The Big Interview

Hello and welcome to the first in an occasional series of interviews with key members of government departments. Here I will be asking them the questions we all want answers to. Tonight I am pleased to welcome Mr John Fiddler, a statistician from the immigration department. He is here as a representative of Billy Liar and the New Taxes party, sorry, Tony Blair and New Labour, to address our concerns on illegal immigration and asylum seekers.

C: Good evening Mr Fiddler and welcome to PMT.

JF: May I correct you there? It's not necessarily evening. In some parts of the world it is actually morning at the moment. It all depends on your viewpoint.

C: Quite. But here, in the UK, in this studio, it is in fact evening is it not?

JF: Maybe yes. But it depends on which way you look at it. For instance there are many people from other counties residing here who might not be operating on Greenwich meantime. I would say it's probable it's evening, but not necessarily.

C: Ok. Well, moving on. Opinion polls show that illegal immigration and asylum seekers are a major concern to a large proportion of people in this country. Yet this government seems to be doing little to reduce the number of these people entering the country.

JF: Thats not true. We are doing everything in our power to reduce the numbers. In the past six months we have employed an extra two hundred staff in my department alone whose sole job is to reduce the figures. We have also rushed through thousands of applications without any checks, wiped thousands from the lists because we don't actually know where they are and changed the way we calculate our figures. All these measures have resulted in a decrease in numbers of over fifty thousand.

C: But has it resulted in less asylum seekers and illegal immigrants? Or is it just a way of massaging the figures so that there appear to be less?

JF: Does it matter? Surely the important thing is that the numbers have been reduced?

C: Actually no. To most of us the important thing is that something is being done to physically reduce the amount of these people coming into this country. That there are actually less of them.

JF: Why? More importantly what good would it do us in government if we stopped these people coming in. You have to remember that these people have friends and relatives here or are of a nationality of which there are already substantial communities. Immigrants traditionally vote for a socialist government and we at New Labour are proud of our socialist roots.

C: More Champagne Mr Fiddler?

JF: No thanks. That cheap stuff you serve here doesn't agree with me. I prefer the more expensive brands. Now, as I was saying. What good would it do us to stop these people coming here? After all they are all potential Labour voters. What we need to do is get as many of them processed as soon as possible. Obviously we can't do this too quickly. We also have to think of the Human Rights act. We now have a whole industry to support so we need to balance the speed at which they are processed with the financial needs of the Human Rights lawyers. It's a very fine balance and one that we need to get right.

C: So what you are actually saying is that this government has no intention of cutting the amount of illegals and asylum seekers and is in fact just massaging the figures and hoping that the public don't notice?

JF: Not at all. It really doesn't matter if the public notice or not. A large proportion of them will vote for us anyway, they always do. If we add their votes to those of the immigrant population, change the way people are allowed to vote, tell a few lies about the opposition and generally muddy the waters we will have enough votes to get re-elected. Surely that is the most important thing?

C: Well Mr Fiddler, I'm afraid thats all we have time for tonight. Thank you for being so frank. Your Limousine is waiting in the car park.

Well ladies and gentlemen, thats it for tonight. Join us next time when we hope to have Miss Walker from the transport department joining us.