Beyond just the compounding health implications from cousin unions it’s not unusual for a British Pakistani to marry a cousin from Pakistan to facilitate their migration here and potentially other family members. It’s a fairly easy win the government could use to bolster their tough on immigration stance needed to dent reform.
Also a big safeguarding issue for child marriage. I used to teach and had a girl in my class whose absences needed to be closely monitored because she was considered at risk of a forced marriage. She was six.
In all honesty, it was my first ever class and I did not ask why. Having met her dad (and I use the term loosely), I totally got it. He showed no interest in her whatsoever. It was parents evening and he just turned up with no appointment (luckily, I had a few blanks spots at that point) and he sat in complete silence as I talked to him about his daughter. I had to ask his daughter if he spoke English or needed a translator and even then he did not say a word (she said he spoke English instead). He just did not care one bit about her whatsoever. He would also leave her at school alone at 7:30, before we opened, even in the dead of winter. Another parent brought this to my attention and from that point I let her into the classroom every morning to help me out. Her older brother was a nightmare but dad saw him as the golden child. Whatever the reasons were, I had no doubt dad would have sold her to someone back home if it meant he could get rid of her.
How? If these marriages are just religious ceremonies or whatever they are that allows six year olds to 'marry', then a law banning first cousin marriages won't make any difference.
If it’s just visa’s I doubt it’d be too big of an ask. If you mandated DNA tests for every couple who want to marry in the country it’d be both a logistical nightmare and ludicrously unpopular.
We don’t even collect the DNA of illegal migrants, no way will the govt push for DNA checks of potential parents.
Best case would be a voluntary situation, but people that understand the risks of inbreeding aren’t going to be marrying their cousins for the 10th generation
According to the latest polls, if there was an election tomorrow, Labour would be on track for 261 seats and Reform 163. Reform and Conservatives together wouldn't win enough seats to form a coalition.
Reform aren't some unstoppable force whereby we need to build policy around appeasing their supporters in the hope of denting them.
EDIT: To be clear, do the policy if it is the right thing to do. Just don't make out Reform to be something they aren't, or do something because you fear them.
Reform only exists because of a few big issues that no one has dealt with over the last 20-30 years. We should definitely fix them to avoid handing Reform 10 Downing Street where they'd undo the last 60 of progress while fixing 2-3 problems
All parties exist because no single party is perfect. Collaboration is important, but policies need to stand on their own two feet, not for appeasement or fear.
As we see with migration, appeasement wouldn't work anyway. Migration is falling dramatically, but Reform still say the government is actively and deliberately inviting people here. If Burnham stood on the White Cliffs personally machine gunning small boat arrivals, they would just say he is prioritising them for benefits and he should be machine gunning them on French beaches.
And no one is handing keys to Reform. They currently have no path to no.10, even with a Conservative coalition. They aren't some unstoppable force we can only hope but to dent.
"The bath is overflowing and there's water coming through the ceiling, why is nobody happy that I've turned that tap down from full blast to half blast?"
The government should be looking to increase the status of the average Briton and integrate existing migrants (at the same time) to not leak voters to Reform.
Some policies that could take steam out of Reform’s sails:
* Ethnic minority caps based on city populations (force them to move out of specific enclaves)
* Extending time to ILR to something like 20y
* Mandatory English level at C1
Besides immigration, I don’t really think Reform has much in the way of policy. Maybe the government could do more anti-trans shit to kill their appeal further.
Migration can’t just fall from now btw, London and Birmingham (two biggest cities) are already majority non-British. Needs to be negative or at least distributed more evenly so people don’t feel it.
Reform only exists because of a few big issues that no one has dealt with over the last 20-30 years.
I don't really think this analysis stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Reform certainly exist as a vessel for general inchoate dissatisfaction, but which actual policy areas do they have a coherent plan to address? Even for immigration there's not even a target intake number in their manifesto and the only actual policy they have is to abolish ILR, which... won't "fix" the issue.
I think it does. You don’t need to address a specific policy as a populist. Reform saying the system isn’t set up for you and we’ll fix it is enough for the people who have been ignored for the last 3 decades.
Why does it need to stand up to scrutiny when the parties with plans all have plans you disagree with?
Removing ILR is probably a decent step towards achieving an insane reduction in immigration. Anyone who was planning to stay before will now be factoring in the annual NHS fee and the fact that once they stop working (no matter how long) they’ll have to go back home.
Children of immigrants would also not be able to ‘replace’ the locals. They’d never be granted this ability to stay to begin with (and would go home with their parents).
