Refugees? What Refugees? #2

Mobile CRS troops in Calais

On Wednesday I was in Calais. We went over primarily to pick up some wine, the famous 'booze cruise', but also to have a pleasant day out and a good meal. When we got there we had quite a surprise.

One of our favourite booze shops is Pidou, so we headed for the Marck branch of Pidou which is no more than three or four miles from the tunnel. Once we left the security of the tunnel area, which now resembles a high security penitentiary in a Hollywood blockbuster, we began to witness the new phase of the 'refugee crisis' or alien invasion as it actually is.

First we saw illegals just over the barrier at the side of the motorway then a handful trudging down the hard shoulder itself. None looked over thirty and I'd say most were in their very early twenties or late teens. Most had their hoods up and we didn't see a single woman.

As we left the motorway, after about ten minutes, their numbers increased dramatically and for the first time ever I saw gangs of them all around the commercial area where Pidou is situated. Many were sidling towards parked trucks and vans others were just standing around in large groups. I have  have never witnessed such numbers and the overhead signs on the motorway were warning motorists to be careful as there were pedestrians on the motorway.

Undeterred we pulled into the Pidou car park and were quite relieved to to spot our first troop of CRS officers in their transport actually parked in the car park waiting for the trouble to start, as we witnessed a couple of years ago in Vienna. Click on here to read about our experience in Austria and Germany. As we left we saw CRS units all over the area including at petrol stations and motorway service areas as well as the corner of most roads within a few miles of the tunnel.

Anybody who thinks the problem of illegal migration, begun by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is over is sadly misguided and anybody who thinks these people are poor refugees on their way to safety from persecution is clearly stupid. I've been travelling regularly around Calais and Boulogne for around thirty years and have never before witnessed such numbers of illegals, especially in that part of Calais, even when Lily Allen was rebooting her career by vising Sangatte and committing hard core virtue signalling. We have a problem and it's not going to go away.

In the end we evacuated, ironically via Dunkirk, and spent the rest of the day in the lovely Flemish towns of Ieper and Diksmuide.

As we headed back for our return on le Shuttle I received a text warning of delays at the tunnel because of security problems. Hardly surprising and we were only delayed by twenty minutes although the queues were so horrific that we had to wait to eat until we were back in Blighty and picked up a curry takeaway.

If you are unaware the CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite) are the general reserve of the French National Police and are involved in general security but are especially trained to deal with crowds and riots. They are heavily armed and resemble Robocop when they go into action, which we witnessed first hand when we were caught up in serious disorder in Paris in 2000 and after a football game in Lyon a few years later when tear gas was fired by the CRS. They are not to be messed with and the fact that they have been deployed in such numbers in the Calais area is an indication of the severity of the problem.

Lefties and Islam

Witnessing the politically correct leftie brigade bending over backwards to make excuses for the barbaric actions of thousands of muslim migrants across Europe has been a very bizarre experience.

One of the most ridiculous the excuses I've heard is that all men are capable of rape and using events at New Year to tarnish the reputation of muslims is pure racism. Nope, wrong in three ways. It is the behaviour of thousands of muslims that tarnishes the reputation of muslims, indeed if muslims have ever had a good reputation. Secondly Islam is a religion not a race, therefore criticism of it cannot be regarded as racism. Thirdly I, and millions and millions of other men, are not capable of rape.

There were also claims that one man arrested in Cologne was a citizen of the USA therefore you can't blame it on Islam. No course you can't, one man out of thousands across Europe just makes it another fine example of multiculturalism in action doesn't it?

The mayor of Cologne has decided to go head to head with Frau Merkel in the cow-frau of the year race. Rather than sort out the muslim rapists and gropers she is planning guidance for German women in how to dress and behave in ways that do not provoke the sexual deviants who have recently arrived in the Fatherland. Maybe the burka would do the trick? Maybe that's why so many muslim women are happy to cover themselves from head to foot, they know their men have no self-control.

