An early start this week. A plural award because no civil servant – yes, it’s the civil service, again…is anyone surprised?…is named in this latest example of snivelling bureaucratic lunacy. A man, a University Professor, who can trace his British ancestry back to the 14th century faces deportation because he was born in India – to British parents when India was still part of the Empire.
Meanwhile, a bunch of raghead terrorists are to take the gubmint to court, whining about how their human right to blow people up in the name of their lunatic branch of organised superstition is being suppressed.
Good, innit?
Link.
Boadicea's Chariot 
No decision like this should be allowed to stand unless whoever makes it is named. They should then be liable, personally, to justify it, and if they cannot, be demoted or have their passport removed or whatever. In many cases I am sure they are right, but in this case, it really is a case of jobsworth idiocy.
Steady, Bravo
https://charioteers.org/2012/08/13/on-the-olympic-stramash-apparently/#comment-81113
OZ
Feeg, don’t you understand. Of course he can’t stay, he was not claiming benefit, political asylum, wanting to bring his extended family over and to cap it all he had a job and was not a terrorist.
Get a grip man, we all know these are the criteria to stay here. 😉
Believe it or not but this has been going on forever.
A girlfriend of mine was caught the same way with her eldest son. He was born in South Africa. She bought him back to Britain as an infant when it was fine to bring children in on the adult’s passport.
He was educated in the UK and became a radiographer in one of the UK’s hospitals. In his twenties he applied for a passport and was refused, told to go and get a South African one.
He pointed out that the country had educated him that he worked in the NHS, all to no avail, they damn well nearly chucked him out until his MP got involved. It took ten years arguing and in the end he had to go to citizenship classes and be naturalised like some bloody wog! He was over 30 before he had a passport.
When the boy was born in Memphis I took great care to get him a consular UK birth certificate from Atlanta and subsequently a British passport. I also automatically got the USA birth certificate and applied and got an American passport too. He had both from birth. By maintaining both to adulthood and never letting either run out neither country ever asked him to surrender the other nationality so he maintained full rights of both citizenships. Very useful!
On discussing this with my friend’s son, I gather the only people that seem to run foul of this are white. He was in touch with a group of similar people and they were all the same, white, mainly middle class professionals! Work that one out!!!!! I gather from him that most of the office staff in the Dept of Immigration are no longer white, they look after their own first.
Long live the revolution.
It really looks like the Civil Service or Border Agency pick on the easy targets. If the man has an Australian passport, why can’t he stay here anyway? It’s the convicted Somali terrorist who can’t be sent back because Somalia is a rough, nasty, dangerous place that we need to get rid of.
CO: what you say makes me glad that I have German nationality, not British.
My mother never bothered to get my a German passport. As a child I travelled on hers,
and she always insisted that I have an Obamastani cangue, er, US passport.
When I was 16 I decided that it just would not be in order and I applied to get a German passport.
It took a bit of discussion, but the document was duly approved after 2 days of investigation.
If Wavy Davy ever meant what he said about reducing bureaucracy here is a perfect example of where thge axe should fall! However, I do not hold my breath!
Completely OT, but just for Soutie, England have just widdled on the Proteas! 🙂
Can’t keep a good side down, eh? England! 😉
Chris it appears all over that unless you do it at birth you seem to have some kind of trouble.
It is a good piece of info to know that place of birth and instant application for the requisite paperwork if wanted is a necessity. Just the kind of thing that most people do not think about in the first flush of parenthood, more’s the pity!
People here should take note for their own grandchildren. Good to keep as many options open as possible.
Then at least they have the choice as they grow up.
Bravo, good evening A complex subject.
I have considerable sympathy for Professor Tulloch but I also have the feeling that he might be a suitable nominee for a Darwin himself.
I have some personal knowledge of the subject, being a British Citizen by descent myself. I have told the tale before but I was born in West Germany while my British-born parents were occupying the place. My right to that citizenship and the consequential right to reside, rested solely on the facts that my Dad was born in mainland UK&NI and that my parents were married at the time of my birth.
I applied for my first passport in 1970 and got back a long letter explaining that I would have to produce birth certificates for both myself and my Dad and my parent’s marriage certificate to prove my entitlement to said passport. My Mum, who was a sort of feral CO, fired off a long letter to the then Home Secretary, the Right Honourable Reginald Maudling. The letter began ‘Dear Cur’ and ended ‘You remain my loyal and obedient servant’. It was a closely argued three-page rant attacking the parentage and morals of anybody involved in the process of questioning my passport application.
The passport arrived in the post within the week and without my providing any of the evidence requested.
All that said, I worry about the Tulloch tangle. Obviously his military Dad was not born in the UK or he would have had exactly the same status as myself and would not have lost his right to British citizenship just because he chose to become an Australian. Not unusual in the Services, of course, The reports seem to suggest that the Tullochs were Indian-born for several generations after his Baptist ancestor first went off to minister to the heathens (presumably from Jockland, given his surname).
