Do you remember ‘in the old days’, when a car ‘went wrong’, it was because the top hose had split and you had water all over the driveway. Or your fan-belt broke and you had to wrap your wife’s tights round the engine to get home. But then cars got better. Stronger, less prone to breakdown, and much safer. And that safety used to be measured by the width of the bumpers, the strength of the chassis, the crash resistance of the sub-frame.

Not any more. I just received an email telling me that our new car’s data protection has been updated. I’ll stop wearing the crash helmet then. You just take it to the garage, where a guy called ‘Jim’, wearing overalls, a roll-up stuck in the corner of his lip, greasy spanner in his hand, will sort it out. Ok, that was a joke, which you know because Mel would NEVER let anyone dirty even approach the new car. But I feel safer knowing my data’s protected.

The immigration debate is hotting up. And has descended into a battle between Cruella de Braverman, possibly the most xenophobic of all immigrant-descendants ever to adhere to the ‘we’re here, you lot can all just fuck off’ paradigm of far-rightness made famous by Enoch Powell. And Justin Welby, the most recent incumbent of the Canterbury Archbishopship, who regularly crosses the line between ‘highest paid bible-basher’ and ‘moral conscience of Westminster’. And it is a royal battle. Without any royals involved. They’ve had more than their allotted ‘5 minutes of fame’ lately.

We all know the arguments. Its horrible to not be welcoming to the horribly dispossessed and defeated. That we would close our doors to Sudanese or Ukrainians fleeing war, or to French people fleeing Macron, or to Afghanis fleeing from the Taliban, is an abhorrent thought. Yet we need to ‘sift’ those from the less asylum-seeking and more pick-pocketing, free-loading rabble of mere ‘chancers’. All of whom, the worthy and the less so, arrive on the same boats. Run by the dreaded ‘people carriers’, who all sides of the debate rightly hate.

So here’s the tricky bit; you can only apply for asylum here if you’re already here. But you’re not allowed to come here without it and will be herded with the ‘Albanians’ (now entered into Braverman’s lexicon as a generic term for all the world’s ne’er’do’wells) to foreign lands for years and years whilst our work-from-home civil servants spend the next decade calculating which side of the ‘righteous/Albanian’ divide you sit.

Its ‘ard.

Happy Friday

A xxxx