Leave to remain

My parents came to this country as refugees in 1947, having fled their homeland after Russia’s invasion of it during the Second World War. They landed with £1 between them and little more than the clothes they stood up in. They had jobs with a GP and then in a hospital as a nurse and orderly respectively. My father later went to college and set up a house furnishing business which provided employment for several people. Both were also active volunteers in the community. My two brothers and I came along in the early 1950s, two of us becoming engineers and the third an architect; mum and dad became naturalised British citizens, and you have never known anyone as patriotically British as my mother. When she moved from Kent to Gloucestershire in her old age she still had as strong accent, but when people asked ‘where do you come from?’ she would draw herself up proudly and tell them ‘Tunbridge Wells’.

Contrasting the kindness, friendship, compassion and opportunity that Britain afforded to my parents, it is sad indeed to hear calls from certain quarters for foreigners’ indefinite leave to remain being revoked. It is pointlessly cruel to people who, apart from some cultural difference, are ordinary folk just like us native Britons. Except that we’ve never had relatives killed or our homes and possessions confiscated or destroyed. If you share my view that Indefinite Leave to Remain should be preserved, I’d ask you to sign our petition at http://fodlibdems.org.uk/ilr