We took them in, they tried to blow us up. What next?

He certainly did have rights at the time. The Metropolitan Police marksmen down below didn't shoot at him for trying to massacre his fellow citizens in the 21/7 plot, and I don't think that right to life is going to change. But he and the other three men convicted of planning mass murder this week also had the right to be British citizens after they fled here from the Horn of Africa, and I wonder how long that is going to last.

The Islamist terror campaign is straining our asylum system, testing its tolerance, maybe to the point of destruction.

For all the coverage of asylum, very few people appreciate that it is a gift. A safe country, Britain in this case, decides that it is too risky to leave foreigners as citizens of countries that will persecute them and grants them the right to be British instead. Clearly, the British are not going to be inclined to be as generous if they think refugees are going to say "thank you" by conspiring to blow up the London Underground.

Until now, the thought that refugees could wreak havoc in their new homeland was next to incomprehensible.

In the 19th century, Britain was happy to give asylum to Karl Marx. When European governments complained to Lord Grenville, the Home Secretary in 1871, that Marx was a notorious revolutionary, His Lordship replied with magnificent Victorian self-confidence that "extreme socialist opinions are not believed to have gained any hold upon the working men of this country". As long as Marx lived in Soho as a law-abiding citizen and never plotted to assassinate Queen Victoria or blow up Parliament, he was free to go about his business.

Since then, the opponents of regimes from around the world have found sanctuary and lived peacefully in London, even while they dreamed of revolution back home.

The only exception I can find is the barely remembered Siege of Sydney Street in 1911 when a gang of anarchist exiles from Tsarist Russia fought a gun battle in Stepney with police forces led by Winston Churchill.

Now, from Abu Hamza through to the 21/7 plotters, it is commonplace to hear of Islamists who find asylum, take state benefits and then plan mayhem.

If one bomb planted by refugees explodes, then my guess is that it would blow away British liberalism.

Already, Home Office civil servants have thought about pulling Britain out of the UN Convention on Refugees and tearing up the requirement that they can't send back terrorist suspects to countries where they may be tortured.

Many innocent people will suffer, maybe horribly, if we did. But unless jihadism is stamped out in Britain, then one way or another horrible suffering is what we're going to get..