With all the Catholic Church’s travails over child-abuse, it clearly could have done without Cardinal Walter Kasper’s disobliging remarks about Britain on the eve of the Pope’s visit here (reported 14 September).  Nonetheless what the Cardinal actually said in an interview with the German Focus magazine was, “When you arrive at Heathrow, you think at times you’ve landed in a Third World country”.  There is more than a germ of truth in this if you come in through the terminals serving Africa and Asia.  Others besides Cardinal Kasper have anxiously scanned the waiting rows of people hoping to see a White face holding a placard with their name on it.

This appearance of foreigners is supported by the statistics: one third of all births in London are to ethnic minorities; over 100 different languages are spoken in its schools; there are almost no English front-of-desk staff in central London hotels, and so on.

The political and media classes think it is all wonderful – the more diversity the better.  The big problem for those seeking election is that most of the native British people intensely dislike their capital city being transformed into a sort of UNland, split up at the criminal level and even in some schools into warring gangs from Asia, Africa and the Balkans.

Only a rigorous implementation of a 5-year freeze on immigration for settlement, deportation without intervention by the courts of failed asylum seekers, people overstaying student, work or tourist visas, refusal of entry to people without adequate independent funds for their visit or without health certificates from countries where certain contagious diseases are endemic, will begin to allow the non-London British people to feel they are going to get their capital city back.

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