Documents, Rain Dog? And what documents do you suppose refugees in overcrowded small boats might have? Suppose they did have documents. Would you care to tell us how that might help the situation?

I should like to robustly defend Gary Lineker on a couple of fronts. First, he is not a political correspondent, a Newsnight interviewer or a newsreader. As far as I'm concerned, he is as fully entitled to exercise free speech to as everyone else. Of course, using our right to free speech exposes us all to potential praise, ridicule or condemnation, which is as it should be if we do believe in free speech. But these scurrilous attempts to have him gagged, reprimanded or sacked for saying something outside of the BBC and unconnected with football, or remarks that his comments are "unacceptable," are simply confected Tory outrage. Second, you don't have to agree with him, though if you examine his comment about thirties Germany a bit more closely there are plenty of parallels, particularly with regard to the demonising of people who "don't fit." That regime also found ways of denying citizenship (ring a bell?) and getting certain sections of people in his country characterised as non-persons. All of that pandered to a population that was easily manipulated, after years of privation and the global depression, into finding someone to blame. Ring any more bells? What he was saying was meant as a warning as to how things could go if we don't wake up. Entirely valid, in my view, though no-one's saying you have to agree in part or whole, and his language was calm and measured (he didn't inflame matters by using the words "Nazi" or "Hitler," for example).

Finally, there's the gobsmacking hypocrisy of his Tory critics who will do anything to besmirch anyone seen as a bit leftie, or, of course, the BBC. The hallowed Tory-donor chairman of the Beeb was a political appointment, made by the man for whom the said appointee had just fixed up an eight hundred grand loan. Mudcat is a family show, folks, so mild swearwords only, please...

(However, I'm having to internalise some slightly more vicious swearwords when I contemplate the utterly toothless response of Labour to all this. I'm still weeping and I'm still a member. I'm questioning my own sanity here...)