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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Stewart Lee

At £38,700 for a foreign-born spouse, how many could the Tories afford?

Illustration by David Foldvari showing hands of slightly different shades, both wearing wedding bands, but with a barbed wire fence separating them.
Illustration by David Foldvari. Illustration: David Foldvari/The Observer

Without the foreign genes of foreign husbands and foreign wives to strengthen the British gene pool, the tragic mental deficiencies that caused 52% of the country to vote for the idiocy of Brexit will only become more pronounced, consolidating the irreversible death spiral of our already internationally pitied realm.

The perma-patsy home secretary, James Cleverly, “liked Stewart Lee a lot better when he was funny” and continues to feign conviction while defending the indefensible. But on Monday, Cleverly revealed that British citizens will now need to earn £38,700 a year before the foreign person they have married can live in the UK. This figure represents a 20 grand rise from the current threshold of £18,600 imposed on anyone unlucky enough to fall in love with a foreigner. The policy is the latest manifestation of the anti-immigration culture wars that are the death throes of this gasping dry wank of a government, malignantly salting the earth for its cursed successors.

But maybe Cleverly has crossed a line here. For example, Tiny Tim Stanley, a whey-faced Brexiter from Britain’s worst newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, and a journalist invited to enjoy the hospitality of Rocco Forte at his Brexit Battalion Media Corps celebratory dinner in 2020, realised on Monday that 75% of us earn less than the required foreign spouse fee. A suddenly sad Stanley asked on X: “Is it fair to limit family formation to the rich?” No. It isn’t. And it is morally wrong to deny the exotic pleasure of foreign romance to three-quarters of the population, unless they are just romancing foreign waiters on a package holiday. But of course, this tax on love won’t affect many of those backing or implementing it, namely, wealthy Tories and Brexiters festooned with foreign-born spouses.

Chief anti-immigration Brexiter Nigel Farage has had two foreign wives, German Kirsten and Irish Gráinne (though Irish spouses can still be taken irrespective of their suitor’s income), but recently earned £1.5m from being allowed to push his far-right agenda largely unchallenged on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, while Ant and Dec cackled like twats. Farage’s ITV blood money alone, in isolation from his other hate-derived wealth, would have allowed him to import 38 foreign wives this year.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is married to a Chinese lady, and his annual salary of £154,089 would enable him to get four foreign wives into Britain a year, as would the similar salary of his colleague the Welsh secretary, David TC Davies, who currently enjoys the comforts of a lone Hungarian wife. Meanwhile, the outgoing immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, has an Israeli wife and a personal wealth of more than £10m. This would allow him to buy in at least 258 foreign wives who, when not engaged in coitus, study, employment or homemaking, could paint over refugee children’s murals.

The security minister, Tom Tugendhat, has a French wife and reportedly holds a stake in two firms awarded £17.8m of government contracts during the pandemic. If those companies’ Covid crisis payouts were parlayed into foreign wives, and the foreign wives transferred to Tugendhat in the form of dividends, the member for Tonbridge and Malling would have found himself sitting on a grand total of almost 460 foreign wives during the pandemic period alone, enough to satiate even the most jaded palate.

But Tugendhat’s spousal dividend would be peanuts compared with that of prime minister Rishi Sunak. His personal family wealth was recently put at £529m, while a company owned by the family of his Indian wife has reportedly received £172m of public sector contracts. The total of those two figures, £701m, would allow Sunak to ship in 18,113 wives; so many wives in fact that, if he had any basic human empathy, he could redistribute them to people denied foreign wives by the cruel policies of his own government.

Like, for example, the loyal “red wall” worker, whose hopes and fears Sunak’s party exploited, dreaming of the mail order bride that is his by rights, who now finds his romantic dreams thwarted by his Brexit saviours. And before you accuse me of stereotyping, I once paid out an expensive ransom to a misled expat relative’s partner for a stepbrother I never met, who was apparently kidnapped by Filipino pirates.

In Chaucer’s 14th-century verse epic The Knight’s Tale, the captive warrior Arcite declares his philosophy of love. “Who shall give a lover any law?” he opines, idealistically. “Love is a greater law, aye by my pan,/ Than was ever given to earthly man./ And therefore statute law and such decrees/ Are broken daily and in all degrees./ A man needs love, despite thoughts in his head./ He cannot flee it though he should be dead.” Aaaah! Bless!!

You’d think that Chaucer’s universal romantic truth would stand the test of time, wouldn’t you? But even Chaucer, who could imagine a man’s bare arse coming out of a window and farting in another man’s face, and who could also imagine loads of friars living in the devil’s anus, and who even imagined Robin Askwith doing a massive hot wee over the people of Saffron Walden’s upturned faces, could not have imagined anything as vile as James Cleverley.

The paperwork to get my children the Irish passports they are entitled to continues apace. It is a great comfort to me. Should they have the misfortune to find their hearts stolen by foreigners, and should they have the strength of character to choose their careers for worth, not money, then perhaps they will be able to find somewhere in the world that welcomes them whatever, even if it has to be far away from this miserable, loveless Tory Brexit shit-hole. Yes, James Cleverly, I said “shit-hole”. You and your ilk have made this country a shit-hole. Shit-hole. Shit-hole. Shit-hole.

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