I welcome the lively debate about the new Points Based/Certificate of Sponsorship system on this site. However, it is a slippery slope to the erosion of civil liberties and freedom when authorities begin to issue certificates through a central database system, when promoters have to be approved by the state in order to bring international artists over; when retina and fingerprint scanning is made compulsory. Talk to any artist in Israel/Palestine and they can tell you how slippery the slope to authoritarianism can be. The new system regulates and controls our right to invite artists and pay them to perform or collaborate with UK artists, with the minimum of fuss. This pernicious bureaucracy needs de-regulating not streamlining into a faceless database system. Where's the human connection in all this? What will happen to artistic freedom and artistic autonomy? An individual or organisation should have the right to invite their peers, friends, professional colleagues to visit and contribute, artistically, socially and intellectually. The new system is a knee-jerk, fearful reaction in the fight against terrorism and illegal immigration. It's protectionist, breeds suspicion of others, and it's parochial. Terrorism will not be stopped by the new regulations, it will not reduce unemployment in the UK but it will increase the unofficial, invisible and downright dangerous and life-threatening routes that some migrants are forced to go through in order to seek a better quality of life.

There are no borders to the petition against the UK Home Office's restrictions against non-EU artists and academics. For more information about the campaign and access to the petition, please visit: http://www.manifestoclub.com/visitingartists

'Well, everybody might be just one big soul,
or it looks that way to me.
Everywhere you look, in the day or the night,
That's where I'm gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm gonna be.

'Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
wherever people ain't free,
whevever men and women are fightin' for their rights,
that's where I'm gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm gonna be.'

Bruce Sprinsteen, The Ballad of Tom Joad