The Blair government employed some very dirty tricks to win the recent election. The fastest political party in Britain is the British National party. The British National Party has the potential to wipe the Labour party off the face of the planet by its anti-multicultural stance. Many people in Britain (and Europe) admire Australia's stance on illegal immigrants, and wished their governments would do the same.

Of course people in academia (who are so far removed from reality), would deny such sentiment exists. If there is, they dub it xenophobic. But the opposite of xenophobia is self hatred, which describes academia perfectly.

I think Howard needs to be more open about the purpose of this article. Is it:

(a) an analysis of the UK election result, attempting to isolate causes of the Conservatives' defeat (or perhaps better expressed, the causes of their winning only 35 extra seats instead of, say, 100); or

(b) a piece of advocacy relating to Australian immigration policy, bending the UK election result in aid of his argument?

Because if it is the former, as I suspect it is not, then Howard is guilty of a rather simplistic analysis. No discussion of marginal seats strategy, no discussion of failure to lift percentage of vote, no discussion of individual constituencies, concentrations of Labour support, and so on.

For those of who do care about the Conservative Party and would like to see it back in government, as I suspect Howard does not, please don't dress up a piece of advocacy on Australian immigration policy with the veneer of being informed commentary on the British election.

Let's hope the British study our model and decide to use it.There are many really good immigrants that have improved our country.On the negative side,there are some who should have never been admitted to Aust.If you come to this country,you should be greatful to be here and not wanting to change the very fabric that affords you so much prosperity.

If Howard Glenn wants us to adopt a model of dealing with asylum seekers that is more like the British then we need to be clear about what is advocated. The Home Office statistics on this have been collected by Migration Watch UK (www.migrationwatchuk.org). They don't detain asylum seekers, and as a result they get very large numbers of applicants (varying over the last 10 years from 30,000 to 84,000 (104,000 counting dependants), a high proportion of which are rejected (21% granted asylum, including after appeal, from 1997-2002, with another 16% allowed to stay, mostly because of difficulties in removal). In most cases the failed asylum seekers cannot be deported. This is not just a problem of finding people, although that is an issue sometimes, but of definitely establishing which countries they come from, if they don't have valid travel documents, and of persuading the home countries to take them back when they want remittances and to get rid of surplus population, particularly elements who are discontented. Between 1991 and 2000 240,000 applications were refused but only 44,000 applicants were deported or left voluntarily. The refugee advocates don't have answers to any of this, probably because they don't accept the legitimacy of national borders, but are very good at shrieking that people are bigots or xenophobes and telling sad stories of individual cases.

In both Britain and Australia there is also the issue of Article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which obliges refugees to seek asylum in the first safe country they come to (i.e. being a refugee does not give you a free pass to the developed country of your choice).

There are different types of seat gains in elections, and it's interesting to compare Conservative seat gains to Liberal Democrat - the Conservatives mostly picked up seats they were only a few per cent off holding last election, and were historically Conservative seats. This may simply be a factor of more people bothering to vote than last election, which was the lowest voter turnout since World War I. Winning 5% of the seats in parliament by mere attrition does not, to me, constitute a "win" in any terms - I agree with the gist of the article. The Conservatives have to find a real leader before they can hope to make real gains - they have not had one since Thatcher.

The Liberal Democrats, however, picked up some safe Labour seats on HUGE swings - as high as 25-40%. There are several more independents in Parliament than at either of the last two elections. The first poster in this thread said the BNP are a potent force - the figures do not bear this out. The UKI, a much more moderate "fringe" party like our own One Nation, did better overall, and the two effectively split a single-digit vote. The LDs, Labour and Conservatives are still the main parties, with the LDs becoming ever more important, and a shock result in several seats in Birmingham and eastern London swinging heavily to Galloway's Respect party, which could well take more than one seat in 2009. As the LDs, Labour and Respect have strong basis in the British migrant community, it would appear that Britain is moving towards a government system more focused on migrants.

The thought of a government focused on migrants is incredibly sad. Afterall, an elected government is supposed to represent the people who vote them in, not import a bunch of people from half way around the world to vote for them.

Multiculuralism is dirty politics. It never had the support of the majority no matter where it is enforced.