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What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

freemovement.org.uk

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Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#181

Post by repolfx »

ngcazz wrote: post #70
ppod wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at this poll: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume... The voters of all parties support these policies. What is "pandering" in a democracy? The people are xenophobes, they are getting what they want.

I think you're both right, pandering is opposed to leading (and eventually shaping public opinion in a non-nefarious fashion).

Why should politicians shape opinion? What makes their opinions so much better than that of their voters? Their role is to reflect opinion and implement it.

And what does shaping in a non-nefarious manner imply? Politicians already give speeches setting out their positions and they do campaigning to try and convince people to vote for them, as part of setting out the menu that is inherent in a democracy. But is this shaping or is it merely offering options?

I don't think there are any non-nefarious ways to "shape" opinion. At most you can argue for your own views and hope the arguments are good.

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#182

Post by repolfx »

ppod wrote: post #43

I moved to the UK seven years ago, and have clearly noticed a change in the time I've been here. It wasn't perfect to begin with, but there is now a clear popular attitude against non-British people. It's worse against non-white people and eastern europeans, but there is also a level of general xenophobia. Of course, this is not the prevailing situation in London and cosmopolitan cities, but it is prevalent among the…

Yes, there are two reasons that interact for this:

1. The population feels the country is full

2. The population feels the government is systematically biased in favour of huge quantities of immigration and doesn't listen to their concerns

Both feelings are pretty much rooted in reality. The feeling of "fullness" comes from the fact that scaling infrastructure is constrained by physical and social limits like how fast new doctors can be trained, capacity of railway lines etc but the number of people that will turn up if allowed is unlimited. So everything in the UK is constantly on the brink of falling over due to being constantly at max load.

The second feeling is even more powerful. Immigration has become totemic because for so many years the political elite told voters they couldn't control immigration, that somewhere along the line - without any announcement or debate - the entire topic had been removed from the democratic realm entirely, that the UK had to accept anyone who turned up from anywhere and changing that was not only impossible due to the EU, but racist/xenophobic/immoral.

Tell large numbers of people who are concerned about overload that their concerns are racist and they should feel ashamed of themselves, that there should be no limits anywhere despite the obvious physical impossibility of such a policy, and it's a recipe for making the electorate very obstinate indeed.

However it has nothing to do with actual xenophobia. The UK is by far the most racially diverse country in Europe.

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#183

Post by DanBC »

vixen99 wrote: post #175
ppod wrote: post #43

I moved to the UK seven years ago, and have clearly noticed a change in the time I've been here. It wasn't perfect to begin with, but there is now a clear popular attitude against non-British people. It's worse against non-white people and eastern europeans, but there is also a level of general xenophobia. Of course, this is not the prevailing situation in London and cosmopolitan cities, but it is prevalent among the…

If you look at the graph here https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/statistics-net-migration-st... you can see migration levels consistently rising from 1975 to 2017 with 250,000 expected this year. Is there any level of migration for which critics would not be perjoratively labelled xenophobes by you? The definition of xenophobe is 'one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin' it coul…

> and the National Health Service is close to breakdown in many areas.

That is entirely because the government has chosen to defund the NHS. It has nothing, and I mean really nothing, to do with immigrants using the NHS.

All the research we have shows us that immigration does not put the NHS under strain, that immigration could help pay for the NHS if the government chose to correctly tax the population and correctly fund the NHS, that the NHS cannot run without immigration (we have nowhere near enough doctors, nurses, and all the other varied allied health profesionals and we must source staff from abroad.)

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#184

Post by alecco »

cm2187 wrote: post #132
xaranke wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who recently applied for a UK Visa, I was shocked that it cost around $120 for 6 months. A comparable US visa for 10 years costs around $160.

That's nothing. Citizenship costs over £1000.

In UK minimum wage is 7.83. So that's 3 weeks of work at most. It's quite reasonable.

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#185

Post by [deleted] »

repolfx wrote: post #178
uniqueid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Not every form of democracy is a liberal democracy. In a liberal democracy, some entity such as the judicial system is supposed to prevent the rest of government from tyrannizing minorities. Democracy protects the majority from a minority (ie: nobility). Liberalism protects minorities (eg: people an with unpopular philosophy, religious view, ethnicity, language) from the majority.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#186

Post by [deleted] »

repolfx wrote: post #179
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This again depends on a definition of "liberalism" accepted by all, but I find the term "illiberal" or "non-liberal democracy" (i.e. the opposite of a liberal democracy) to be very difficult to interpret. Is it a democracy in which people have the right to vote, but their liberties are not protected by the law? But- the right to vote is a liberty. And then again, how come people voted to have their liberties not prot…

Don't try and parse the term literally, the term is a contradiction - there's no such thing as an "illiberal democracy" for the reasons you specify. People who use that word simply mean "democracies where my personal views on things like immigration don't win". The term illiberal democracy is an especially empty one because more or less any decision can be phrased in terms of positive liberties - e.g. "restrictions o…

[deleted]

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#187

Post by uniqueid »

repolfx wrote: post #178
uniqueid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Not every form of democracy is a liberal democracy. In a liberal democracy, some entity such as the judicial system is supposed to prevent the rest of government from tyrannizing minorities. Democracy protects the majority from a minority (ie: nobility). Liberalism protects minorities (eg: people an with unpopular philosophy, religious view, ethnicity, language) from the majority.

[flagged]

Wikipedia: "Liberal democracy is a liberal political ideology and a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of classical liberalism. Also called western democracy, it is characterised by elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedoms for all people."

I promise you, I'm not in league with Wikipedia editors to make this stuff up. It is literally textbook.

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#188

Post by dang »

repolfx wrote: post #178
uniqueid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Not every form of democracy is a liberal democracy. In a liberal democracy, some entity such as the judicial system is supposed to prevent the rest of government from tyrannizing minorities. Democracy protects the majority from a minority (ie: nobility). Liberalism protects minorities (eg: people an with unpopular philosophy, religious view, ethnicity, language) from the majority.

[flagged]

Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? Accounts aren't allowed to use this site primarily for that, and this looks like exactly what yours has been doing.

Also, your first paragraph breaks the site guidelines pretty blatantly in other ways. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it.

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#189

Post by vidarh »

xaranke wrote: post #98
blattimwind wrote: post #9

"Indefinite leave to remain" sounds like some almost Orwellian concoction of meaninglessness to me. How exactly do you get from "permission to stay in the country" (aha, it means one has the permission to stay in the country) to "indefinite leave to remain" (uhm... to remain here, I need to leave indefinitely?)

Can you lose indefinite leave to remain like you can lose permanent residency in US/Canada if you don't live there for a certain period?

Yes, you can. If you want a right to return at any time you do need to go on to apply for citizenship.

Re: What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

#190

Post by MagnumOpus »

dmix wrote: post #93
nutjob2 wrote: post #20

This is par for the course in the UK right now. The Tories have been pandering to the xenophobes and racists for some time now an their "hostile environment" for immigrants isn't restricted to ones who are doing something illegal, instead it seems to be targeted toward making life miserable, if not impossible for any immigrants wether they're doing the right thing or not. They have no problems breaking their own rule…

I find it strange how so often the failures in some low-level bureaucratic system or law enforcement agency, whose failures have existed and were alive well before these 'xenophobe' politicians were ever a thing, gets blamed on some abstract shift in ideology of a small group of politicians. As if all new popular ideas instantly trickle down to all government policy... and everything is to blame on that. How do you e…

Except this is not a failure mode of the bureaucrats, but is deliberate policy handed down by “these xenophobic politicians” who headed up the home Office for the past eight years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environm...

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