The British Nationality Act 1948 was an Act of the British Parliament which established the status of Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies(CUKC), the national citizenship of the United Kingdom and those places that were still British colonies on 1 January 1949, when the 1948 Act came into force. However, until the early 1960s there was little difference, if any, in United Kingdom law between the rights of CUKCs and otherBritish subjects, all of whom had the right at any time to enter and live in the United Kingdom. The act effectively allowed any one of the 800 million subjects of the King in the British Empire to live and work in the UK, without needing a visa. One of the reasons why the act was implemented was that many of the MPs of the day thought that few citizens of the Empire would want to reside in the UK. Indeed, the act was passed with little debate, a stark contrast from the current immigration debates in the UK. The Act was mostly repealed in 1983. Both nationality and national identity are currently collected in social surveys, such as the Labour Force Survey and the Annual Population Survey.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
The word 'English' as we know stems from Angle-ish ( Angles and Saxons), who settled here from what is now Germany. Churchill called us 'the British race', and the phrase struck a chord, even if technically incorrect.
A cohesion grew up between English, Scots, Welsh and N. Irish which overlays German tribal origins. We are islanders, not Continentals.
We don't need a foreign 'social contract' (Rousseau, Hegel, nor Marx for that matter). Our island genius which gave us Magna Carta is unique.
We don't for the most part call ourselves 'citizens' : we are still the Queen's subjects, with sanctions.
The American Catholic Encyclopedia (sic) Caxton, 1910, states, "When allowance... has been made for the mistakes due to several centuries of undiscriminating admiration, the charter remains an astonishingly complete record of the limitations placed on the Crown at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and an impressive illustration of what is perhaps a national capacity for putting resistance to arbitrary government on a legal basis."
Under Magna Carta that arbitrary government is the EU while our Constitution is being ignored by ministers who are effectively agents of a foreign power.
Last evening's burlesque presentationt of Magna Carta on the BBC One Show underlined
the need to restore its potential - as Churchill forecast could happen under threat, as now.
In some ways they're doing what the post-war Labour government did:
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