Immigrants get it from right and left!

You'd be wondering why so many would-be immigrants try so desperately to get into Britain. On the one hand (the right) they've got Nick Griffin sizing them up as potential "racial foreigners" and on the other hand (the left) they've got the hapless Jacqui Smith viewing them as potential terrorists and anti-social foreigners. Not much of a warm welcome there!

Most sane and rational people want a firm and fair immigration system. One that is palpably open to simple understanding and not bound up with so much red tape and regulations that "experts" have to decipher it all. The BNP has come up with some frightful tome called the "Language and Concepts Discipline Manual". This is apparently to keep the BNP faithful from straying into illegal talk but encouraging them to use words that convey the "message". Which is that if you have a skin colouring that is on the darker side of Robert Kilroy-Silk's you get to be put in the "racial foreigners" camp. A camp that may one day have barbed wire all around it.

This is a policy (well, not even a policy, really!) that is high on hatred and low on logic! Griffin has taken Humpty Dumpty at his word and made "racial foreigner" mean what he wants it to mean. All very distasteful.

Then we have the case of the twelve Pakistani students rounded up on terrorist charges, the very same ones that got Bob Quick to resign, only to find that the police can't charge them with anything. The whole thing appears to be a storm in a teacup. Or a cockup. Or worse.

Now that the police have done their bit, these students are still deemed unsavoury characters so have been turned over to the UK Border Agency. Jacqui Smith has become judge and jury and they are going to be deported. Nice one! If I were a Pakistani contemplating coming to study in England I'd have serious doubts running through my head. Because the way the expenses-cheating Home Secretary thinks, they are guilty just because they are Pakistani. This is utterly monstrous. She should have the guts to tell the Pakistan government that ALL their citizens are seen by the UK government as potential terrorists.

Some of them are protesting their innocence in court. It's the very idea that, because no charges were made, some other method needs to be used to "get them". This government is always spinning that they are fighting terrorism but mostly they are not. New Labour's bungling of security issues only feeds the very thing they are claiming to be against. Now Asians living in the UK are disturbed and upset by the thought that they are perceived as a trojan horse.

They must feel like they are in the Charge of the Light Brigade. "Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them...."