My Life as a Foreigner

It is just the kind of news morning the Indpendent loves -

• David Cameron is forced to sack Patrick Mercer, a front-bench spokesman on Homeland Security (as if you didn't know) for saying race abuse needs to be accepted as 'normal' part of Army life
• PC Anthony Mulhall's use of 'brute force' to arrest Toni Comer is to be investigated for any racist under/over-tones
• Magistrate Alan Mitchell is sacked for complaining of 'bloody foreigners'
• There are increasingly open accusations that Lord Levy, as an 'outsider', is being 'hung out to dry' in the cash for honours investigation

The Independent detests Levy, so they haven't included him, but the other cases suggest racism continues to riddle Britain's highest institutions.

I am ready to shrug it off as the usual badly-concealed hysteria, typical of opinion-as-a-supplement-for-news which keeps the quality-tabloid on budget, until Jonathan Dimbleby comes onto Today to cheerfully announce that Andrew Green of MigrationWatch will be a guest on this week's Any Questions.

Go to the MWUK website and the first thing you see is a photograph of groups of girls with dark hair and dark skin loitering about on a rubbish-strewn street. The message is clear. Immigration is about dark peoples, overcrowding, overbreeding, poverty and a lack of public hygiene.

As a 'foreigner' I am getting increasingly nervy about public mood-swings in the UK. The latest scheme is that I and others like me - who have lived half their lives in the UK, obeying every law and paying every penny in taxes owed - will have to carry around special ID Cards. One more 'foreign criminals scandal' to come from the Home Office and instead of carrying them in our pockets we will be sewing them into our lapels.