In the UK  the right to family life (Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights) has been increasingly refused through all sorts of rules and bureaucratic delays, refused even to refugees and other immigrants who have already gone through enough hoops to achieve British nationality status. “You don’t earn enough”, says the Home Office, “so your spouse will be a drain on the state.” “Your wife must do an English course,” it says, “even if she has to travel through dangerous areas of Afghanistan to Kabul for the classes.” “Your wife must go from Afghanistan to Islamabad for an interview,” it says. And on, and on, and on. People wait years for their applications to be processed, and it takes even longer when the UK Border Agency + the Consulate + the private companies (the last, of course, are “our partners”) who are part of the process lose the application, and then have the cheek to ask the applicants to start again.

It looks as if these refusals will be hardening up in future, according to legislation before parliament.  One result is that Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, has written an article in today’s Guardian criticising the government’s policy on these matters. Before he wrote he did his homework, including talking to many of the victims of the policy. As a result, he says that the regulations now in place are anti-family, unsavoury and a scandal. He asks:

“… is it the government’s intention to penalise British citizens? To undermine marriages and to split up families? Other EU citizens are free to come and live in the UK with spouses from outside the EU. And yet British citizens do not enjoy the same rights. The feeling of being victimised by one’s own government is a bitter pill to swallow.”

Strong words from an Archbishop, and his article should be read in full. As might be expected of an archbishop, he ends with a pious hope: “I hope that parliament, in considering the current immigration bill, will take the opportunity to correct this clear injustice.” Amen to that, Archbishop, although snowflakes’ chances in Hell (if you’ll pardon the expression) do spring to mind.

But to help the process along, let’s all write to our MPs expressing our disgust at the government’s unsavoury, scandalous (and, not least, cruel), policies.

Here’s the archbishop:  http://gu.com/p/3y7nx

Here’s some research suggesting that government statistics trying to justify the policy have been – er, well, cooked:

http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/07/09/revealed-the-financial-cost-of-theresa-may-s-immigrationl