A British parliamentary commission says the government’s claim that immigrants contribute 6 billion pounds a year to the UK economy is pure, unsubstantiated hokum. Or words to that effect. I fancy I’ve heard much the same claim of economic benefit regularly made in Spain about its own massive influx of foreigners over the last 5 to 10 years. So I wonder whether this, too, is questionable. It’s possible that the fact Spain doesn’t have more than a million [two million?] people claiming they can’t work because they’ve got a bad back differentiates the cases.

The legal maximum for alcohol for driving in Britain is 0.8 per mg, which is a lot higher than most other European countries. Nonetheless, UK road fatalities are lower than elsewhere. But this couldn’t last, of course, and the government says it plans to bring the limit in line with its EU partners, at 0.5mg. They say this will save ‘up to 65’ lives a year. I wonder how they do these calculations. And whether they use the same Mickey Mouse economics apparently used to justify levels of immigration way above anything they forecast only a few years ago.

Quote of the Week

There’ll be an uprising in this country soon.

My mother - after reading a tabloid article about a veiled Muslim woman who’s claiming thousands of pounds in compensation for the ‘racial discrimination’ behind her failure to land a job in a hairdressing salon. She’s totally wrong, of course - my mother I mean - but I can’t help wondering whether her concerns are more akin to those of the electorate than Gordon Brown appreciates. Especially in those sectors of the economy where - according to the same Parliamentary commission - immigration has led to wage erosion.

The good thing about this debate in the UK is that it is a debate. As others have commented, even the British government is now saying things for which they themselves would have labelled you racist five years ago. Maybe we have to ‘thank’ the London tube and bus bombings for this.

A certain C. Fernandez writing for one of the British papers says that men are hopeless at recognising when women are flirting with them. I like this notion. It’s greatly preferable to the conclusion that I’ve never been chatted up because I’m ugly. Or because - in the view of one reader at least - I look like Brian Sewell.

You can’t stay in Hoylake without playing a round of golf on the world famous Royal Liverpool course. Or, in my case, on the municipal course across the road from it. But at least Tiger Woods and his colleagues used the latter for practice sessions. So we may have sworn at the same bloody magpies. Though I doubt he lost as many balls.