Travel broadens the mind, opens you up to new ideas and makes you challenge your own way of doing things.
Travel is easy these days, and many of us spend time in another country, fall in love and marry someone of another nationality. MPs of course are just people, who presumably also like to travel, or meet people who have travelled here. Some of them also end up marrying people from other countries. That’s great, hopefully it informs their views.
In one of the immigration groups I am in someone went through the list of all the MPs and noted down those who have (or have had) foreign spouses or partners. A great idea.
I then went to check how they voted on immigration related issues . I checked only for those MPs who had non-EU spouses to whom they are currently married.
My findings: conservative male MPs voted for the #hostileenvironment, making it harder to immigrants to get bank accounts, rent houses, seek medical attention, just live their lives. I haven’t checked the income level of any of these MPs when they married, but presumably they met the minimum income requirement to be able to bring a foreign spouse into the country. Hooray for them – it’s great to see rich happily married couples living together. Shame for the 48% of us who don’t qualify. No problem, we can communicate through Skype.
Here’s the post copied from facebook. I have highlighted in red the ones who have voted anti-immigrant policies.
I checked relationship status of 650 current UK MPs using their wikipedia pages and other available online resources. 26 of them have or had a foreign spouse/partner. I think we should target them because they could relate to us more.
1. Diane Abbott (Labour) was married to David Ayensu-Thompson, a Ghanaian architect, in 1991. They had one son together before divorcing in 1993
2. Bridgen, Andrew (Conservative) married a Serbian opera signer Nevena Pavlovic in 2017.
3. Brown, Alan (Scottish National Party) has an American wife.
4. Cable, Sir Vince (Liberal Democrat) has married Olympia Rebelo in 1968 after a long courtship in Kenya, where he was working and where Olympia had been raised by her Indian parents. She died of breast cancer shortly after the 2001 general election. In 2004, he married Rachel Wenban Smith. He revealed that he wears the wedding rings from both of his marriages.
4. Jeremy Corbyn married his third wife, a Mexican Laura Alvarez in 2012. His second wife was Chilean exile Claudia Bracchitta.
5. Crabb, Stephen (Conservative) is married to Béatrice Monnier, who is French; they have two children.
6. Davies, David T. C. (Conservative) has a Hungarian wife Aliz Harnisfoger.
7. Drax, Richard (Conservative) has a Norwegian born wife Elsebet née Bødtker.
8. Flint, Caroline (Labour). Flint’s first marriage was to Saief Zammel, a Tunisian stockbroker. They had a son, Karim, and a daughter, Hanna, entertainment editor at Metro.co.uk. Flint obtained a divorce in 1990 after Zammel was arrested on charges of violent disorder and was subsequently deported.
9. Halfon, Robert (Conservative) married a Brazilian partner Vanda Colombo in 2016.
10. Hands, Greg (Conservative). He married half-German, half-Russian Irina Hundt in July 2005 in his constituency. His daughter, Helena, was born in 2006, and his son, Martin, was born in 2007.
11. Huddleston, Nigel (Conservative). Huddleston lives in Badsey, Worcestershire, with his American wife Melissa and their two children.
12. Hunt, Mr Jeremy (Conservative) Hunt’s wife, Lucia Guo, comes from Xi’an in China. They married in July 2009 and have a son and two daughters.
13. Kinnock, Stephen (Labour). Kinnock married Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who later became Prime Minister of Denmark.
14. McDonnell, John (Labour) His second wife Cynthia is a Goan from Kenya, [ex-Nairobi], who he married in 1995. They have a son Joseph.
15. Malhotra, Seema (Labour (Co-op)). She is the wife of a wealthy Indian financier, Sushil Saluja.
16. Malthouse, Kit (Conservative). Spouse(s): Juliana Farha (m. 2007). Juliana Farha (born 1966) is a Canadian writer and businesswoman who lives in London, England.
17. Pritchard, Mark (Conservative). In May 2017 he married Tamuna Kapanadze, a Georgian citizen, and a former Georgian Deputy Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
18. Raab, Dominic (Conservative) is married to Erika Rey, a Brazilian marketing executive who works for an IT firm. They have two children.
19. Shah, Naz (Labour) was forced into marriage in Pakistan.
20. Stewart, Bob (Conservative) has six children and is currently married to Swiss former Red Cross worker, Claire Podbielski.
21. Stewart, Rory (Conservative). In 2012, he married an American NGO executive, Shoshana Clark,[149] with whom he had his first child in November 2014. His second child was born in April 2017.
22. Sunak, Rishi (Conservative). He is married to Akshata Murthy, daughter of Indian businessman and billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, and has 2 daughters.
23. Timms, Stephen (Labour). He is married to Hui-Leng Lim, a Singapore-Chinese homeless project worker.
24. Tugendhat, Tom (Conservative). Tugendhat is a French/British dual citizen. His wife is a French judge / senior civil servant.
25. Whitford, Dr Philippa (Scottish National Party). Whitford has been married to Hans Pieper, a German citizen who works as a general practitioner, since 1987; the couple have a son together.
26. Zeichner, Daniel (Labour). Domestic partner Barbara Ziolkowska.
And just for good measure, I also checked the voting record of Sajid Javid, the new Home Sec. Pretty much anti-immigrant to.
Gillian's Immigration Nightmare (GIN) 