There comes a time in any government’s life where you reach a level of unpopularity such that you may as well dust off all of the half-arsed, mean-spirited policies you’ve ever dreamed up, and just throw them all out there. The point where your opponents are so tired and hoarse from trying to decry all your laughably objectionable new rules that they simply collapse into a defeated heap, while you roll your latest nasty ideas tank onto their collective lawn.
Yesterday we got to read about Theresa May’s charming new ruse, the one about effectively stopping British citizens from marrying their foreign partners and living here, unless they have a good enough job. Ordinarily this might seem a little harsh, but I suppose if you can get away with selling off chunks of the NHS, you can get away with this.
I should probably declare a partial interest here; several years ago I was engaged to be married to someone who lived in Croatia. A foreigner! The relationship broke down in the end, but for a long time we intended to live together, and to do that we would have had to get married, as was the style at the time. I think it was at around this point when I started to get especially angry at whatever immigration clampdown the press was clamouring for. There was something about knowing that, one day, the person I intended to marry would become part of a statistic splashed across the front page of the Express to show quite how close our collective handcart was coming to Hell, that made me feel a little upset. Funny, that.
In the end, the relationship didn’t work out, but on reflection I think it was probably better for said breakdown to be the result of my own enormous and continual failings as a human being, rather than because the Home Secretary has declared me too poor to be embarking on such romantic folly.
I understand that there’s an imperative for governments to be seen to be Doing Something about immigration, but they seem to be forever finding increasingly ham-fisted and downright mean ways of doing it. Whatever the intention behind the policy, the end result of it is that it sets a minimum income requirement on marriage and makes it difficult for poorer couples to get married. This from a government who like the idea of marriage so much they would marry it, if that were at all possible.
Presumably the person in government whose job it is to screen potential policies for signs of unswerving evil has been made redundant, or is simply so overworked by this point that they can only read bits of each policy through the gaps in their fingers as they cradle their head in their hands, sobbing. If I were that person, I might gently suggest to the Tories that, if they want to look less like the wealthy, privileged ‘arrogant posh boys’ of common legend, they might want to think twice about floating a policy idea that effectively restricts love to people earning over £25,700 a year. Then again, if I were that person I’d probably be earning over £25,700 a year and in a position to stop caring about people poorer than me.
But hey, that’s the free market, right? If you can’t afford to fall in love with a foreigner, why not simply exercise your economic freedom and swap them for a more affordable partner, one who lives in the same country as you? Perhaps someone who knows the words to several Beautiful South songs, thinks the Eurovision is a massive fix, and has curiously forthright opinions about the ‘correct’ term to use for a small sandwich roll. It’s really just simple economics! These are tough times which we’ve inherited from thirteen years of the previous government and difficult choices have to be made.
Perhaps if you’d just worked a little harder or got into a grammar school, you might have been able to marry that foreigner! Apply yourselves!
Content from our partners
Related
