I think that we need to be a little careful in any condemnation of immigrants to the UK. If you can trace your ancestry back several hundred years with no foreign relatives great - I doubt that many in the UK could do that, but it doesn't mean that, at one time, your distant ancestors were not part of an invading force.

Just a glance back at the history of the British empire will show that, at one time, our ancestors invaded a number of other countries and I would guess that the people in those countries could have said "They do not share the same history, religion, language (in many cases)or sense of cultural identity as the rest of us "natives". Many of them continue to wear strange clothes, worship strange Gods, and speak in unfamiliar tongues" In many cases our ancestors appropriated land belonging to those natives by force. They also made it a practice, in many cases, to convert the natives to Christianity and to overlay their own culture with that of the British.

I agree that illegal immigrants need to be checked and, when the law is broken, they should be deported without delay. I'm also aware that, without the influx of West Indians in the 50s our hospitals and transport systems would have been in real trouble. The unfortunate thing is that it is the troublemakers who get the publicity, not those who work to make a life for themselves and their families.

Many of us, if we really look carefully, will have some vestige of prejudice within us. The fear of anything different, be it skin colour, language, religion or culture, can leave us feeling uneasy. The thought of our own racial heritage being mixed with one that is unfamiliar to us - brown babies instead of pink blond ones, for example - may bring these fears to the surface, but I believe that it is possible for most of us to recognise and come to terms with those feelings and to go someway toward understanding that, under the skin, we are all very much alike.