ConDem Government Abandons Yet another Tory Election Promise
The ConDem coalition government has abandoned yet another Tory election promise, this time the one which undertook to bar immigrants unless they had a command of English.
The promise was a major part of the Conservative Party’s election campaign in the completely false assumption that speaking English would turn a Congo pygmy into an Englishman.However, even this absurd presumption has been thrown away, like almost all other Tory election promises, with the ruling by Home Secretary Theresa May that the families of asylum seekers will be exempt from the rule.
The announcement was made on the quiet in a written Commons reply last week which said: “The new language requirement will not apply to dependants of refugees and people granted humanitarian protection in the UK.”
The reason for the ruling is directly attributable to Britain’s membership of the European Union.
The demand that asylum seekers speak English breaches Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which gives everyone “the right to a family life.”
It was to fit in with this EU rule that the previous Labour regime introduced the Human Rights Act (which the Conservatives also promised to repeal, another promise which they threw out the window).
It is therefore possible for an asylum seeker to argue that their right to a “family life” is greater than the demand that they speak English.
As such, the EU court can override any rule made by a British court.
Although the Tories will now claim that they have no choice but to accept this “exception” to their rule, the reality is that all objective observers knew all along that this was an impossible promise to fulfil.
Membership of the EU compels Britain to abide by that organisation’s rules and laws.
The Conservatives’ promises to repeal the Human Rights Act, “roll back EU power” and force immigrants to speak English are all impossible to achieve while Britain remains a member of the EU.
All of this is obvious from the briefest reading of the Lisbon Treaty, which forces observers to one of only two conclusions:
1. The Tories really did not know, and they are incompetent fools; or
2. The Tories do know what the situation is, and they deliberately lied to the public.
Either way, the verdict on the Tories is equally ghastly.
