procedure to make migrants learn English to finish ‘control’ by spouses has edifying intentions,but does he really understand the issue?A yarn used to be told to illustrate the benefits of the kind of liberal imperialism Britain liked to mediate it was spreading to what Rudyard Kipling called “lesser breeds without the law”. David Camerons latest intervention on making migrants learn English made me mediate of it. The yarn involves Gen Charles Napier, whose statue still adorns Trafalgar Square (where are the “Napier Must Go” students, or eh?),a conqueror, but also a reformer. As such, and he once told Hindu priests,protesting about the British ban on the tradition of having widows throw themselves upon their husband’s funeral pyre – suttee – that his country too had a custom. Burn the widow “and my carpenters will erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned”, Napier said.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com