Jack Straw (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf raises an interesting point but I am afraid Jack Straw is at best being too coy and at worst is imitating Pinocchio.

To begin with, I can clearly remember being told by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary that he saw “No logical upper limit for immigration” into this country.

He said that on Question Time, in front of a lively studio audience, chaired by the now tattooed David Dimbleby
At the time, no-one contradicted him, including Tony Blair, the Prime Minister and Jack Straw, who subsequently became a long serving Labour Home Secretary.

Then there was the question of E-Borders, a system that was acquired from Raytheon Corporation and jointly worked on by consultants from that company and BT Global Services at great cost.

The Raytheon System had to be bought because comparable technology was not available within the UK to “count people in and out of the country” as Dr John Reid (another former Labour Home Secretary ), assured us it would.

The system was only partially rolled out, and to this day, no-one in the Government really knows how many people are actually living here, nor coming here, although food sales, school admissions and the number of notes and coins in circulation suggests a figure of around 70 million plus 500,000 new people coming here each year of whom 250,000 are illegal immigrants.

When the Poles were about to come here, it was to plug a shortfall of construction workers to build much needed houses and a shortfall of English dentists, caused by the then Labour Government’s imposition of a new dental contract, which the dental profession didn’t like to such an extent that many of them left the NHS and went into private practice.

We were told by Jack Straw, Charles Clark and by a succession of Labour Ministers that just 13,000 Poles would come to the UK.

Those Ministers knew that the figures that they were putting out were woeful underestimates because they had access to the figures on the numbers of Poles applying for National Insurance numbers to be able to work in the UK; they had access to data on the number of Polish passport holders applying to enter the UK; and they had data on Poles who were going to perform agricultural work for Agricultural Gang-masters in East Anglia over and above those Poles who were going to be dentists, construction workers and plumbers.

The rest is history but it will be repeated, once again, when the Romanians and Bulgarians come to the UK, following the New Year, despite all the assurances given by people like the sanctimonious Anna (“I don’t like your tone Mr Farage”) Soubry on Question Time, less than 2 weeks ago.

John Gelmini

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