In my youth, I knew a few Army brats whose fathers and even grandfathers had been born in some far flung part of the Empire and who accordingly,had to establish their right to reside.
They sorted it out and I just don’t believe that Prof. Tulloch could not have done the same, particularly before he went off to boil his billy beside his billabong. I also don’t understand why he did not fix it sharpish when they confiscated his passport by making sure that he established the right to reside here, albeit as a self-condemned Commonwealth colonial, instead of relying on work permits.
By his own evidence, his Indian-born brother managed to work it all out and is a Briton with right to reside.
And, before we all go off the deep end about this being an attack on whites, could we perhaps consider the fact that the whole reason for this increasingly complicated legislation, first introduced in 1962, was to try to stop uncontrolled immigration by all those British subjects of our former Empire, overwhelmingly of a non-white background, who did not have a direct patrineal link with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (later Northern Ireland)?
Mrs Mackie senior sounds a lovely lady and she reminds us all that these civil servants and ministers are indeed paid by us. I did have a vague feeling that there was something Prof Tulloch had omitted to do on his own behalf, but I still see no reason why Australian citizens of good repute should not be allowed to reside in Britain and I still want to see convicted terrorists sent back to all the hellholes they came from.
CO: at the time of my birth it was not necessary and would have actually been a complication.
The US government does not take kindly to legal immigration from first-world countries.
Much like the UK, it prefers shifty people of dubious character and little social/economic value.
One must keep the Democrats/Labour in office, eh? In essence, Germany does not generally permit
dual nationality and the Democratic People’s Republic of Obamastan, while having many people of multiple nationality, does not care for the concept either. I am able to hold both as I inherited both, Germany permits the inheritability of its citizenship from either parent. Until the 1970s it was only from the father, but the number of dead-beat American fathers who impregnated German women only to run off to their wives/girlfriends in the USA or the high number of failed marriages when the German mother returned home caused a stark re-assessment of the law.
I don’t know enough about this particular case – but let me assure all and sundry that taking Australian citizenship does not mean that one loses one’s British citizenship… both Bearsy and I have dual citizenship, as does my daughter and grandson.
The Australian government requires all members of parliament to renounce former citizenship – but the minute MPs with former British or, for that matter, Greek citizenships finish their term in office they simply apply for a new passport from their country of birth.
Mrs M sounds like a woman after my own heart. When I applied for a passport after divorce # 1, I foolishly said that I had had another surname – I had reverted to my maiden name and have stuck with it ever since. Back came a letter from the Passport Office demanding that I inform them of the whereabouts of the ex-husband, what he was doing, etc, etc. I replied that I’d had enough problems getting rid of him and had no intention of going to seek him at that stage in my life…
Back came my passport without delay.
Boadicea, good evening.
I just can’t help myself when it comes to ‘For the avoidance of doubt’ moments.
The point about this case is that Prof. Tulloch was not a British citizen when he decided to become an Australian, Had he been one, you are, of course, right that he would not have lost that citizenship by signing up.
The very short version of his status is that he was a British subject. It was clearly stated in the legislation that was then current that he would lose that status and his right to reside in the UK if he chose to join another nation. I find it unlikely that he was not warned about that at the time. I could, as ever, be wrong.
I also worry that he did absolutely nothing about re-establishing his right to reside when they took his British passport off him and that he chose to rely on work permits instead until he retired.
I am absolutely certain that, if he does now apply for right to reside, it will be granted given his circumstances. I am reasonably satisfied that he brought most of this whole mess on himself, from the evidence which I have been able to find so far.
I repeat that I have total sympathy for him and wish him well. I still think that he is a worthy candidate for a Darwin award.
Well, that generated more discussion than I might have thought. I have to confess that I didn’t look into the matter beyond the surface. Perhaps I should re-award the distinction to the good professor himself?
On a personal note, when my daughter was applying to universities, she was informed that she would be regarded as an overseas student and would have to pay full fees because her parents were not resident in the country while she was at boarding school here. I sent a one line letter in reply, ‘I was a soldier,’ with a copy of my attestation and discharge papers, my Warrant, and my service record. I copied the letter to the Secretary of State for Defence. A letter acknowledging the error and confirming my daughter’s eligibility for the grants applicable at the time arrived by return of post.
Postscript. As it happened, my daughter changed her mind and decided to go to work and save some cash before going to university. She finally received her degree by a rather round-about route. She started a business administration degree at Liverpool John Moores. The course included Spanish, and her third year was spent at the Universidad de Sevilla. At the end of the year, she thought to herself, ‘Hmm, what to do? Go back to Liverpool or stay in Seville? Liverpool – Seville, Seville – Liverpool…’ So she got a job in Seville and finished the degree through the Open University 🙂