Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

With summer approaching fast I thought I’d give my new theme a whirl and use any feedback to tidy it up a little before releasing it on an unsuspecting world.

This is the theme I was working on off and on throughout last year. It’s got oodles of options on it so I’ll likely be playing around with some of them in the coming weeks but, so far, seems pretty workable with the current settings (I’ve been using it on some other blogs for several months now).

Big pluses are that it’s fully widget enabled so no more hunting around for missing things that always seems to happen when you change a theme. Also, it’s very easy to change from a full splash background to a plain and simple one.

Now, all I need to do is talk Wendy into using it on her blogs too to simplify looking after them all…

Having started to move more seriously onto Twitter a short while ago it’s interesting to see that using the keyword approach to find people is working rather unexpectedly well and I’m finding people that I’ve run across via their blogs already.

Which raises an issue… I really should change my Twitter name to match the blog but the problem is that “ForeignPerspectives” is 19 letters and Twitter only allows 15… more mulling over required as I don’t like any of the alternatives that I’ve come up with yet (suggestions welcome!).

I’d thought originally that this change would mess me up and it implies on the Twitter screen that it would but by coincidence somebody in Belfast I’m following has done just that and it seems not to make any difference in terms of the followers that you already have. That said, it seems best to make the change early on in my Twitter life before a whole heap of people need to start remembering a different name.

No, not as an asylum seeker!

We’re following European Directive 2004/38/EC which is the directive which gives European citizens and their family members and dependants the right move to any other European country. In general terms to take advantage of this directive you need to be moving your family from one country to another. For example, if you are only British and are living in the UK then you can’t use this directive to get any residence rights for a non-European wife. However, in the special case of those who count as “people of Northern Ireland” it’s possible for a British citizen to exercise these rights by requiring the UK authorities to consider them to be Irish (see the British-Irish agreement).

Who counts as a “family member or dependant”? Basically it’s:

• the European citizen plus their spouse (or registered partner or partner in a durable [2 years or more] relationship) and
• the direct descendants of either one up to 21 (or older if they are dependant on the parent) and
• the dependant direct relatives in the ascending line of either (ie parents, grandparents, etc.) and
• any other dependant relatives or members of the household of the European citizen.

Which essentially translates as anyone who lives in the house of the European citizen in the country from which they are moving, regardless of their nationality (which paraphrases Articles 2 & 3 of the directive).Most people think they must have a visa to move to another country but if you are one of the people covered by the above paragraph then in fact you don’t courtesy of Article 5, paragraph 4 which lets you prove “by other means” that you are covered by this directive. For example, in our own case Wendy has an expired European Residence Permit in her passport thus proving that the directive applies to her so she doesn’t need a visa and neither does she need to go down the “Non-European citizen” queues at immigration control even though she’s Australian.

Now you might think that you’re sure to need a residence permit but even that’s not the case because  Article 25, paragraph 1 also has the option to “prove by other means” entitlement to the rights granted under this directive and specifically forbids possession of a residence permit to be used as a precondition for the exercise of any rights or completion of any administrative formality. Which means that, in practice, you never need to have the residence permit.

But, what rights does this directive actually give? Well, in practical terms it translates as giving anyone covered by the directive almost all the rights that a national of the country would have with limitations only in areas such as national security (eg you probably couldn’t work as a diplomat) and voting (although the European citizen can vote in local and European elections). Thus the authorities are required to treat Wendy as though she were British and had always been British.

That’s the theory, but how does it work out in practice. Well, Wendy doesn’t get any UK stamps in her passport these days and avoids the massive queues at some airports which simplifies our lives no end as we can all go through the “EU Citizen” immigration queues. She already has her National Insurance number from when we were here before but temporary ones are allocated once you start work in the UK if you don’t have one already. One current complication remains in connection with the doctor (and I suspect the dentist) which is that although the doctor’s office don’t have any problem in treating her, the Central Services Agency (CSA) are still asking for copies of her visa and residence permit which, of course, we can’t provide as we have neither and we just found out this morning that because of that they’ve told the doctor to take her off his list. That’s not really a big problem as worst case scenario from the doctor’s office end is that we fill in a temporary resident form every time we go to the doctor. It does have a potentially major upside in that as the CSA are breaking the law we could get quite a sizeable compensation payment…

So, overall, an easy, legal and free way to live & work in the UK.

