People who wish to enter the UK and to live and work here permanently will now have to sit a test to see if they are eligible for the right to do so. The test features 24 questions which the entrant must complete within 45 minutes - answering more than 75% of them correctly means they may be eligible for citizenship.If you were born here, making you British, have you ever wondered how well YOU would do in the test? Well, now you can find out...Acid Rabbi scored 67%, Mrs. Rabbi scored a more respectable 71%. As such, we will both be leaving the country as soon as possible. Expect future posts to be sent from our new home in the Seychelles.
Lord Malloch-Brown, the Home Office minister who announced his decision to step down from the Government earlier this week, has delivered a stinging attack on Gordon Brown despite having been considered one of the Prime Minister's closest Parliamentary allies.
The minister's career in UK politics was short and marked by controversy. Enobled and brought into the Government as part of the PM's "government of all talents," he caused a rift between No.10 and George Bush's White House administration almost as soon as he joined the Home Office. He is widely credited as being largely responsible for the success of the G20 Summit held in London earlier this year, an event which had a massive beneficial effect on Mr. Brown's reputation as a world leader and his resignation is seen by many as another blow to the PM's already precarious position as leader of the Labour party.Malloch-Brown says that Latin American and South-East Asian countries - nations known for corruption, unrest and revolution - exhibit better "strategic thinking" than Mr. Brown's Government and that British politics are "disappointingly shortsighted." He is also said to have become angry when it was first announced that the enquiry held into the Iraq war - a conflict that he opposed - would be held in secret, a decision that was later reversed in an embarrassing U-turn for the Government.According to colleages, "Mark [Malloch-Brown] had never worked in Whitehall before, and it is fair to say he was shocked at how everything was cobbled together at the last minute and no one took the time to plan ahead. It was not uniquely a problem with Brown, but a feature of the British political culture." He had previously put his decision to quit down to what he called "personal and family reasons," but his recent statements seem to suggest that he has always had severe misgivings about Gordon Brown, his abilities as Prime Minister and his style of politics - which is likely to be seen by the electorate as confirming their own, similar, views.
63,000 asylum seekers have been informed by the Home Office that they will be permitted to remain in Britain because they have been here for so long while the Government tries to catch up with a backlog of cases that removing them would be too difficult.Officials have to date examined nearly 200,000 out of 450,000 individual cases and approved the claimant's right to asylum in 32% of those cases. If they keep up that rate, 144,000 people will be allowed to stay here. Some of them are cases that would not have otherwise been approved, going back to the 1990s, while the majority will be genuine examples in which the asylum seeker faces torture, political imprisonment or murder should they return to their place of origin.Good. That's another 144,000 people who, once approved, will be able to start looking for work and - as soon as the recession is over and they find it - start paying taxes which can then be spent on health and public services.
People who wish to enter the UK and to live and work here permanently will now have to sit a test to see if they are eligible for the right to do so. The test features 24 questions which the entrant must complete within 45 minutes - answering more than 75% of them correctly means they may be eligible for citizenship.
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