We’re a tolerant country but migrants in luxury hotels stirs trouble

OUR eternal national dilemma is that more people want to live in the UK than we can ever house, educate, employ, heal when they are sick and care for when they are old.

We are lavishly generous to asylum seekers.

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But the fact is that we will never be able to offer a British home to everyone in the world who wants one.

Their numbers are too great. Our resources are too limited.

“Get a grip!” shrieks Keir Starmer at the Government as the migrant crisis hurtles out of control.

But would Labour be any better? All the evidence suggests that Starmer’s mob would be a lot worse.

Labour act as if the migrant crisis is all the fault of the wicked Tories and their racist cheerleaders.

Labour acts as if every soul who gets out of a dinghy on Dover beach is a blameless refugee fleeing from a war zone.

And not, you know, France.

The blood runs cold at how a Labour government would cope with the migrant crisis.

Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper once vowed to put up Syrian refugees in her own home but never quite managed to get Ed Balls to clear out the box room.

Yvette couldn’t find a home for one migrant, let alone 60,000 of them.

And around 60,000 people are expected to illegally cross the Channel in small boats this year — equivalent to the population of a town the size of Macclesfield, or Margate.

The numbers — like emotions — are suddenly totally out of control.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman called the current situation “an invasion”, emotive language that offered an open goal to Braverman’s establishment enemies.

But let’s not quibble about semantics. The important issue is that 1,843 migrants found their way across the English Channel in 2019.

Last weekend, 1,000 made the same journey in just one day.

The next day, a man threw petrol bombs at an immigration centre in Dover before apparently taking his own life at the scene.

We are on the edge of a national catastrophe. The UK is a tolerant, welcoming country.

But welcoming criminals does nothing to help national harmony.

A convicted murderer from Albania, a Mr Mariglen Shoshari, 31, is currently, and incredibly, having his application for asylum considered. Hmmm — that’s a difficult one!

And kicking British tenants out of their rented flats to make space for illegal arrivals does not make our country a kinder, gentler land.

Dover’s MP has warned that greedy landlords are attempting to “cash in” on the crisis.

I am sick of this country being a soft touch. If you say you are gay, or a Christian fleeing a Muslim country, or you have been trafficked, then you get to stay. That’s all it takes.

I am sick of dumb ideas that will never work in a thousand years.

In a country with a booming human rights industry employing herds of left wing lawyers, exactly how many illegal migrants do you reckon will actually be deported to Rwanda?

My guess — none.

I am sick of those who pretend the crisis is all the fault of the wicked Tories and the racist British.

Like Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor currently advising Albania’s PM Edi Rama on how to slam the evil British Government for their heinous treatment of Albanians.

And I am sick of those who talk as if there is any lasting solution other than stopping the boats in the first place.

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No, the Royal Navy are not going to repel the boats, or sink them, or enforce gunboat diplomacy.

Because our history tells us we are not that kind of country.

But the current system is not working and if the numbers are not controlled, the UK will be a far uglier, less welcoming country than it was before.

The processing system is so slow it is comatose.

Nearly 130,000 asylum seekers and their families are currently waiting to be processed.

And 96 per cent of those who landed last year are still waiting.

Until their applications are heard — most will of course be successful — the British taxpayer shells out for their keep.

This is not a racist country but when illegal migrants are put up at taxpayers’ expense in luxury hotels, racism is actively fomented.

Can we hold out a helping hand to the genuinely needy without being a soft touch?

Can we be caring without being a nation of mugs?

Can we even learn to work with our French neighbours to stop the human traffickers? Probably not.

But the alternative is building a town the size of Macclesfield or Margate every year.

And we can’t do that, either. But this is the greatest country in the world, and that is the heart of our national dilemma.

Because if you were living in Albania or the EU, then you would probably want to live here too.

Tommy and Pam iconic

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FOR Halloween, Liam Payne dressed up as Tommy Lee while his date, Kate Cassidy, went as Tommy’s former wife, Pamela Anderson.

Then rapper Machine Gun Kelly also channelled the Motley Crue drummer, while his fiancée Megan Fox did a pretty good impression of the Baywatch babe in her busty pomp.

This is not a simple coincidence.

Pam and Tommy are iconic now, as instantly recognisable as John and Yoko or Sid and Nancy.

In our woke world where everyone is terrified of giving offence and being jumped on by the Twitter mob, Tommy Lee and Pam date back to a less complicated, fun-loving age.

Who ever thought that excessively tattooed biceps and large sun- burnished breasts would seem almost innocent?

Public have had enough

I LOVE the woman in the East End who tried to drag some beardy Just Stop Oil berk from the middle of the road.

What a shame the police didn’t have the bottle to do it.

Reggae dogs

RESEARCH suggests that dogs relax best to reggae. Really?

Our Stan deals with his separation anxiety with some soothing classical music.

Bach? No, just a little light snoring.

The adverts choc full of memories

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FRENCH author Marcel Proust took just one bite of the madeleine and it unleashed a torrent of memories that resulted in his seven-volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past.

I felt just like Proust when I heard that they are dropping Bounty from the Celebrations tub.

The chocolate commercials of my childhood came vividly flooding back.

The macho truck drivers with their sexist Yorkie bars: “Good rich and thick, a milk chocolate brick!”

The worldly sophistication of those Ferrero Rocher ads: “You’re spoiling us, Mr Ambassador!”

The Milky Bar kid acting like a four-eyed sailor on shore leave: “The Milky Bars are on me!”

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Have a break – have a Kit-Kat. The middle-class dinner parties where they passed around the After Eight mints.

Aero: “Feel the bubbles melt.”

The phallic, quasi- pornographic fantasy of Cadbury’s Flake and its choc-sucking hippy chick.

The woman in a bathing costume inexplicably stuffing her face with sweets.

“Chocolates? With your figure?”

“Maltesers!” It was the honey-combed middle that weighed so little, apparently.

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The commercial for Bounty was the closest my childhood ever got to a tropical holiday.

“They came in search of paradise,” the man said, as beautiful people stepped ashore on a golden beach. “And found . . . Bounty.”

It’s not going to be much of a celebration without the taste of paradise.

Boy’s onto a winner

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EXPECT Boy George to walk away with I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here.

He is as hard as nails.

After being sentenced to community service for the discovery of cocaine in his Manhattan pad in 2006, George was ordered to clean some of the filthiest streets in New York.

He did it with grace, grit and a defiant humour.

“I’ve always been a scrubber,” he chuckled, promising he would wear “something loud” under his street cleaner’s kit.

But what impressed me then and what I recall most clearly now, is that George said his mother – who offered to fly out and help him – had been a cleaner.

And there is no shame in being a cleaner.

When George wins big in the jungle, it will be his final step in his transition from law-breaking, drug-taking, gender-bending bad boy to national treasure.

Strictly secret

MILLIONS of Strictly viewers had exactly the same reaction to the revelation that last Sunday’s dance-off was restarted after Fleur East had a mishap with a prop.

So it’s not really live after all?