Now the police chief of Vienna, where gangs of muslims also attacked women at New Year, has added his two schillings to the debate by warning women not to go out alone. Tell you what mate, get your police force prepared to actually protect your women from these vile bastards. If you can't do that then don't suddenly find the resources to take action when your population decides to deal with the problem themselves.

Look at muslim countries all over the world and tell me they are the kind of places you would like to live. Generally speaking women have far fewer rights than men. In Saudi Arabia women aren't allowed to drive. Throughout the muslim world execution, often in public, is commonplace, as are public floggings. In many muslim countries women guilty of adultery are stoned to death and thieves have their hands chopped off.

Everywhere muslims pitch up they demand minority rights. Wherever muslims are a majority the rights of minorities are trampled on. How then can lefties defend this and accuse those opposed to the increasing numbers of muslims in Europe racist? It is because their loathing and hatred of the country and people that have given them such freedoms and rights is what drives their destructive political beliefs. Like Islam the creed of political correctness hates the west and all we stand for. Why else would lefties excuse the excesses of Islam when they are supposed to support equality for all?

Finally, if you have to warn women how to dress and behave to avoid being groped or raped by immigrants maybe they are the type of immigrants you really shouldn't have in your country.

Refugees? What Refugees?

We are now back in Blighty after a seventeen day jaunt by train through France, Italy, Austria and Germany and quite a break it's been. Where to start?

Train travel is fantastic, especially the decadence of a splendid meal in the dining car then going back to your cabin to find the beds have been made up with lovely fresh linen sheets. Incredibly it doesn't break the bank and you don't have the completely over the top security crap to suffer that they put you through at airports. So we took Eurostar to Paris then an overnighter to Venice. A day in Venice then the pleasant train ride to Rome where we had an apartment for nine nights.

We attended a General Audience with Pope Francis in Rome, visited as many historic sites as we could fit in and managed a day trip to Naples to visit Pompeii. Wonderful country and Rome is a very special city.

From Rome we took the sleeper to Vienna, this was last Thursday (8th October). There was a crisis at Terminii station in Rome but we finally got the train. The fun started when we got to Vienna on the Friday morning.

We'd been warned about travelling by train to Munich (our next destination) and Vienna by friends before we left. We had kept abreast with the news but our friends had reliable contacts, especially in Munich and warned us that the situation was worse than suggested by the British media. We decided to take our chances as there was still nearly three weeks until we got to Vienna and Munich. The three weeks had passed and there we were.

We arrived last Friday in Vienna to find the Hauptbahnof teeming with migrants, over 95% of whom were young men in their twenties, some maybe early thirties. The atmosphere was quite threatening and outside the station, as at the Westbahnof in Vienna, there were police vans and ambulances. We are not inexperienced or particularly nervous travellers, in 1990/91 we travelled overland through Central and South America including Bogota, Colombia at the height of the drug cartels. But this was a new experience, and it was in Europe.

On Sunday we checked our tickets to Munich for the following day and found that we didn't have reserved seats, so we went to Westbahnof tickets in hand. Passing by police, ambulances and gangs of young migrants we went straight to the information stand to be told that our train to Munich the next day had been cancelled. That train hadn't run for three weeks as the border at Salzburg had been closed because of the migrant crisis.

When we got over the shock we were told that we could swap our tickets for tickets to a small town in Bavaria called Plattling and then would take a local train to Munich. It meant that we only got into Munich around 8 00pm and we would sacrifice our afternoon in Munich but at least we would be able to get back on track for our early departure on the Monday to Paris.

So on Monday we turned up at the station and boarded the train. There were still hundreds of migrants, police and so on around the station but we got into our seats and suddenly the carriage filled, just before departure with migrants. At a guess our carriage, with around 120 seats, had around 100 migrants in it. The train departed heading to Germany where we would cross the border at Passau.

