Tuesday, January 19, 2016

UK would be wrong to test immigrants' progress in English

Demanding that immigrants learn English, testing them on their progress, is too much. No, you can't do that. Not everyone can learn a new language. The older you get the more difficult it is. Should a middle aged Englishman be barred from marrying a middle aged Russian woman who might well struggle to learn English? No, it's unnecessarily harsh.

Assist immigrants. Help them to learn English. That should be enough. And absolutely insist on English-only in school.

However, ensuring they are keen to assimilate is a different matter. Women who move to Britain - or any western country - must be full citizens, fully able to talk to, show their faces to anyone they meet, interact with.

Again, I don't think the veil should be outlawed, but if businesses don't want to serve women who cover their faces that should be their prerogative. We in the west need to see the face. It's part of how we communicate. If someone doesn't want to show me their face then I should be able to say, "You don't want to communicate with me then I don't trust you sufficiently to do business with you."

Banks and other businesses insist that motorcyclists remove their helmets. I see no problem in any business doing the same with the veil.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

"Keep an eye on Chris Christie"

George Will argues that Chris Christie is not finished by a long shot. His path to the nomination isn't as difficult as the Trump vs Cruz scenario that we're currently being fed would have us believe.

As chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 2014, Christie campaigned frenetically, dispersing more than $100 million as 17 Republican governors were reelected and seven new ones were elected. So far, only four governors have endorsed candidates: Alabama’s Robert Bentley supports Kasich, Arkansas’s Asa Hutchinson supports Huckabee, Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Maine’s Paul LePage support Christie. So 24 Republican governors, many of them indebted to Christie and all of them disposed to admire executives, have political muscles to flex.