What does everyone in Britain do for a living these days? We know that Bulgarians have taken all the jobs picking flowers, we know that London’s traffic wardens are all Nigerian, that your cockles were picked by a Chinaman, that your plumber’s a Pole and that whenever you ring a call centre it sounds like you’ve got through to the Kumars at No 42.

So, and I’m struggling here to think of the right terminology, what are the indigenous English doing to fill their days? I pay particular attention to people who appear on gameshows. In the past, people on Blind Date would usually claim to be retail managers, ie, shop assistants, but these days most people buy their groceries and their exercise equipment from the internet.

And we know from recent press stories that people are leaving the army in droves because half are being sent to war by Tony Blair armed with nothing but a twig and the other half are living on bases so squalid you can catch ebola from the light switches.

No one knows how many people are living in Britain at the moment. Some say we’re getting a migrant a minute, but that doesn’t count the others who are arriving disguised as horses and clinging to the bogey wheels of the Eurostar.

Let’s assume that there are roughly 60m people here and that 30m are of working age. That’s 30m people getting up in the morning and getting in their cars and going to work. But what are they doing when they get there? Several thousand — and again no one knows quite how many — are on the run from jail, so you might imagine we have a great many policemen trying to round them up. But the police force has mostly been replaced with speed cameras so that’s out too.

Also, we know people are not going to factories and making things because all that palaver stopped in the 1980s. We know, too, they’re not going up chimneys or down mines, and that all the nurses in the NHS are from Guam. Yes, someone on a recent edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? said he was a hypnotherapist, but I can’t believe this is a trend.

Obviously several hundred thousand are employed by television companies to sit in a house, or a jungle, or to slither about a dance floor in sequinned jumpsuits. But that still leaves, what, 29.5m people. The only conclusion I can draw is that all of them are working in some way for the government.

This makes sense. At present, each of us is governed by a parish council, a borough council, a county council, Westminster, the European Union and whatever regional assembly Blair has deemed necessary for your area.

Each of these elected bodies has to be run by an army of civil servants, who need a team of hit squads to enforce their whims. That’s why you have the kilogram police patrolling market stalls, fish Nazis waiting to arrest the country’s last six trawlermen and Jonathon Porritt’s sustainable development KGB, who can arrest and murder you for having a toaster.

And all this lot have to be paid for by the only non-government employees left in Britain today. That’d be Bruce Forsyth and Jade Goody.

Soon, however, they will be gone too, because as the EU continues its inexorable march towards Kamchatka, more and more people will be needed to monitor the rights, health, safety and sustainable development of each new member state.

I like the idea of the EU. But now it’s too big, and too unmanageable, especially as it’s trying to make a cohesive and yummy whole from a selection of ingredients that wouldn’t fuse even if you put them all in a blender and nuked it. Retsina, bangers, mash, small birds, goulash, dog and bratwurst is not something you’d want to put in your mouth. Ever.

We see the same sort of problems in the car industry. All the players reckon they can shave costs by merging with one another. So you have Daimler and Chrysler, Renault and Nissan, and Ford which has gobbled up Volvo, Aston Martin, Land Rover and Jaguar.

Apparently, however, even this isn’t enough so now there’s talk of General Motors joining forces with Renault and Nissan, and of Porsche reversing into Volkswagen, which already owns Seat, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and Skoda.

Eventually I can see a time when there are only three car companies in the entire world. There will be one in the Far East, one in the West and BMW. Already, I have a sense when I drive a new car that it’s really just a mildly altered collection of exactly the same components that I encountered in the new model I drove the previous week. The tyres are from Pirelli, the gearbox from ZF, the brakes from AP, the stereo from Harmon Kardon, the seats from Recaro, the windscreen wipers from Bosch and so on.

Of course, BMW is no different. The bits that make up your 3-series are from the same companies that make the bits for everything else. And yet . . .

BMW is like Switzerland. It’s in Europe and the people there have eyes, noses and hair. On the face of it, they’re just like us, but they’re not.

The Swiss are independent and focused. And BMW’s the same. It doesn’t make vans or tractors or trucks. The only other places you’ll find the blue and white roundel is on a motorbike — which is cool, if you like wearing leather trousers — and on the Gulfstream V, which is cool no matter what strides you prefer. Sure, Bee Em dallied with expansionism in the Nineties, taking on Rover and emerging with Rolls-Royce and Mini, but it is still privately owned, and now has no obvious ties to anyone else.

Theoretically this shouldn’t work. BMW should have been crippled by go-it-alone development costs and wiped out by over-production. But last year it sold more cars than ever and predicted pre-tax profits in the region of £2.6 billion.

Perhaps this is because in the one-size-fits-all modern world some of us crave something a little bit different. A Kentucky Fried Partridge. A Big Mac and new potatoes.

Some BMWs don’t work. The 335 coupé I tested recently is too expensive and too boring, the X3 is useless on every level and the Z4 coupé appears to have caught elephantiasis of the arse. But when they work, they work very well. And the models that work best of all are the most independent, most focused of the lot. The M cars.

This brings me awfully late to the subject of this morning’s column. The M6 convertible. It’s ugly, it has a roof from Heath Robinson Ltd and it comes with a frighteningly bad flappy paddle gearbox. But despite all this I want to marry it, move with it to a croft in the Highlands and spend the rest of my life making M-powered Jezza babies.

There’s no real point to the M6 coupé. You’re better off buying the better looking, more practical and cheaper M5, which is just as fast.

But an open-air M6? Mmmm.

Of course, a Mercedes SL 55 is better looking and has a much better roof. It makes a better noise, too, and comes with a proper gearbox. But when you delve into the BMW’s iDrive system and find the control that unleashes all of the V10’s 500bhp, trust me, the Merc is made to look like it’s made from a mixture of wood and wallpaper paste.

The M6 never feels light, agile or sporty. But the speed. Oh my God. The speed. It’s hyperspace fast. And that’s more addictive than watching Deal or No Deal on crack.

I don’t know what you do for a living. But if you’re the chap who’s paying those Bulgarians 5p a year to pick daffodils, I suspect you’re making enough to buy an M6 convertible. You should.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model BMW M6 convertible
Engine 4999cc, 10 cylinders
Power 500bhp @ 7750rpm
Torque 383 lb ft @ 6100rpm
Transmission Seven-speed (sequential manual)
Fuel 18.6mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 366g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 4.8sec
Top speed 155mph limited (205mph unlimited)
Price £86,400
Rating 4/5
Verdict I think I’m in love

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