We arrived at Passau to hear a voice coming down the train asking for passports. We got ours out ready for inspection. We then heard people being ordered off the train. When we looked back down the carriage the polizei were ejecting migrants without passports or ID cards from the train. Of those in our carriage the only people with Syrian passports were a family of four. All the others that we heard claimed to be Syrian but when challenged had no papers and admitted not being Syrian when pressed, they came from a whole range of countries except Syria.

The train eventually left Passau and a full train was virtually empty. Looking out of the window we saw hundreds of illegal immigrants being herded onto buses outside the station. As in Vienna over 90% of them were young males.

We've never really been beach holiday/sun worshipping people, each to his own, but this was a new experience we really didn't expect. Yes we knew there had been trouble at many stations in central and eastern Europe which is where we feared there may have been problems. But it seems the problems with migrants at Munich have been pretty well sorted after the border closure. We can only think that our route (Hamburg the ultimate destination) is now being used to funnel the migrants to Passau, presumably to be given asylum or to be repatriated.

The Hungarian government claims that up to 30,000 migrants were repelled on its southern border this last weekend. This not a refugee crisis, this is a migrant crisis brought about by the megalomaniac German Chancellor. She precipitated this crisis by opening German borders to all Syrians and dropping the necessary checks and regulations to speed up the process. That is why potentially millions are flooding into Europe overland, without any identification but claiming to be Syrian. As we saw for ourselves the overwhelming majority are neither Syrian nor refugees.

Now It's Personal Merkel!

I've said it before and I will now repeat it. Europe is being invaded by muslims. They are not refugees they are migrants. Refugees flee terror and danger and take refuge in a safe place. Once they decide to leave that sanctuary they become migrants. That's just so you know when I refer to 'migrants' who I am referring to.

Now then, I love Germany and I like the German people. But Angela Merkel I loathe. She is a political chameleon driven by a lust for power. She was a uniformed apparatchik in the old, hated German Democrat Republic and is now bullying the smaller countries in the equally hated European Union. The woman is a monster and even her coalition allies in Germany are starting to see her for what she is.

Germany, understandably I believe, still has a huge guilt complex about the last century and their grovelling to migrants is an outward sign of this complex. What precipitated the current migrant crisis was the German government deciding to relax asylum rules for Syrians. Then they announced they would accept 500,000 per year. Then they panicked and started backtracking, but it was too late, the invasion had begun. What Germany has done is to screw over Europe as they did, although in a different way, in the last century. They have financially bullied countries in the Eurozone and have now enabled the swamping of Europe by countless migrants that the populations of Europe don't want.

Thanks to the high handedness of Germany the EU's statistical office claim that only one in five of the current migrants flooding Europe are Syrians. That accounts for the thousands of dumped passports and other identity documents from non-Syrians found in Serbia, Greece and elsewhere. The papers are from Nigerians, Kenyans, Iraqis and  people from a host of other nations. They are clearly not refugees despite what the politically correct might claim.

So why is it personal now with Frau Merkel? Because in a couple of weeks time we are due to arrive in Vienna then Munich by train. Vienna has seen migrants rioting, fighting each other and the local police as has Munich. The authorities are claiming that the numbers of migrants in the coming weeks will increase. Is it really likely that the civil disorder will decrease?

This week two reliable sources, totally unconnected to each other, have warned us not to travel to Munich, especially by train. It is too dangerous. We are currently trying to check the situation in Vienna.

One of my sources has also seen reports from the authorities in Germany stating that attacks on migrants and mosques are not being carried out solely by right wing extremists but migrants of different ethnicities or different sects of Islam. There have been videos on the internet of Turks and Kurds fighting each other on the streets of Hamburg.

What Europe is doing is importing the conflicts of the muslim world, especially the middle east. Brace yourself for a rocky few years. It's no wonder that Arab/muslim countries aren't welcoming these migrants with open arms.

