No doubt there will be general rejoicing at yesterday’s tightening of asylum regulations; and, if I had never met any asylum-seekers, I too would have rejoiced. Are they not making a monkey of the British state? It is my opinion, however, that the British state can make a monkey of itself, without their assistance.

I have no way of knowing whether the asylum-seekers I meet in medical practice are representative of asylum-seekers as a whole. Perhaps I have met only the cream, although I rather doubt it. Suffice to say that I am favourably impressed by their human qualities, which seem to me often superior, sometimes by a long way, to those of much of the native population. Even when they have not been persecuted in the strictly political sense, they have usually had lives of considerable hardship, which has deepened their character and polished their manners. Few of them appear to me to be spoilt egotists.

Contrary to much prejudice, they do not want to sponge off the state: most asylum-seekers seem to me avid for work. I have met many desperate for a job, although forbidden one by the state, and none who, once working, wish to give up. Their aim in life is self-improvement, not resignation to sloth in squalor. They want no part of Gordon Brown’s vision of a just society: namely, one in which everyone is at least partly dependent upon a Treasury handout, overseen by you-know-who, for whom they will vote for all eternity.

Let me enumerate a few of the ways in which we are already cruel to asylum-seekers. The first is the disgustingly disdainful and humiliating way they are routinely treated by minor British officials, whose every question is an accusation, and who often appear to have no knowledge of life outside their suburbs. People who have seen their children killed in front of them are treated the same as obvious liars: everyone is a liar until proved otherwise. One cannot help but remember Primo Levi’s nightmare in Auschwitz: that when the war was over, no one would believe what he said about what he had seen.

The way in which young, clever and willing people are turned within a matter of a few weeks into helpless, shuffling dependants, the inhabitants of a kind of Purgatory, by being forced on to our system of welfare, has to be seen to be believed. We give them somewhere to live and a tiny amount of cash on condition that they do nothing to help themselves. Many have told me that they regard it as a form of torture, and I do not think this is an exaggeration. They want nothing more than to earn a living or start a business: instead, they are told that they must vegetate, if necessary for years. Their role is to be parasites, for everyone else in society to hate.

Another refinement of cruelty is to withdraw this welfare once they have been refused residence, as well as continuing to forbid them to work, in the hope that a life of sleeping in parks and searching for sustenance in wastepaper bins will soon drive them to ask for repatriation to the land from which they have fled.

For any sensible policy to work, we would also have to jettison all the multicultural claptrap that employs armies of administrators in town halls and elsewhere, who want to Balkanise our society into “communities” competing for public funds, in order to give them, the administrators, something to do. Once the asylum-seekers are granted leave to stay, they should be expected to learn English and take their place as full citizens. Most of them would be only too glad to do so.

Until then, welcome to Britain, land of the allegedly soft touch. If you believe it to be so, let me ask you, would you wish the life of an asylum-seeker on yourself?

The author is a doctor

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