Kiwis know how to slim down their immigration

THE FRIDAY THING:

WHILE we continue to wrestle with immigration issues with the fearsome new tactic of putting a wagon on the street bearing the catchy slogan: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest”, a possible solution comes, from, of all places, New Zealand.

No-one in Britain, least of all politicians and immigration officials, have the first idea how many people are actually living here, where they are and what they are up to. At the very least it’s totally naïve to think illegal immigrants are going to take the slightest notice of a moving poster that tells them to go home or face arrest. They might be here illegally, but generally they aren’t stupid

The bottom line is that the officials who could and should be monitoring who gets into Britain are letting us all down.

And so to New Zealand. That most splendid of little countries has decided to deport a South African immigrant because he weighs 20 stone - above what the New Zealand health services consider obese, and a strain on health services.

If we tried something similar and the court of human wrongs approved we would pretty soon slim down the population (in more ways than one) if we put chip and curry eaters and beer and wine drinkers on our list of undesirables. At leat then we would have even more room for our soon-to-be-neighbours from Albania and Romania.



FIREMEN, high on the list of public heroes for saving lives by rescuing us from blazing buildings, have found themselves dealing with the heat of passion rather than of combustion...

Thanks no doubt to the heavy breathing literature of Fifty Shades of whatever, firemen are being asked to rescue more and more people handcuffed to their (or other) bed posts and either can’t find or can’t reach the keys.

London Fire Brigade, for instance, has turned out to 79 cases of cuff trauma and 1,300 incidents where people have got themselves, shall we say “stuck”, in household items. And firemen are not alone in embarrassing moments.

You would have thought that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) was far too dry a place for such shenanigans but not so. One chap came up with a highly original excuse for being unable to go out of the house to buy a tax disc because he had overdosed on Viagra.

Talk about cock and bull stories...