My mother Loula (pic) was a wartime bride from Greece when she married my 
English father at 16, he was eight years older and stationed there as a soldier. She arrived in the UK alone on a ship and couldn’t speak English following their very brief courtship and hastily arranged marriage. It had been love at first sight.
She was one of only a few that remained in the same Cambridgeshire town, most other Greek brides went back disillusioned. Her parents had also planned to make their new home with her in the UK, but were not allowed to stay.
I just wonder how she would fit in with the new Conservative plans to protect young foreign brides, the chances are she would be turned down, she would have ticked all the wrong boxes. And yes, it was a genuine love match, my father sadly died five years ago.
The Conservative plans outlined today by Damian Green, Shadow Immigration Minister, are obviously geared towards putting an end to forced marriages, mostly against Asian women, which end up abusive, and I wrote about here.
They include making it harder for Britons to marry foreigners, that potential spouses should be over 21 and subject to English and citizenship tests. British citizens who want to marry abroad should be made to give the Home Office notice of their plans six months in advance to prevent fraudulent and forced marriages.
Sunny from Pickled Politics has eagerly been waiting for today’s announcement. She thinks that the minimum age for brides being brought here should be 24; the Home office only recently raised the minimum age from 16 to 18.
Controversially, Conservatives also want to prevent divorcees from marrying a second overseas person for up to 10 years, primarily to prevent men who marry serially to gain the dowry, and then abandon the women. I think this may be tricky, bearing in mind that we are such a multi-cultural society and it could prevent many genuine marriages too. Of the 41,560 spouses and fiancées who came to Britain in 2005, 39 per cent travelled from the Indian sub-continent.
This is an area the Home Office should have acted on swiftly and decisively and has constantly failed to address. I’m delighted Conservatives are sending out a strong message on this, that they genuinely want to help reduce the misery of countless vulnerable women, perhaps even young men too, who are forced to marry against their will. But we must not do that at the expense of preventing genuine love matches which cross racial divides.
Share on Facebook
