People who do not have British nationality are foreigners. In France people are foreigners if they do not have French nationality.
BBC Radio 4's Today programme today referred to hundreds of young men in Calais as "illegal migrants". This bestows on them an acknowledgement of their continuing to be somewhere where they have no "right" to be.
A Frenchmen who helps them was proud to do so as, he said, France was the originator of "human rights".
What are "rights" but a semantic instrument to affect a nation's law - which may be good, bad, or indifferent. (A rare exception is the expression "Right of reply".)
Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights states "Everyone's right to life shall be protected...." It has been suggested, therefore, that soldiers who are killed in combat have had their rights violated (by their own Government).
The reason soldiers enlist is to protect their country.
Therefore there is no "human right" more important than immigration control. Which, if functioning properly, protects a country from foreign occupation without recourse to violence.
Yet when an Englishman (yours truly) complained to the European Commission of Human Rights (10 June 1977) about foreign and Commonwealth men using marriage as a means of living and working in the UK, it was not investigated - on the grounds that I had not been a victim of a decision by a public body.
Subsequently (12 May 1982), the ECHR determined in favour of three women whose husbands were not allowed to live and work in the UK. Article 12 - "Men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry and to found a family, according to the national laws governing the exercise of this right." - was cited.
Article 12 concedes the precedence of national laws.
Nevertheless, the Conservative Government that was elected in 1979 to end this concession to foreign men did not do so.
Native British men have been reduced to second-class citizens, which the spread of the English language has done nothing to ameliorate.
There's a Union Jack at the entrance to Eglise Saint-Maclou in Rouen (where Joan of Arc was burnt by the English in 1431) together with a notice in English saying "... women, men and children" have worshipped there.
That word order is contrary to normal English usage. And promotes conflict.
It is hard to believe that the Church is in favour of conflict. Nor that Jesus Christ would have used that word order. It has nothing to do with Christianity, or God, or Good.
Friday 24 July 2009
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