One of the principal aims of the Northern Ireland education minister is to end the 11+ selection system and thus kill off the grammar school system.

However, her thinking is extremely flawed. Yes, socialism is all about equality of opportunity but it seems to me that it’s more than that: it’s about giving the opportunities to those who are able to benefit from them. Her banning of selection tests removes the ability of the education system to allocate places on the basis of ability rather than on the basis of how much money one’s parents have.

Whilst clearly it makes some sense to allocate places on the basis of distance from the school what that does is raise property prices in areas near good schools as it already has done in England. Thus the ability of a working class family to send their child to one of these “good schools” is severely diminished as they are priced out of the housing market near these schools very quickly.

Making the primary selection criteria that the child is entitled to free school meals just seems like a joke. What that really means is that those in relatively deprived areas get priority over those in areas a little better off however it also discriminates against the many families who could claim but won’t claim free school meals on principle. Taking that particular criteria what seems sure to happen is that, by and large, those who would have gone to a grammar school will go to the secondary school instead and vice versa. That’s a system that’s sure to fail everyone. How long will it take the less able pupils to do the typical one or two hours a night grammar school homeworks? Three? Four? In reality it’s not going to take long before they fall behind. Similarly in the secondary school system there just aren’t the mechanisms in place to stretch the pupils. Thus we will have a school system that will be suitable for nobody.

However, the main problem with removing selection is that those that can afford it will simply move into the private school system which seems set for a major expansion on the back of her “no academic selection” policy. Without a grammar school system many children from working class families who would have benefited from a grammar school (which is, after all, effectively a private schooling but without the cost) will lose out as will we all.

Of course, banning selection at 11 doesn’t remove selection. In France, everyone is guaranteed a place in university which seems a grand socialist ideal and so it is. The problem is that it results in a dropout rate of 50% in the first year (and is up to 70%) compared to only 8% in the UK.  Surely it can’t make sense to raise expectations unrealistically as they do in France?

The working class need grammar schools. Yes, the selection process isn’t perfect but let’s not kill off the biggest educational advantage that they’ve ever had by wiping out grammar schools.

Although I’ve had a Twitter account for ages, I hadn’t really done anything with it ’til last week.

Simple reason for that really: Twitter lets you type up to 140 characters in a message and I’m very much a long winded kind of person as y’all will know by now. Also, I knew diddly about promoting myself on Twitter so had next to no followers ie I was effectively talking to myself.

However, last week I took another look at it and found a neat way of bumping up the number of followers (Twollo)  and also found that I could add Twitter to sociable on the blog. The first gave me a way of gathering followers whilst the second meant that I could do a short tweet with a link to a more lengthy blog article and together these overcame my issues with not using Twitter.

Twollo is a slightly odd application to use. What it does is let you put in words and automatically follow those that are using them, the theory being that quite a lot of the people who you follow will follow you back thus building up your followers. It kicks in surprisingly quickly too and I picked up over 400 followers within a matter of days. It is a little odd though as you need to use words that people use within their tweets rather than actual subject so, for example, although there are lots of expats tweeting  few use the word “expat” in their tweets so they don’t appear a lot in my followers.

One other problem with it is that you quickly get to the point where you’re following 2000 people which is the initial limit. That’s solveable though Twitter Karma which lets you remove those who’ve not followed you back: all you need to do is to sit back ’til you hit 2000 then run it. You can follow more than 2000 but it needs to be balanced with followers eg with 2000 followers you can follow 2000 plus 10% ie 2200, once you hit the 2200 you can add another 10% and so on.

My initial experiments at reposting some blog posts via Twitter seem to be working in that they’re pulling a lot of new readers to the blog posts (click-through is around 5% at the moment). In theory I could repost the whole lot but in practice my current thinking is that I’ll repost the reference style ones from OurInns, some of which have already been picked up by other tweeters.

So a good start I think with a whole bunch of new readers.