"This overcrowded little island" - there are more people emigrating every year than immigrating, so that really doesn't stand up. And your man Tony Blair was on TV last night taking pride in the fact that unemployment here is now lower than in the rest of Europe.

The papers have been trying to selll us the idea that the 58 people who died were some kind of anonymous mass of humanity being shipped around from continent to continent like so much cattle. They didn't say "bunch of coolies", but that was the underlying message.

Then we saw the film of them hanging around in in Belgium, a bunch of ordinary kids, like any bunch of sixth-formers on a school trip abroad, a bit tired, some of them bored, some excited. Most of the way from China they'd probably come by plane and train and bus. For the final trip into England, with the frontiers sealed so tight, they took the risk of allowinmg themselves to be smuggled in by a container lorry, and it turned out disastrous.

Somebody advised them badly, crimninally so, and they died as a result. But the blame doesn't just lie on imcompetant travel agents. And w've all known those in our time. The fact that these travel agents were acting outside the law doesn't make them that all that different from the ones that turn up on the TV consumer programmes after booking holiday makers into hotels that haven't been finished. But they aren't the only ones to blame - the people who nailed the frontiers shut have something to answer for.

And as for the things about England that have got worse. Things like the litter in the streets and the yobs and the football hooligans and the surly scowls and the unfriendliness that hits you like a blow when you come back from Ireland for example - all that - that's not the doing of the newcomers, it's the native English, for all kinds of reasons noone has satisfactorily explained, though I think the politics and economics of the 80s and 90s has a lot to do with it.

There are so many great things about the native English way of doing things - there is a tolerance and an odd sense of humour, and a disinclination to take themselves too seriously and an instinctive evasion of authority, and a willingness to cooperate. Like the little girl in the nursery rhyme "when they're good they're very very good - and when they're bad they're horrid". And you can say the same of the people of every country, but different places have different ways of being good and of being horrid, and maybe mix the two sides in different proportions.

(And Filbert, get off your high horse. Of course in a pub, I'd offer a stranger in a conversation a seat, and show him where the coat hooks were. And the point about names isn't that there's anything special about your name and of course anyone could use a variation of it without causing a problem. But as it stands there's nothing to stop anybody using exactly the same name, and saying things that would make you look a right eejit. And that kind of thing has happened here before. If you want to have a discussion about why you might not want to get rid of the GUEST tag on your name and so forth, start another thread for God's sake. In this one it's an irrelevant distraction.)