Afternoon:
15°c
Welcome to Britain, the deadly Australian redback spider! Welcome, too, you crazy ants and bigheaded ants, you pharaoh ants and ghost ants! Welcome, Argentine ants - the unpleasantness over the Malvinas is forgiven - and German cockroaches! Welcome, the melon-loving stink ant, with your post-mortem aroma of rotting coconuts!
A Sunday newspaper yesterday reported this roll call of new immigrants to our shores, and though I'm delighted - the redback is a pretty spider, which will probably only kill you if you bite it - tedious people will doubtless call for Theresa May's resignation.
It was sad to see the Home Secretary panicked into making such a hash of the whole Brodie Clark thing. Caught red-handed implementing a sensible borders policy - let's not strip-search every school bus full of German eight-year-olds, etc - Mrs May went mad and laid the public purse open to a costly employment tribunal. Not for nothing do they call immigration a "dog-whistle" issue.
Every Home Secretary has been gnawed by the canines it summons: on one hand, the baseless paranoia that at any moment we will be swamped, bankrupted or blown up by terrorists; on the other, the cranky fantasy that it is possible to control absolutely who comes and goes from our country.
May's instincts were right. Queuing at passport control is tedious. Some 66 million people passed through Heath-row last year. Every minute each of those people spends in a queue adds up to more than a century of wasted time.
Contrary to the fears of lead-swinging, state-pension-claiming expats who bemoan our decline in letters dispatched to the Daily Express from their haciendas in Marbella, illegal immigrants are not coming over here to swing the lead. Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe are not sending us their elderly, lame and halt.
It takes quite some fitness and determination to cling onto the bottom of a van for six hours. Most who slip through our borders illegally are of working age, and keen to work: they find jobs in flexible sectors of the economy such as labouring, fruit-picking, public relations, terrorism and the sex-trade.
The small minority of illegal immigrants who go to the bad, and involve themselves in identity theft, usually make better use of the identities they steal than their original owners, who have been conditioned to idleness, stupidity and self-satisfaction by the mere ownership of a British passport.
It's childish to be in favour of the free movement of capital around the world and object to the free movement of labour. The more cursorily we check the passports of people passing through Heathrow, the happier, wealthier and wiser we will be as a nation.
Oh, for a good literary dust-up
Right-wing historian Niall Ferguson is displeased with novelist Pankaj Mishra. Reviewing Ferguson's book in the London Review of Books, Mishra compared his work to that of racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard and called them "white people's histories". Ferguson thinks this adds up to an accusation of racism and says he "is owed an apology". The gist of Mishra's scholarly riposte is: "Jog on, pal."
Ferguson - in a paraphrase of King Lear ("I will do such things - what they are, yet I know not; but they shall be the terrors of the earth") - warns Mishra that he will "hound him in print in a way he has never experienced before".
To outsiders it may be hard to see who's in the right. It's all about hegemonic historiography or occluding the subaltern. The key to enjoying it is to ignore the academia and enjoy the punch-up.
Come on Niall! Come on Pankaj! Kick him in the pods!
Sexual healing of a rather different kind
Among the stranger and more poignant cases to come to court was that of Graham Gibbons, last week acquitted of voyeurism. Gibbons used his mobile phone to film himself and his girlfriend having sex.
When she found the film on his computer she contacted the police and ceased to be his girlfriend besides. Gibbons's defence was that, far from acting out of salacity, he meant only well: as an unemployed time and motion consultant, he wanted to use his professional skills to assess and hence improve his sexual performance. "After studying the tape I gave her 20 minutes of sexual satisfaction, five minutes of intercourse and another nine minutes of sexual satisfaction," he told the court. The jury, finding nothing arousing about the film at all, accepted his explanation.
That was cruel. Mr Gibbons goes free with no stain on his character: but his acquittal makes it, probably, even less likely than a conviction would have that this well-intentioned fellow will get the chance to practise his sexual technique on anyone else.
Canon Giles clears his head
I admired Canon Giles Fraser for his decisiveness and his show of conscience in resigning from St Paul's over the attempt to evict Occupy London protesters from its precincts. After his resignation, he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land - and described his experiences there on Radio 4 yesterday.
Pilgrimages, he explained, were a way to "sort your head out". He was depressed by a spoof "Guns 'n' Moses" T-shirt. He thought that were he to come back today, Jesus might be born in a tented village outside St Paul's. He came over as nice but his broadcast had the unfortunate effect of making him sound like a bit of a clot.