Migrants, Refugees and Racists

Let's clear up one lie about the current influx of immigrants to Europe and specifically Britain. When other countries, and soppy left wing do gooders here, accuse us of not taking our share of refugees remember that no other country in Europe has had up to 330,000 migrants added to their population as we did last year and over 250,000 in each of the last five years or so.

Another lie. Lefties claim the influx of immigrants in recent years has had no impact on our infrastructure and public services. Migrants live in houses, their children need education, they need jobs, they need healthcare. If an influx on the scale we have seen in recent years hasn't had an impact then services like the NHS and education have been massively overfunded with huge spare capacity in recent years. Which means that those lefties claiming that this and the last government have cut services to a dangerous level are lying.

Now to the current invasion of Europe from muslim countries. European Union rules demand that asylum seekers seek refuge in the first country they land in. Hungary quite correctly tried to stop 'refugees' moving north so their applications could be processed, but was pilloried and accused of racism and oppression. They eventually had to let the 'refugees' move north into Austria and Germany. Merkel claims to be happy to accept 500,000 of these migrants into Germany each year. The problem is once they have been validated they can move to any other country in the European Union. Germany is merely offering to act as a clearing house for immigrants. Another reason to leave the EU.

Reports from Hungary suggest that a high proportion of people claiming to be Syrian refugees are lying. Passports and other documents from  Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and other nationals have been found in significant numbers at the border with Serbia. There have been several photographs in the mainstream media of jihadists brandishing guns in Syria and photographs of the same men now climbing off boats on a Greek island claiming to be refugees. How many potential terrorists are amongst the thousands crossing to Europe?

The Syrian civil war has been ongoing for five years, why are so many people suddenly fleeing now. Why did the man whose wife and children died in Turkey return to Kobane to bury them if he fled Kobane fearing for the safety of his family? Why did the authorities and the media collude in staging the filming and photographing of the dead little boy on the beach? Turkey is a safe country, the little boys family had been given housing and welfare there for three years, so how can they claim to be refugees when they pitch up in Greece? They are clearly not fleeing any danger in Turkey.

Europe is being invaded. That is not a racist statement, it is fact. When the media thrust a sobbing woman and a child on their front page or news headlines look behind them and you will see the overwhelming majority are young, able bodied men. Take a look at film of Greeks on Lesbos having to witness rioting 'refugees' trashing the place. Take a look at film of 'refugees' rioting outside Budapest's Keleti station. Pretty violent scenes for people supposedly fleeing violence.

The gullible in this country are riding a wave of emotional hysteria, even offering immigrants their spare bedrooms. Open your eyes, look at the facts and stop calling realists racists. I always smell a rat (pun intended) when Bob Geldof jumps on the bandwagon.

Politically Correct Delusion

We may have a Conservative government but we do not have a conservative government. What we have is yet another social democrat government, which we have had for most of the post-WWII era. The exception was probably Mrs Thatcher's government, which is why she is so reviled by the sheep of the left. Whatever you think of her Mrs Thatcher put the country first ahead of vested interests, especially the hated trade unions.

I honestly can't trace a difference between Cameron and Blair, maybe apart from Cameron not yet behaving like a bloodthirsty war criminal, but there's time. Blair opened our borders to limitless numbers of migrants, Cameron welcomed over 333,000 migrants to this country last year, ably continuing the national destruction begun by Blair and his predecessors.

The brainwashed, deluded politically correct who think they are so right might scoff but this country is seen as one of the most attractive, tolerant and civilised countries in the world. If you don't agree then answer this simple question: Why do so many people, wealthy and poor, so desperately want to come and live here?

The fabric of this country is held together by the British people, our institutions that have developed over centuries and our history. These are the things that make this country such an attractive place to live. What we are doing now is destroying that which made us what we are at the behest of social democracy, which is synonymous with political correctness. No country can absorb 250,000 to 33,000 immigrants a year without being fundamentally changed. Witness the record levels of anti-Semitic attracts in the UK and elsewhere in Europe in recent years, largely due to the violent philosophy of Islam, an alien philosophy.

