Sunday Times, 27 May, Rod Liddle's column:
May 27, 2007
A rape conviction is better than a VC if you want to stay in Britain
Rod Liddle
Here’s a quiz. Not a very good quiz because you will know the answer before you’ve finished reading the question. Whether you can comprehend it is another matter. An awful lot of immigrants are allowed into Britain these days and very few deported because they are undesirable. However, as a nation we must draw the line somewhere. So, using your understanding of How Britain Is, estimate which of the following four aspirant British citizens has been told to get out and stay out. And which three can stay?
1) Mouloud Sihali, Algerian. Lived at Finsbury Park mosque, breeding ground of Islamic terrorism. Described in court as “unprincipled and dishonest”. Illegal immigrant.
2) Yonis Dirie, Somalian. Drug addict, armed robber and burglar. Convicted of raping a young woman in London. Illegal immigrant.
3) Tul Bahadur Pun VC, Nepalese. Won the Victoria Cross for taking out a Japanese machinegun post in 1944 in Burma single-handedly. Now 84, of unblemished conduct, suffering from heart problems and diabetes and would like treatment here. Legal applicant.
4) “AS”, Libyan. Islamic extremist involved with Milan terrorist group. Court accepts that he is likely to try to kill us all again quite soon. Illegal immigrant.
You got it, didn’t you? Old Pun’s application was rejected because - and here’s another punchline, in case the first wasn’t funny enough - he “failed to demonstrate” that he had “strong ties with Britain”. How much stronger do you want? There can be hardly a soul who wouldn’t be happy to have Pun here. And not one who could make a case for allowing Dirie, the robber-rapist, say, to get preferential treatment. Some of us would have happily dispatched him back to Mogadishu strapped to a missile.
There is no great objection to immigration in this country; the objection is to how it is done and who benefits, exemplified by the cases I quote above.
I suspect the public feels there are people who should be allowed in - people to whom we owe a profound debt of gratitude (like Pun), or those whose countries we have let down in one way or another (such as the Hong Kong Chinese or the black Zimbabweans). And yet it seems we do precisely the opposite.
Libyan and Algerian extremists who feel the regimes in their home countries are not sufficiently rigorous are allowed to stay because we worry they might be bumped off at home - regardless of what threat they pose to us.
I would vote for any party that pledged to extricate us from the international legislation that insists on such absurdities.
By then, however, it will most likely be too late for Tul Bahadur Pun VC. The Japs couldn’t kill him - but we’re not making a bad job of it.