Moorhen chicks on the Curate's Pond

Ah, the cycle of nature ! Score for the last fortnight :

2 cockerels and a hen taken by the fox - all pinched off the back lawn around six in the evening. The cheek of it. Obviously feeding cubs. Poor hens are being kept in their runs and I'm cutting down some of the garden greenery to give a clear field of fire from the house.

Six moorhen chicks on the pond - of which two weeks later three or four still remain, despite cat, crows, magpies. Ahhhh ! They get into the hen-run to pinch food, then can't get out, so we've handled most of them.

More ambivalent Muslim opinion.

"The Populus survey for The Times and ITV News has found that more than one in ten thinks that the men who carried out the London bombings of 7/7 should be regarded as “martyrs”. Sixteen per cent of British Muslims, equivalent to more than 150,000 adults, believe that while the attacks were wrong, the cause was right."

Bob Rowthorn speaks the obvious.

"If you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it. What you cannot do is turn it from being false into being true. And the Government's claim about the economic benefits of immigration is false. As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.

Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.

The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions.

For low-skilled Britons, the result is that there are only two options: very low pay or unemployment. The economy becomes dependent on a constant influx of immigrants who are willing to accept low pay and poor working conditions. That is what Labour ministers mean when they insist that "public services would collapse without immigrants".