There is an artificial debate about the NHS and other public services, largely centred around the socialist obsession with money. I know the current leftie PC lie about immigration is that immigrants economically contribute to the country, but they don't all. A wealthy businessman coming here to set up a business may create wealth. A beggar from Romania or a barman from Slovakia doesn't add anything, they just redistribute money that is already here. There is also the question of why, with 2,000,000 unemployed we are allowing unskilled people in by the hundreds of thousands, but that's for another time.

The next question for the PC lefties is why don't immigrants use public services? Quite clearly they do, which means they don't just give economically they also take. They need schools, roads, accommodation, healthcare. If you add thousands upon thousands to your population every year of course you are draining public services. If you keep adding beer to a pint pot that is full it overflows and you stop adding beer.

But of course that is common sense, and political correctness ignores common sense and reality. Political correctness is driven by ideology and the brainwashed would rather watch the country die than admit they are wrong.

On an emotional level the politically correct suffer from emotional retardation. They get a nice warm glow by showing off how very much more 'tolerant' and 'caring' they are than us nasty realists. They feel so superior when they can attack realists as 'racists', 'homophobes' or any other 'phobe' they care to unthinkingly throw at realists. As I've said before when they can't do that they accuse realists of being brainwashed by 'the right wing media', usually the Daily Mail.

If you have any doubts about the left's disconnection from reality then look at the Labour Party leadership election. Everybody I know knows somebody who has paid their £3 to register to vote but is not a Labour supporter. Some are lefties wanting to force the Labour Party to the left by voting for Corbyn, others are people on the right wanting to wreck the Labour Party by voting for Corbyn. I'd say that I know of dozens of people who have done this and I know of only one who has had his vote rejected.

Multiply that throughout a nation of 65,000,000 people and I would guess many thousands of people have registered to vote or, infiltrated which is more accurate. But Labour are desperately claiming that there has been negligible infiltration. They have rejected about 3000 peoples' registrations and pretend the job's been done.

It's a bit like Blair claiming that opening our doors to open immigration from the EU would only result in a trickle of immigrants.

Labour Party Morons #33,001-Chris Bryant MP

Strangely the Labour Party had an open door immigration policy but now their nitwit MP Chris Bryant is apparently attacking employers for giving said migrants jobs. Or is he? Bryant is now taking a position that most Labour morons would call 'racist' if anybody else took it.

Here is the moron completely cocking up an interview on BBC Radio4:

Immigration Or The European Union?

I am a completely dedicated withdrawalist when it comes to the European Union. I want Britain out of the EU sooner rather than later, and if that means the subsidy junkies in Scotland, or elsewhere in the UK, decide to break up the Union and beg off what remains of the EU then so be it and good riddance.

But for years the problem has been that Eurosceptics, despite hard evidence, have never understood that the EU comes quite a way down peoples' list of priorities. In most elections even quite hardcore Eurosceptics will not vote solely on the EU question, which is why single issue parties have failed, be that the Referendum Party or UK Independence Party.

The crux of the problem is that if you state that obvious fact to a typical UKIP member you get an instant lecture as to why the EU is the root of everything bad in this country today. Yes, we no longer rule ourselves, but just ranting on and on without listening to people is exactly what we accuse the EU of. I lost count of the number of sympathetic people I took to UKIP meetings who were put off with what they saw as obsessive, often eccentric behaviour.  Like it or not in 21st century Britain sounding like Little Englanders turns people off. They want a party that speaks to them on a whole range of issues, not just the EU.

If we look at the announcement today that Sir Andrew Green's e-petition, about restricting immigration, gained the required 100,000 signatures in a week, compared to the year it took the petition on EU membership to reach 100,000, I think it proves the point nicely. People are much more agitated about immigration than the EU. I do believe that the majority of people would be happy to see immigration restricted and for Britain to leave the EU, but they see immigration as the more immediate problem, rightly or wrongly.

