Quite soon – within 50 years or so – the only people left in Britain will be cut-price Polish plumbers, angry suicide bombers from the dusty Maghreb and obese, flatulent, drunken, educationally subnormal indigenous chavs who haven’t yet worked out the quickest route to the ferry terminal. Good luck, all of you – I’ll be long dead by then, even if I stop smoking. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the number of British people leaving the country last year was a remarkable 400,000 – that’s a city the size of Sheffield. And more than half of those were reasonably well-off, tax-paying, palpably sentient human beings.

Even more people came in, of course – 591,000 according to the ramshackle guesswork of the ONS. But they weren’t quite the same, economically and socially, as those who got the hell out. They were – now, what’s the nicest way of putting this? – differently-abled.

We are repeatedly told that we should welcome our incomers because they will enhance the wealth of the country: we need them to do the jobs that British people won’t do because they’re too idle or too greedy. But then a recent study from the Social Affairs Unit suggested that for an immigrant to add to the wealth of the country he should be carrying £144,000 with him, otherwise the rest of us will be left less well-off.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I’m not convinced that every single member of the present influx brings in that amount. Meanwhile, high-earning, productive Brits continue to leave in ever increasing numbers for Spain, Australia, the United States and so on. One reason is simply that these days they can leave – British property prices being so ludicrously high that you can buy a mansion in Tallahassee for your two-bed flat with small patio of fox-poo in Stockwell, south London.

Why would you stay in Britain, given our weather, our congested cities, our rotten schools, the eerie, robotic presence of David Miliband on Question Time, speed cameras, stealth taxes, Tesco, Roman Abramovich and Jonathan Ross? Surely any sensible person would leave. You head for Heathrow and, having been subjected to three hours of misery, are finally allowed to board the plane and you’re free.

All of that might provoke a person to emigrate. But if you look at the graph, handily provided by the ONS, there is a direct link between those leaving and those coming in. The pattern of immigration into Britain over the years mirrors almost exactly the pattern of migration out. So much so that you might suppose there is a causal link between the two; we’re getting out because of all those people coming in. Everybody tells us that immigration is good for the country. The only people, it would seem, who are not quite sure about this are the general public.

Spoke to a man who went hare coursing the other day. “We have to be careful though,” he whispered, “on account of police informers.” Not careful enough, matey, I thought to myself, surreptitiously writing down his car registration number. He then explained, with great exasperation, how at the end of every course they had to shoot all the hares, otherwise the whole enterprise would be deemed illegal. “There’s just no alternative, that’s what the law says we have to do,” he said. “Well, you could just not go hare coursing in the first place, which is what the law really intends,” I said. He looked very puzzled, as if this thought – of properly abiding by the law – had never even occurred to him.

In The Spectator, meanwhile, one of Britain’s most celebrated fox-stranglers, the former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore, worries that the police might soon “turn nasty” with regard to the hundreds of braying pink-jacketed aristowannabes who continue to flout the ban. By “turn nasty” he means uphold the law of the land. Charles and his ilk are at other times fervent admirers of law and order. I wonder how he would feel if he were to be burgled or mugged and the police resisted the temptation to “turn nasty” bypursuing the perpetrator, but turned a blind eye instead?

She’s rough for a redhead, mate

Congratulations are in order for P Selvakumar, a 34-year-old Indian farmer who last week tied the knot with a russet-coloured mongrel dog called Selvi. The four-year-old blushing bride looked absolutely lovely, dressed in a sari and garlanded with flowers. One assumes – or hopes, at least – that the happy couple plan to adopt. Mr Selvakumar married the dog to bring himself good luck; however, not so long ago an elderly Nepalese chap called Phulram Chaudhary married a dog – a different dog, obviously – for precisely the same reason and was dead within the week from some mysterious infection. Rabies or parvovirus, maybe. It is not so long ago that a Sudanese man got himself hitched to a lithe young goat – although he was a more reluctant bridegroom: village elders forced him into the union after he had been espied having congress with the creature while they were both still single. That, as you will be aware, is really not on. These are conservative societies, after all. And following the Indian wedding, Mr Selvakumar was at pains to point out that his Selvi was a bitch, just in case anyone thought there was anything weird or perverted going on.

He wrecked the Rock and sailed off quids in

Adam J Applegarth, until this weekend the chief executive of Northern Rock, sold £2.6m of shares in his company at high prices while at the same time urging investors – and his own employees – to buy more and more. He sold those shares before his own idiotic policy of moving Northern Rock from its old-fashioned steady investments to speculating in the volatile short-term money markets resulted in catastrophe. With the moolah he is said to have bought some expensive cars. And an estate in Northumberland. A little later Northern Rock was begging the Bank of England for help with its “liquidity problem”. It was skint. The sub-prime crisis, of which Northern Rock was Britain’s biggest victim, is portrayed as an act of God, like a freak flood. But, of course, it is not: it has been occasioned by the greed and stupidity of men like Applegarth. He still has his enormous bonus, awarded for the very strategy that landed Northern Rock in the mire. He has no liquidity problem.

All credit to the authorities for nobbling Victoria Young, a woman from Manchester, for having invented a whole bunch of fictitious babies and claiming more than £40,000 in various state benefits on their behalf. But have they got to the bottom of it all? The last ectoplasmic babies for which Young illegally claimed benefit were called Kacey, Kelsey, Kier, Kie and Kyla. Is it not likely, then, that they caught her somewhere in the middle of her fraud – as she cheerfully worked her way through the Book of Names for Chav Babies (£6.99, at no good bookshops)? And that much earlier she may well have been claiming for Ashley, Aleesha, Adidas, Aymee, Archers and Aguilera?

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