Immigration, Immigration…

‘POOR old Trinny is in something of pickle this morning.

”No, your mummy’s the woman who looks after you on my day off”

If she votes Tory at the next election, she’ll be supporting a party that wants to set quotas for the number of immigrants and asylum seekers entering the country.

And you know what that means – it’ll be even harder to find an au pair for little Jake and Prunella.

This is just one of the problems the Tories’ announcement – taken out in a full-page advert in the national press – has thrown up.

For another thing, the Telegraph’s political sketch writer, Andrew Grimson, thinks the Conservatives are cutting their own throats.

”Howard fails to realise that immigrants are the natural Tories,” says the headline to his piece.

And, you’d be right in saying those are immigrants just like Tory leader Michael Howard’s own family who came to these fair lands from Romania in the 1930s.

”I came from an immigrant family,” said Howard as he sat on the stage at a packed press conference.

With would-be Home Secretary David Davis at his side, the pair delivered their party’s plan to solve the immigration debate.

But many now cry ”unfair”. If Howard can do it, they argue, then why not others?

Well, the Times says that many may not be genuine refugees looking for asylum. Some may just be searching for better pay, the so-called economic migrants.

While this argument may well hold water with many voters who read stories about what appears to be a loss of control at the borders, to others it is just awful.

The Independent leads with ”GREAT BRITONS?”, its cover dedicated to the woman who arrived in the UK with £5 in her pocket and created Patak’s, the family food firm with an annual turnover of £50m and staff of 600 workers in the UK.

”Under Michael Howard’s plans such success would not have been possible,” the paper says.

Only it might have been because Howard is not seeking to mine the waters around the coast and employ submarines to sink ferries, li-los and anything a wannabe Brit is paddling over on – he wants to set a quota.

But he might not be able to do this even if by some miracle he becomes the next Prime Minister.

As the Telegraph says, directives already signed by the Government would prevent the UK withdrawing from the 1951 United Nations convention on refugees.

So, it seems that even if Howard is elected, nothing will change.

Which means that Trinny and her ilk can for once raise a glass to those meddling foreign bureaucrats. And then get Svetlana to clean it…’

Posted: 25th, January 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink