May backlash over ‘insult’

Fallout from PM’s comment about jumping queues

Prime Minister Theresa May basically called the three million citizens of other European countries living in Britain a bunch of queue jumpers. This has upset some people, because this is quite an insult.

In Britain, jumping the queue is simply not done. Not by the British people, or their long-term guests.

Keep calm and carry on? The whole reason the British — who are actually highly excitable — can keep calm is because there is a queue, and they know that if they stand at the back of it, they will eventually get to the front of it. You know who cuts in line in the British mind? Barbarians. Vikings. Foreigners.

Sometimes a clueless tourist will jump the queue and then everyone in line, collectively, begins to get twitchy and invisibly upset, until, collectively, they decide not to actually say anything out loud to the tourist because that would be rude. But they think it.

In a speech to promote her Brexit deal, May promised: “It will no longer be the case that EU nationals, regardless of the skills or experience they have to offer, can jump the queue ahead of engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi.”

Guy Verhofstadt, the Brexit coordinator for the European Parliament, went on Twitter to remind May that the three million EU citizens “living, working, contributing to UK communities didn’t ‘jump the queue’ and neither did UK nationals in Europe”.

May has vowed to reduce overall immigration, from 100,000s annually to 10,000s, and to give preference to the high-skilled, high-earning “best and brightest” over the lowerskilled, low-pay workers who currently harvest the crops, clean the hotel rooms, and care for the sick and elderly in Britain. In the future, EU citizens will not be given any preference, she promised, over someone from India or Australia.

May’s line about jumping the queue was deemed deeply insulting.

LBJ radio host James O’Brien said that May was characterising Europeans as “a cheat, as someone who is not to be trusted, as someone who will game the system . . . Why? Because they’re foreigners.”

Nor did May misspeak. It was in copies of her printed speech. Political analysts assumed that she meant it, as a bit of red meat for hardcore Brexiteers.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted: “That the case for Brexit has been reduced to such a miserable and self defeating bottom line is depressing in the extreme.”

May’s official spokesman said: “We have always been clear of the important contribution which EU citizens make to our economy and to public services. The point the Prime Minister is making is that we wish to have a global system where people’s skills are the basis on which they are able to work in the UK.”