What Andrew Green's e-petition also highlights is that political correctness may have changed the way we talk about immigration, restricting our free speech on the issue by branding those opposed to immigration as racists, but it hasn't changed peoples' deeply held beliefs and concerns. More evidence that political correctness could ultimately drive decent people, with genuine concerns, into the arms of manipulative extremist parties.

More than ever the Coalition has proved the need for a political party that represents the views of the decent majority. A party a bit like the Tory Party used to be. Until then there are millions of us in this country who feel, and indeed are, disenfranchised.

I'm starting to sound like Peter Hitchens now so I'm off!

Government Still Lying And Cheating About Immigration

Since the Coalition seized power very little seems to have changed, and it's not all because the Lib Dems are pathetic pinko slobs, the Tories are little better. We are now bombing Libya, following a blood lust policy started by Blair, and we now hear that immigration is still out of control. But is anybody really surprised?

Like the last lot the Coalition bullshit the electorate with talk of controlling non-EU immigration, when it is the vast numbers of EU immigrants that needs to be checked. But we all know our EU masters won't allow us to do that, so Cameron thinks we'll fall for the Blair line that the inability to control immigration is nothing to do with the EU.

But even worse than that, and to prove what a huge bureaucratic monster of a government we are oppressed by, they have effectively given illegals, or "failed asylum seekers" an amnesty. It gets worse. They've done it to clear a backlog of files in a government department. It gets even worse. The govenment boasts that it no longer has a backlog of asylum seekers because, unlike Labour, it has dealt with the problem. More bullshit! We want the people/population problem dealt with not the filing system. 

I wonder if the government would let me off with my tax bill if I told them I had binned all the relevant paperwork to deal with a backlog?

No Spikki Inglis (Part 2)

"The second half was a crazy game and when it is a crazy game you can't control things. Why was it crazy? Because it was crazy."
Rafa Benitez - not crazy about Liverpool's draw at Wigan.

Bloody foreigners taking our jobs and not even learning the language properly! Perhaps all the English football managers should go on strike against these foreign workers.

Mind you, he has been learning English in Liverpool.

No Spikki Inglis!

More than 300 primary schools in England have a majority of children whose first language is not English.

The local education authority with the most primaries where English is not the mother-tongue of 70% or more pupils was Birmingham, with 60 schools.

The statistics were revealed by schools minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry after a parliamentary question from Labour's former minister Frank Field.

Now that statistic need not be a huge worry if those speaking English as a second language are the chldren of newly arrived immigrants who have some grasp of English and are making serious efforts to learn. My worry is that many have made little effort to learn and, with growing levels of militant Islam, have parents who don't care whether they speak the language of the infidel or not.

Language is a code, a means of communicating and that code must be as universal as possible. I do not see this as cultural or linguistic imperialism, as the left claim when this issue is raised, those most disadvantaged are the people who do not have sufficient English. Nor do I blame the children or, to a lesser extent, their parents. I blame the establishment.

The root cause of many of today's problems is the socialist revolution of the 1960s. It preached that western civilization and capitalism are bad therefore all else, especially if it loathes our western civilization, is good. It preached that society was bad and should be restructured, under vile authoritaian socialism, whilst encouraging the worst excesses of individualism that have damaged the very fabric of 'society' with a 'me, me, me' philosophy.

The very people who attack those who want to encourage integration, rather than ghettoisation, are the ones who vilify British people abroad for turning parts of sunnier climes into British enclaves. The height of hypocrisy.

Immigration need not cause problems to any country. It is those, on the left and the right, who use it for their own purposes who cause the problems. Language is the first, and most crucial step to integration, tolerance and understanding for all.

Immigration And Training

The Institute for Public Policy Research, that 'progressive' think tank, is yet again singing the virtues of mass immigration and decrying opponents as xenphobes. You really know the lefties have lost the argument when they can't talk rationally about immigration without throwing abuse like xenophobe or racist at people who diagree with them.

