One that got away

Escaping Home C4

The British people want their country back" Robert Kilroy-Silk MEP tells us, and what better place to start than with our dear own royal family?

They should be flying the flag whenever they travel, so let's take away their foreign Rolls-Royces (great cars, but German-owned) and their Jaguars (made by a US company nowadays), and instead transport them in a vehicle that encapsulates all that's best about British design and engineering, the Reliant Robin.

Yes, I know that Del Boy's favourite car stinks of oil and plastic, has all the stability of George Best on an ice rink, and shatters into fibreglass shards if it's hit by so much as a fly, but those features are precisely what makes it so quintessentially British, unlike the Aston Martin (also American-owned) currently driven by Prince Charles.

I for one would certainly shed a manly patriotic tear at the sight of a fleet of royalblue three-wheeled Plastic Pigs (emblazoned on the sides with the words "By Appointment") tootling down the Mall at a stately 4mph, with the Union flag flying proudly on the bonnet.

In reality, of course, the British people are pragmatists who know that this island has flourished historically through international trade and immigration.

Our royal family are German imports, our health service and hotel industry would collapse without a steady influx of foreign workers, while our standards of cuisine have been transformed by our ethnic communitiesand Escaping Home (this week's occupant of the C4 Slot) sets out to remind us of the positive contribution that refugees fleeing persecution have long made to the wellbeing of this country.

According to the Home Office, refugees also contribute £2.5 billion annually to the British economy, a fact that Mr Kilroy-Silk and his like should remember, as should the prominent Tory I once heard at a dinner party shouting "there ain't no black in the Union Jack".

I had to smile when he did so, partly because he'd confused racism with patriotism, partly because of his ignorance (the "Jack" is only flown on ships - he should have said Union "flag"), but mainly because I've always believed that laughter is the best medicine (unless you're asthmatic, in which case you should really opt for Ventolin every time).

Yesterday's contribution to Refugee Week gave airtime to Aram Shali, an Iraqi with an extraordinary and harrowing story to tell. Under Saddam's regime, he'd been arrested for belonging to the communist party, and incarcerated for a month in one tiny cell with 40 others in conditions so cramped that they'd all had to sleep standing up, just to survive.

Worse still, the only respite from this nearfatal overcrowding was the daily ritual of being taken out in groups of 10 to be beaten and battered into near-unconsciousness by Ba'athist thugs.

No being smeared in excrement back then though, nor attacked with dogs, nor connected to electrodes, nor forced to wear women's underwear, nor formed into naked pyramids. That was the trouble with Saddam's men. They had no imagination.