I'm not clear, Ron. You have said you think the immigration authorities have got it wrong, but you then seem to be saying that the Halle Orchestra should have suppressed this story, which would have had to mean giving some fictitious reasons for why the tour which had already been announced had to be cancelled (and they wouldn't have been believed anyway - with 100 members knowing the truth and a good few other people, secrecy would have been completely impossible, and the outcome would have been a bigger story).

I can't prove it, but I am sure that in the hypothetical couterexample I gave, people here would in fact have been at least as rude about the British Government as they were about the Americans, and probably more so. And they'd probably been pretty scathing about anyone from here who seemed to be excusing the policy.

Fair enough, some people strayed over from criticising the authorities into making cracks about the States as such. But I would imagine the same would apply the other way round, it's inevitable. Cracks about "supeedyah culchah" "bunch of crybabies" "puling crybabies." And there hasn't exactly been a chorus of disapproval of the immigration authorities from Stateside so far as I can see,