In this article by the IPPRs resident immigration/race obsessive Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah he is so fanatical in his obsession with immigration that even Frank Field and Tory porker Nicholas Soames are attacked for questioning the wisdom of unlimited immigration. They are hardly Hitler and Goebbels now are they?

Also in the news today the IPPR are claiming that at least 40,000 new immigrants per year are going to be needed if things such as the Olympic facilities for 2012 are going to be completed on time. What utter bollocks when we have unemployment soaring upwards. Why don't we train properly the people here now to fill any gaps in certain trades but, more importantly, why is the 'progressive' IPPR talking in this way when hundreds, if not thousands, are being laid off every week in the construction industry?

When the left rattle on about us needing immigration to fill the skills gap I agree, as long as every existing citizen who could fill the gap is doing. When the left talk about needing migration to pay pensions because of an ageing population I wonder where they find young migrants who don't age. When the left argue that we need migrants to pay forthe NHS (and I don't see 40,000 per year making a huge contribution) I wonder where they find migrants who will never use the resources of the NHS themselves, merely contribute. Finally, I have yet to find a serious academic study, other than one to justify a 'progressive' political agenda, that shows immigration making a net contribution to the host country's economy.

As long as the self-proclaimed 'progressives' continue spouting this nonsense there will be a reaction to it leading to an unfortunate growth in support for the far-right. It is the 'progressive' left's obsession with race and immigration that sees the far-right making advances, without them the far-right would be starved of publicity and irresponsible talk of unlimited mass migration worries people of all races who live in this country, sometimes driving decent non-racists misguidedly into the arms of the far-right.

Personally I support an open door policy on immigration. But if migrants can't legally make their way in this country, they receive absolutely no state benefits whatsoever and, if they try to make their way illegaly, they are immediately deported.

One last thing on the question of training to fill skills gaps. The government is now urging universities to help middle-class people who have lost their jobs, by encouraging them to complete masters degrees for example. Well forgive me but why not re-train them to be brickies, sparks and carpenters? And the City whizz kids who got us into this mess? Well they could re-train to become lavatory attendants, especialy in Salvation Army hostels.

Immigration

Here is a link to the story of the government's latest deception. Their much trumpted points system for immigrants is outlined and then, towards the end, there is a "by the way it doesn't apply to migrants from the EU".

The truth is the government has kicked in the teeth, yet again, people from the Commonwealth and elsewhere, in favour of Europeans. Oh, but is only Europeans from countries within the European Union.

Does Tha Speak The Lingo

The Skills Secretary, John Denham, has now decided that having huge chunks of the population unable to speak English is harmful to community relations. In order to improve community relations he is now advocating 'free' English lessons to immigrants who cannot speak a reasonable level of English.

Now forgive me, but only a few years back if you had the temerity to state that, and suggest a level of English was desirable for immigrants, you were branded a xenophobe at best. I never saw it as morally wrong to question the wisdom of official documents and notices being printed in numerous languages, I always felt that it was unhelpful and divisive, a common sense position I thought.

When an organisation I worked for some years ago decided to print introductory leaflets in numerous languages, I questioned the wisdom and was told it was so that we could be 'more accessible'. They didn't grasp the irony that when the recipients of said leaflets rang for assistance nobody on the switchboard, or in the organisation, could speak other than English. Massive amounts of money wasted on an empty gesture.

Now I accept that not all who come and settle here will be able to speak an acceptable level of English initially, but for anybody wishing to settle here a certain level should be a condition of entry. Some people, from any background, may meet and marry somebody from overseas, as friends of mine have done, and poor English should be no bar to their entry. However, the emphasis should be on them, from their own resources, improving their English.

When the government talks about 'free' English lessons they mean free to the recipient, not free to you and me who pay through our taxes. Where there is a real need, such as genuine refugess who are unable to speak English, then let voluntary organisations provide a service, great practice for students before going away teaching English on their gap years.