Fight ! Fight ! Fight !

Brute Anderson :

"Britain exists for the benefit of the British. Foreigners are here by sufferance. If they become a nuisance, they should be deported."

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown :

"We immigrants should withdraw our labour for a day. I feel ashamed of being an immigrant. We take the abuse when we should be rising, as they are in the US."

Brute : "There is no case for admitting Kosovan gangsters or Somali criminals"

Yazza : "Any man with swarthy skin is now suspect"

Brute : "immigration has worked to our advantage, by controlling wage inflation"

Who's this 'our', paleface ?

Yazza : "Have you noticed, no businesses join in the demonisation of migrant labour ?"

At last the Indie comes out in support of unfettered capital !

Brute : "If we find ourselves apparently bound by international conventions on refugees and asylum which pre-date mass air travel and are reminiscent of the era when all the political refugees in London couldhe accommodated in the British Museum Reading Room, we should repudiate them. If we find ourselves restricted by international laws which oblige us to treat foreigners as if they were British we should repudiate those as well. After the war, the shattered nations of continental Europe, whose legal systems had been polluted by dic tatorship and occupation, felt it necessary to rebuild them according to abstract international principles. Forty years later, the nations who had escaped from the Soviet empire also decided to draw on others'experience in order to introduce the rule of law. Hence the popularity of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

In Britain we had no problem with either human rights or the rule of law. We had enjoyed both for more than two centuries. We signed the ECHR to encourage the foreigners, not because we thought that it could ever be needed here. In the 1960s we abolished the death penalty, legalised homosexuality, liberalised divorce and permitted the mass murder of foetuses - which now seems to be regarded as a human right - without foreign help.

Today human rights legislation incites prisoners to spend their idle hours dreaming up compensation claims, while schoolmasters wonder whether they are entitled to confiscate their pupils' mobile phones. Those who believe in Britain for the British also believe that our people should elect our Parliament to make our laws,and that legal disputes should he adjudicated by our judges. Those who think like that take a benign view of British history. They feel grateful that they were born to a double privilege: the Queen's subjects, they are also British citizens. They believe that over the centuries their country has been a powerful force for good. At least until the port has been circulating they will be too modest to attribute this to moral superiority. They will merely point to the geopolitical advantages ofthe English Channel.

As an island, we were insulated from the ravages of foreign wars. We should now exploit our insularity, both legal and geo graphical, to protect us from the ravages of foreign judges and uncontrolled immigration. Whether in Nato or the EU, it might be necessary to give up some righhts to take our own decisions, making lesser conces- sions to achieve greater goals. But we remain sovereign. That is a prospect which appals those who take a different view of British history: the Ken Livingstone campp. To them, our history is a criminal record of oppression and exploitation. It is not a matter for pride but for apology (there have been moments when Tony Blair seemed to endorse that view). Whenever Britain was in dispute with another nation, Britain must be in the wrong (until the blessed day when we quarrel with George Bush's America). It would be absurd to suppose that we could dispense with the EHCR - if anything we need it more than the other Europeans do.

The Livingstonians so dislike their country that they wish to transform it out of recognition. To them immigration is an agent of irreversible cultural change : the more disruptive and less assimilable the immigrant, the better."

Yazza : "Why didn't we move to Canada when we could have ? We need to say enough is enough. Immigrants, refugees and their descendants are in this together. We should launch an Immigrants Proud campaign, organise nationwide marches and boycotts, monitor speeches by politicians and rain down objections on those who play this card, expose bigoted bureaucrats and officials, engage in robust debates with academics, boycott media outlets guilty of serial hostility against immigrants and so on. To accept animus in perpetuity as a condition of citizenship is an intolerable deal and we should now be bold enough to reject it."