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| Subject: Gibraltar and Hong Kong | |
Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) | [ Next Thread |
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] Date Posted: 15:01:47 10/28/04 Thu In reply to: Dave (UK) 's message, "Federation is the answer." on 13:56:30 10/28/04 Thu Having MPs at Westminster would not constitute federation for Gibraltar, but complete incorporation. This already works at Euro-election level, in which Gibraltarian votes count as votes in the South West region - how interesting that this is where the UKIP came only a few dozen votes away from finishing FIRST in the poll! I think that 14000 Gibraltarian votes for UKIP were something to do with it. To turn to your question over Hong Kong...In the wake of the revolting 1984 agreement over the city, the government issued 50,000 'heads of families' with British Passports. Assuming that their families also took the opportunity of sharing British nationality with their fathers/husbands/etc, that means that no more than about a quarter of a million Hong Kongers were full British citizens in 1997. Many of them now live in Britain, for obvious reasons, and many used their British citizenship to get easy access to the rest of the English-speaking world, in which a Chinese passport is not especially useful. I know many such Hong Kongers in Britain who were on the first 'plane to London they could find after the hand-over. One of them, a chap called Andrew Chang, who sounded for all the world like Prince Charles, told me that he wasn't going to live under a communist dictatorship for anybody... load of peasants going around redistributing other people's property. He considered it "most indecous". My own personal opinion is that, from 1984 to 1997, we should have offered ALL Hong Kongers the right to domicile and work in Britain as full British subjects. A couple of million may have come, but certainly not the total 6 million, many of whom were recent immigrants from China with no especial love or affinity with Britain. That, frankly, would be sensible and considered immigration, since the population of Hong Kong is educated and skilled, and these are the people whom we need in Britain: doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, that sort of thing. Instead, we are taking Eastern European immigration - unskilled and often uneducated workers trying to force their way into an already 120% saturated market for construction, labouring and restaurant work. By prefering Europe to our own colony as a source of badly-needed immigrant workers we have ended up with exactly the wrong kind of immigration; and as we can see from our newspapers, it is rapidly becoming a serious problem. I have no problem with Eastern Europeans - my own family came from Poland 160 years ago - but back then there were more jobs in industry than we had Britons to fulfil them; and in any case my family consisted of a Rabbi and his wife and children, and very few rabbis are seen applying for constrution jobs in Hammersmith or queuing up for housing benefits.. although it would make a damn' funny picture! The way in which we have treated our former colonies, and indeed our present ones such as Gibraltar, I am frankly amazed that there are so many people in the Commonwealth as the few on this forum who are able to put up with us, let alone want closer ties with us. Mussolini called us "l'Albione Perfida", and he sure had a point! [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Hong Kong emigration | |
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Author: Jim (Canada) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 17:51:36 10/28/04 Thu Many Hong Kongers came to Canada as well as Britain at the time of the 1997 handover. Many, who were lucky enough to get British passports, settled in Vancouver and some went on and settled in Toronto. Both cities have large Chinese-speaking communities. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Vancouver | |
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Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 14:00:36 10/29/04 Fri Yes I noticed that when I was in Vancouver in August. There is quite a substantial Chinatown, and most of those I met had come from Hong Kong. It is interesting isn’t it that to this day, the peoples of the Commonwealth, and in this case, former Commonwealth, still share a sense of shared identity. They chose Canada instead of Europe for example. A good statistic as far as we are concerned, was an article in the Sunday Times magazine last week. The study concerned the emigration habits of Britons today. The study shows that while older people tend to retire to Europe, younger people and families still favour the Crown Commonwealth countries of Australia, Canada and New Zealand as their destination of choice to make a new life. The worrying aspect of the study was the statistic that nearly half of all Britons wanted to quit Britain, and nearly one-in-three were actively considering it. The main reasons given were cost-of-living, tax, crime, healthcare and weather. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Ha! | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 19:00:45 10/29/04 Fri I was talking to some Euro-lefty in a little cafe the other day, wearing little glasses and sipping a thimbleful of espresso and saying "ciao" to everyone, and he told me that the fact that thousands of British people are moving to Europe is "evidence of a growing sense of solidarity and European-ness", and wasn't it nice that we were all one big happy family now. He didn't take kindly when I explained the economics of it (we have lots of money, you don't, your houses are cheap, ours aren't, so we're going to buy up all your villas and price you out of your own housing market, because we can) and postulated that it was just another example of good-old British colonialism in another form, and that, far from integrating with the local populations, the Brits Abroad merely form expat communities and open lots of fish and chip bars! [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Ha Ha | |
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Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 15:37:32 10/30/04 Sat It wasn't that annoying journalist from Le Monde was it? He often appears on Dateline London on BBC News 24/World. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Nah | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 15:48:14 10/30/04 Sat Don't think so... you never catch French reporters outside Paris, where they can use their subsidies to stuff themselves with ortolans and fois gras, plagiarise their stories off the BBC website, put a socialist gloss on them and insert the occasional reference to "cowboy Bush", shove them into their editor's in-tray in his absence (he's out to lunch stuffing himself with ortolans and fois gras), and then get back to the Restaurant Lipp on Boulevard St. Germain and stuff themselves with ortolans and fois gras... An American girl whom I know took up a post on the Herald Tribune's Paris offices, and a year later is reported to have put on about three stones and got Delerium Tremens... [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |