as “second or third generation immigrants”.

although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants.

I hope that your proposed reclassification of Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry as not British, as second and third generation immigrants descended from the foreign-born Phillip, will not distress them too much.

But it does seem most ungrateful, when Winston Churchill was voted ‘greatest Briton’, to now strip him of that status because he had an American mother. (However strongly your newspaper disagreed with Churchill’s criticisms of appeasement in the 1930s, isn’t it now time to let bygones be bygones?)

Perhaps you could let us know who the Daily Mail thinks is truly British. I can see you probably think it is too late for my children – as “third generation immigrants”, currently aged under 3 – but perhaps there might be a tip or two they could pass on to their descendants.

So, given our shared interests in integration and citizenship, it would be terribly kind if you might let us know whether there is anything that those of us who were born here as British citizens could ever do so as to become British in your eyes.

Yours sincerely,

Sunder Katwala

So, my wife and childrens’ passports and birth certificates are lying then, eh?

Via Tygerland

*Subtitled: The Daily Mail are cunts

Tagged , ,

§ 5 Responses to The Daily Mail redefine being British*"

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

What's this?

You are currently reading The Daily Mail redefine being British* at Sim-O.

meta