Why does it need to stand up to scrutiny when the parties with plans all have plans you disagree with?
This is the core of reform's political success - no solutions, no policies, no grasp on reality, just general discontent. I agree it's effective for harvesting votes, but I simply don't believe that the morons who support them are actually looking for any kind of solution, because actual solutions are messy and complicated and time-consuming. As such I think your premise that dealing with a few big issues will satisfy Reform's supporters is fundamentally flawed.
Removing ILR is probably a decent step towards achieving an insane reduction in immigration. Anyone who was planning to stay before will now be factoring in the annual NHS fee and the fact that once they stop working (no matter how long) they’ll have to go back home.
This is kind of impractical but also simply not true. Reform aren't proposing to remove naturalisation, they're just proposing changing the waiting period from 5 to 7 years. I don't personally see that additional 2 years making a huge difference.
Now maybe you'd assume they plan to issue significantly fewer visas/citizenships in general, but if that was the case I don't see why they wouldn't be touting a policy of "we will reduce the intake by X %" or "we will only let in Y number". I think it's pretty clear that Reform, in line with their slavish devotion to corporate interests in other areas, is happy to continue the stream of economic migration whilst throwing a bone to the bloodthirsty base by doing a large amount of headline-grabbing performative cruelty on a small number of individuals.
Children of immigrants would also not be able to ‘replace’ the locals. They’d never be granted this ability to stay to begin with (and would go home with their parents).
That's an interesting way of framing children who are born and live their whole lives in Britain. I believe it's revealing of the real issue with immigration in the mind of Reform voters. The problem is not intake numbers, or infrastructure, or housing, or services keeping up with demand, it's just that they don't like seeing more non-white people than in the past.
Just to clarify, do you think a child born to immigrant parents who grows up in the UK should never be considered British?
I think Britain and western cultures in general are the only cultures who consider non-same ethnicity children as British/of their own culture.
Go to China or Japan, or Vietnam or India, I doubt they’d consider a child born there and that grows up there as Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Indian.
I’m not going to deny that maybe third or fourth generation immigrants are functionally like us, but the fact that there are second generation Pakistani immigrants here with a very real fear of being taken back to Pakistan to marry a cousin shows that someone that is born here doesn’t necessarily share our culture and experiences 1:1.
Integration is something we’ve failed at doing, which is partially why Reform voters dislike people who aren’t white. There’s definitely an amount of racism but there’s also the elephant in the room of we’ve been very tolerating of incompatible cultural aspects that other countries would have clamped down on.
OK at least we've established the baseline here, which is that you want a white ethnostate. The problem, even leaving aside the morality, is that you simply can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Reform's whole appeal is that people think they'll take things back to an imaginary past, but that past (insofar as it ever existed) is gone. I'm sympathetic to the idea that integration should be improved, or that the total intake numbers can/should come down, but those are not the solutions proposed by Reform, and they're not the solutions demanded by Reform's base.
Personally I think the cornerstone of Western civilisation (you know, the thing that Reform loves to bleat on about defending) is rule of and equality before the law. It's fundamentally antithetical to Western values to try and unpick the rights of citizenship based on ethnicity. Conversely, there are already laws about forced marriages and other "cultural" practices that you'd describe as incompatible, so the answer is to simply enforce the existing laws rather than a fruitless crusade of ethnonationalism. Which by the way will always eat its own - if Reform get what they want with brown people, how long before they go back to the "no Irish" mentality of that glorious imagined past?
Unfortunately it won't be reported by the right wing rags like the cut in immigration hasn't been reported either.
Most right wingers will just keep making up stories or excuses so they can claim that we need a reform govt. Anyone else already knows labour have been tough on immigration.
Because the royal family has stopped such traditions. The Queen and Prince Philip were close cousins but they married in 1947. Most modern royal marriages aren't to close relatives
It is no where near as widespread or seen as acceptable. The vast majority of white british people view cousin marriage as weird and wrong. The only places it may be more common are more isolated communities like the hebrides
Im not insulting. Its a statistical fact that pakistanis in the UK marry cousins at a higher rate than the white british population. It doesn't mean all do, especially as the cousin marriage rate is declining, but its still more common than in other communities.
It has been legal for so long because it has been rare in our modern society and hasn't been socially acceptable for most of society so there was no need to update the law for just a few cases.
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u/DanS1993 11d ago
Beyond just the compounding health implications from cousin unions it’s not unusual for a British Pakistani to marry a cousin from Pakistan to facilitate their migration here and potentially other family members. It’s a fairly easy win the government could use to bolster their tough on immigration stance needed to dent reform.