Frank Field\’s proposals for that compulsory voluntary service. You do your 6 months or a year, then:
…..and a final citizenship ceremony.
Have you ever in your puff seen such a perfect perisher?
British citizenship, for those born here, is not something which is in the gift of the Government. It is not the State\’s to award or deny. It is something held as of right.
We are that State, we the citizens of the country simply hire the superstructure of the Government to do society\’s scut work for us. There is not, and cannot be in a free society, a requirement for us to devote 6 months or a year of our lives in order to earn our citizenship. For there is no one for us to earn it from except ourselves.
The concept that it is the State which validates our citizenship is one which is deeply fascist. That only if we are good little boys and girls, only if we do our exercises, show the appropriate genuflection to community, to the order that righteously guides us, are we therefore full members of the society. Absolutely not so, we are, whether we are miserable individualistic misanthropes like myself or Fotherington Thomas types wishing the sky and the clouds good morning that society and we need no permission or ceremony to take our place in it.
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you\’re someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"
The inaugural black footy bags award goes to Frank Field.
Sadly, given the state of the nation, I have a horrible feeling that the inaugural award will not be the last.
I fear you are right, but invoking the spirit of Pelham Greville is absolutely the right response, pending the compulsory lessons in the Lamppost Tango.
Thanks. It is years since I read Wodehouse, and I must put that right.
Even Spode had a human side.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnCNJD3-e7g&feature=related
“We are that State”
Oh no we’re not. That really is something Mussolini might have said. Other than that I agree absolutely.
Field is always presented as some kind of prophet but it seems to me he’s lost the plot.
Doubtful as I am about the details of this scheme, some system whereby people had to perform a service in order to receive the benefits of citizenship would be no more than a revision to the tax code- effectively exacting a contribution from those with too little money to make a worthwhile financial contribution. I would prefer a system where people can choose to opt out- provided they give up the right to vote,”free” health care, the 57 varieties of benefit, embassy/consular support abroad, etc. etc.
Whilst I agree people should be free to live here without the services provided by the state, in exactly the same way as they are for example free to not pay for insurance, that should similarly imply no payouts.
I suspect that if you were to emigrate to say Australia you would have to go through a citizenship ceremony.
And anyway this is in fact already the govts latest wheeze. To get immigrants to take a citizenship ceremony.
http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/applying/ceremony/
I suspect Field is only repeating what is the current law and practice of the land. And you are being needlessly abusive.
Try an apology
Frank has made a lot of sensible observations and suggestions lately, but I strongly disagree with him on this one.
It would take an awful lot of people out being classified as unemployed though, which may well be the real driver.
The youngsters who want to do thi s type of thing are already doing it. They are Guides, Scouts, Rangers, SeaScouts, Cadets, Air Training Corps, Duke of Edinburgh award candidates. And a lot of others are going to college. Or working. Or training to become wheel-tappers and shunters. And mostly they don’t need any “intervention” whatsoever. In fact, it would hold them back.
No this scheme is really about “omigodwhatarewegoingtodoaboutthechavs…”
And what they intend to do, is treat all the youngsters as if they were bone idle layabout chavs. We have to be all alike. Collective punishment. I can’t help thinking about Philip Pullmans article which was published yesterday in the Times, but mysteriously disappeared from the website.
If you read the article rather than “suspecting” TrevorsDen, you would see that Frank Field is indeed proposing that people born British citizens rather than immigrants, would undergo a citizenship ceremony which is most certainly not the current law and practice of the land.
Well, no snivelling little government shit is going to drag ME to a ceremony OF ANY SORT, apart of course from my elevation to the peerage, and thank you very much. Certainly nothing to do with citizenship. I spit on citizenship. Nasty froggy notion. I am a subject of Her Majesty. God save the Queen
That reminds me of the idea the Labour Government were promoting years ago of a Stalinist pseudo-baptism ceremony for newborn children. We never hear of it now, so presumably nobody wanted it. Let us hope this ghastly idea of Frank Field’s goes the same way.
Frank also appears to forget that once something is in the government’s gift it is also in its power to take it back.
Fergus has it. Citizenship has been foisted upon us by the EU. Without, of course, any of the privileges that notionally apply to it (but are ignored by their governments anyway.)
When did Crown subjects start needing passports, again? Sometime after WW2?
What citizenship? British people are subjects of the Crown, not citizens.
And what is Timmy blathering about here?
Crap. Crap. Crap.
You’re talking about the United Kingdom as if it were a republican state governed “by the consent of the governed”, which the UK demonstrably is not. That’s why the signers of the US Declaration of Independence put in that phrase because it self-evidently did not apply to the United Kingdom
Timmy still has no idea what State he’s in. That’s why he’s making claims about the status of a British subject which do not, and never have, existed.
“British citizenship, for those born here, is not something which is in the gift of the Government. It is not the State’s to award or deny. It is something held as of right.”
Actually it is only true if your parents are British citizens.
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