Thursday
26Feb2009
So, who does the Mail think is British?
Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 6:48PM
Sunder has published an open letter to Paul Dacre, the fabulously remunerated editor of The Daily Mail.
Reproduced in full.
Well, I always presumed my kids were British. Oooops!
Sorry, my bad.
I’ll turn in their passports in the morning. Now, Mr. Dacre, are they also required to wear some kind of identifying clothing? An armband maybe?
Reproduced in full.
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
Well, I always presumed my kids were British. Oooops!
Sorry, my bad.
I’ll turn in their passports in the morning. Now, Mr. Dacre, are they also required to wear some kind of identifying clothing? An armband maybe?
Reader Comments (8)
That's me, the wife and all my kids on the list then. Oh, and my brothers-in law and all their kids, and my grandchildren (they get a double coat from the immigration brush), and several of my GPs (including the first one - who fled Germany to escape persecution) and his children, and grandchildren...and so on...
Well, that's my house going to be an awful lot quieter.
Heh. I don't think TDM has any idea of the level of "mongrelism", there is in this country.
The article also calls this the most crowded country in Europe. I don't know if that's true, it probably is. But have you driven the length of this country? It's bloody empty in most places.
My wife always complains that we have such piddly houses, yet we have fields, forests and unused land everywhere.
I'm all for green-spaces etc,, but what I'm getting at, is that it's not like we're being pushed into the sea by hoards of Poles and angry brown-skinned people, is it?
We have a load of unused housing that is sat empty, loads of brownfield sites that could do with re-developing, we don't need to encrouch on the green spaces.
"Now, Mr. Dacre, are they also required to wear some kind of identifying clothing? An armband maybe?"
Don't be silly: they might be able to remove it. I'm thinking some kind of geometric shape – a yellow star, or a pink triangle, maybe – sewn onto their clothing; just until they are old enough to get the number tattooed on their forearms.
DK
aargh, DK has posted something funny I agree with. Woe is me :(
I'm putting this in the show I'm doing, Poles Apart, which has a whole section dedicated to the nonsense printed in the Daily Fail, this is a horrible addition that will hopefully lose it some readers.