Red Tide

What I would like, just for once, is for a politician to stand up and say that immigration is a good thing.

We've had thousands of years of people coming to this country, bringing fresh ideas and enriching our culture (and occasionally raping and pillaging, but you take the rough with the smooth). If somebody has the gumption to travel halfway round the world and then knuckle down to working then fair play to them. I am proud to live in a country that is regarded as being free and fair, and it makes me sick to think that we are deporting people back to barbarous regimes where their lives are in danger in order to meet some mythical quota of 'acceptable' immigration.

I am angry with Gordon Brown though. He should have been honest yesterday, rather than glad handing the Rochdale pensioner and then letting his true feelings slip later. Somebody once said that a gaffe is when a politician accidentally says something true, but this is a monumental blunder and an open goal for the Murdoch press.

For years the mainstream parties have followed the tabloid line by using coded rhetoric about 'hard working families' who are 'worried' by 'mass immigration' and 'opening the floodgates', and Brown has followed suit to grub a few extra votes. In doing so, he has given himself a huge hostage to fortune, that he could so easily have avoided.

Thinking back to 1997, I remember the sense of optimism that the sleaze, incompetence and arrogance of the Thatcher and Major years was at last on the way out and that things would get better. Since then, we have had futile and bloody wars, petty corruption, economic meltdown and the biggest erosion of civil liberties that I can ever remember. Brown has nosedived the Labour Party into the ground and Cameron is a slick frontman for the usual suspects who have been biding their time for the last thirteen years.

Can Clegg make a difference? I sincerely hope so ...