Mr Johnson has just been on a family holiday in Australia and was also the keynote speaker at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
He says that following his speech he was approached by an Australian teacher, Sally Roycroft, who had been teaching at a school in London but was forced to leave the UK because of “disgraceful” immigration rules.
“She isn’t a citizen of any of the 27 countries of the European Union,” Mr Johnson says. “She is Australian; and she has been told to bog off by the authorities in our country because it was, they said, too much of a palaver to go through the business of ‘sponsoring’ her to stay.
“That is the infamous consequence, as we all know, of a historic and strategic decision that this country took in 1973. We betrayed our relationships with Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand, and entered into preferential trading arrangements with what was then the European Economic Community.”
The Mayor says that the UK must now distance itself from the EU and “seek a wider destiny for our country”.
David Cameron has pledged to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU before holding an in-out referendum on the UK’s membership in 2017.
However, Mr Johnson says that as well as altering our relationship with Europe, the Government should now “intensify” links with the Commonwealth countries.
He says that “you could not do better than by starting with Australia” and calls for freedom of movement rules to apply between the UK and Australia.
Mr Johnson adds: “I suppose there might be some objection from the EU — but they should be told firmly to stuff it. There is already variable geometry in EU border control arrangements. It is basically outrageous and indefensible that Sally Roycroft is deprived of a freedom that we legally confer on every French person.”
Under current EU freedom of movement rules, any citizen of a European member state has the right to live and work in the UK.
Just over 20,000 “skilled workers” are each year allowed to come to the UK from outside the EU but they need to be sponsored by an employer and pass a complicated points-based assessment.
Commonwealth citizens who have a grandparent who was born in the UK can also apply to come and work in Britain for five years. They can then apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK.
Immigrants, fixing the problems caused by the native Brits, no need to thank them. Immigrants take less benefits than UK citizens and put more into the pot. Our old people would be in an even worse situation if we didn’t have immigration. Its the only way we will pay for the massive costs of our aging population, you clearly don’t like it, but you should get used to it.
From the various ONS reports and such. They pay tax and use relatively less services than aging folk, thus help pay. We have open borders, that’s not quite the one way stream you suggest. Maybe in a generation or two the movement would be greater, assuming we bother teaching languages to our kids. I know of many people who have migrated to the continent, some permanent and many older folk for the bulk of the year.
Isn’t that great 🙂
Anyone who has ever glanced at the newspaper section of a supermarket knows what the press do to immigrants. They libel them, abuse them, humiliate them and stoke up resentment against them. It’s been that way my entire life. After studying 58,000 articles in every national newspaper in Britain – over 43 million words – researchers found the word most closely associated with ‘immigrant’ was, you guessed it, ‘illegal’. It almost trips off the tongue. Even for those of us on the other side of the debate the two words feel intimately connected, like ‘pub’ and ‘pint’ or ‘library’ and ‘book’. One goes with the other.
For tabloids, other words closely associated with ‘immigrant’ were ‘coming’, ‘stop’, ‘influx’, ‘wave’, ‘housing’ and ‘sham’.
The press knows what it’s doing. It’s demonising immigrants. Its aim is to make us think of them as less than human beings. They are not humans, they are immigrants. And soon they won’t even be that. They’ll be ‘illegals’. And then you won’t have to worry about them at all anymore.
IA
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk
I have a very old and somewhat crinkly French Mistress, who I call “Creasy” or, sometimes,”the 100 years whore”, Boris old bean it may be an error to appear to favour Pakistan over France. The key thing is sovereignty and the freedom to make such decisions, and eat foreign cannibals if we so choose.
If UK passport holders become automatically entitled to Canadian or Australian residency then Boris will need that extra airport to cope with the rush for the door.
It’s only the UK’s lamentable ability to learn foreign languages that prevents HM’s subjects from enjoying a better life in the EU.