One can see that sign on the doors of bars and retail outfits all over the world. Yet, according to the EU, Britain isn’t entitled to the same leeway.
Mrs May’s plans for criminal checks on European citizens hoping to stay in Britain have made EU negotiators roll on the floor frothing at the mouth. There will be no Brexit talks, they scream, unless Britain stops discriminating against continental criminals.
Admittedly, that group does suffer from discrimination. Why, some members of it are occasionally even locked up for years. Though it pleases a life-long liberal like me to see that this tendency is on the wane, it hasn’t yet been completely eradicated.
However, this form of discrimination still tends to be accepted, with reservations, even by life-long liberals. We accept that the state largely derives its legitimacy from protecting law-abiding citizens from criminals.
Such protection has two aspects: punishment and prevention.
The former is fairly straightforward, or rather was before life-long liberals decided that punishment ought to be replaced by some kind of awareness course and group therapy.
Prevention is more involved, touching upon, as it does, aspects of education, social work, family policy, economics and so forth. However, in any sane society – and in any sovereign country – difficulties arise only with home-grown criminals, actual or potential.
With foreign miscreants, the problem becomes as simple as truth itself: keep them out if they’re still out, throw them out if they’re already in.
That’s where the familiar sign one sees on bars and shops comes into play: the definition of sovereignty includes control over the country’s borders. That means the country’s government deciding who can come in and who can’t or, for those who’re already in, who can stay and who can’t.
Sorry to have to enunciate such elementary truths, but those EU chaps don’t seem to get something that has for centuries gone without saying. So allow me to paraphrase, in simple words.
Leave to stay everywhere in the world has always been contingent on certain qualifications. These vary from country to country.
For example, when I myself was an immigrant, some 44 years ago (and doesn’t tempus bloody well fugit?), the UK hardly admitted any Russians at all. And Commonwealth countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand had age and profession qualifications. Hence a young computer programmer was welcome, while an old film critic wasn’t.
Where all of them converged was in routinely turning away those with criminal records. The shared feeling was that there was enough trouble as it was, without importing foreign murderers and thieves.
At the same time the native countries of such personages understandably wished to get rid of them. The opportunities to do so increased in direct proportion to the volume of emigration.
When thousands of Cubans welcomed the 1959 advent of social justice by fleeing in every way possible, Castro saw the chance of ridding his country not only of dissident intellectuals but also of common-or-garden criminals. Thousands of them were tacitly encouraged to leave Cuba, mainly for Florida, where they continued to ply their trade in both an organised and haphazard fashion.
Learning this valuable lesson from their Cuban comrades, the Soviets played a similar trick in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when hundreds of thousands were magnanimously allowed to leave the communist paradise for the capitalist hell.
Among those hundreds of thousands were thousands of bandits, thieves and rapists, many of whom actually hadn’t wanted to leave. However, the Soviets outlined the available alternative so vividly that the criminals’ original reluctance vanished. Off to America they went, where the overworked Immigration Service allowed many of them to slip through their fingers.
The US was thus blessed with the arrivals of two mafias, first Cuban (mainly in Florida), later Russian (mainly in New York). It pains a life-long liberal like me to admit this, but something similar is happening in the UK.
While the supposedly invaluable contribution EU migrants can make to our culture remains a thing of the future, their contribution to the crime rate is very much a fact of present life. EU immigrants, most of them from Eastern Europe, are convicted of 700 crimes every week, this on top of the thousands of crimes that go unpunished and often uninvestigated.
One would think that vetting potential new residents would go a long way towards reducing these numbers. Moreover, such vetting isn’t only the right but indeed the duty of any sovereign state.
There’s the rub: Brexit or no Brexit, the governing elite of both the EU and, as increasingly becomes evident, the UK don’t really want Britain to regain her sovereignty, including control of her borders. We’re denied the rights routinely claimed not only by other countries but also by bars and retail establishments.
The effrontery of those spivs is most refreshing. For example, Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt says: “The European Parliament will remain vigilant regarding citizens’ rights and will continue to push for full rights for EU citizens in the UK.”
The European Parliament can push for anything it wants within its own jurisdiction. That won’t include post-Brexit Britain, or for that matter any other sovereign country. With such countries the EU can’t push – it can only make polite requests, which are up to the countries’ discretion to grant or not.
“It is a core mission of the European project to protect, not to diminish, the fundamental rights of all citizens,” continued that misguided Guy.
Could have fooled me. The core mission of the European project is to create a single, unaccountable European state with an unlimited mandate to bully its constituent members. The rights of citizens are routinely trampled underfoot, especially when said citizens vote the way guys like Verhofstadt decry.
That happened in France, Portugal, Ireland and everywhere else where signs of national dissent were discerned. Now guys like Verhofstadt conspire with our own spivs to perpetrate the same debacle on Britain, by overturning or at least neutering the Brexit referendum.
For telling Britain that she can’t decide whom to admit is tantamount to saying that, Brexit or no Brexit, Britain will never become a sovereign nation again.
If we can’t even refuse the honour of acting as dumping ground for the EU’s human refuse, it’s not immediately clear why we voted to get out in the first place. That, as far as guys like Verhofstadt are concerned, is the whole point.
“The US was thus blessed with the arrivals of two mafias, first Cuban (mainly in Florida), later Russian (mainly in New York). It pains a life-long liberal like me to admit this, but something similar is happening in the UK.”
Foremost beware the Chechen Boys. Absolutely ruthless. Pimps and drug smugglers and killers.