Inequality

A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Carey, said on BBC Radio 4's "Sunday" programme today (24 June 2007) that the issue of immigration into the UK would not go away, and that the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, should impose further restrictions.
Every working day foreign and Commonwealth men exploit the loophole of marriage to enable them to live and work in the UK.
In the 1980s the Council of Europe wrote it had long been recognised that women were in a privileged position regarding marriage and migration. This is because they could live in their own countries and they could also live in their husband's country.
Enabling people in international marriages to live in two countries puts them in a privileged position compared to people who can only live in one country.
The very thing the Council of Europe should not do is promote privilege and inequality. This is what it did in the 1980s by thwarting the Thatcher Government's promise to end the concession of foreign men being allowed to live and work in the UK through marriage.
While many British men opposed the Conservative Party's election promise about this in 1979,
some women supported it. I'm grateful to have had their support.

A Challenge to the Concept of Human Rights

All my life (since 1962) I have been affected by the UK's immigration controls.
I set out for Asia in 1959, but there was nowhere I was allowed to live and work.
I returned to the UK in the summer of 1962 just when the Commonwealth Immigration Act came into force.
Parliament deliberately delayed the application of the Act so as to enable as many people from the Commonwealth to enter the UK as wanted to. Lots of young men rushed to beat the Act.
I knew, after July 1962, that young men would come here on tourist or student visas and find someone to marry - to enable them to obtain permanent residence in the UK.
In 1969 the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, closed that loophole.
But in 1975 Roy Jenkins bowed to pressure and re-opened it.
It was Conservative Party policy (under Mrs. Thatcher) to end this "concession".
Opponents said that it could not be implemented because it was contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights. So on 10 June 1977 I complained to the European Commission of Human Rights that the UK Government allowed foreign and Commonwealth men to live and work in the UK through marriage even though I (and other Englishmen) could not live and work in their countries through marriage.
The upshot of protracted correspondence was that the Commission would not investigate my complaint because I had not been the victim of a decision by a government department.....
When the Conservatives were elected to power with a large majority on 3 May 1979 Mrs. Thatcher said that - unlike her predecessors - she would keep her election promises, but she
did not keep this one.
On 12 May 1982 (when the Falklands Conflict was at its height) the European Commission of Human Rights determined as admissible the case of three (foreign) women whose husbands were not allowed to live in the UK .
This is an ongoing issue: Every day, while British servicemen are being injured and killed, foreign and Commonwealth men use marriage as a means to occupy the UK.
Thus the demographic nature of the UK is not only being deliberately changed but the large influx of young men is partly responsible for the long-ongoing imbalance of the ratio of the sexes in the UK.

The original purpose for setting up the Council of Europe was to prevent the persecution of minority groups. It was definitely not for the purpose of enabling other peoples to occupy member states, and so increase the population of those groups.

My complaint in the 1970s was exactly the sort of complaint that the European Commission of Human Rights was established to investigate. Instead, it defeated the policy of a democratically-elected government.