`Cool Brittania" modernisers may laugh at the hankering after days of empire, evoked for some by those gutsy renditions at The Last Night of the Proms. But Britain's imperial past is a real factor in the present perceived crisis over asylum and illegal immigration into the EU.
Non-political observers say that qualification, "perceived", is necessary because the statistics do not sustain the popular notion that Britain (or Ireland for that matter) is being "swamped". UNHCR figures show asylum applications for 2000 amounted to 1.66 per thousand of the population in the UK (and 2.93 in Ireland).
Shared histories mean there are many people across the world who have family links with, or at least feelings of affinity for and identification with, the UK. They range from fleeing Kurdish refugees who think they'll find greater understanding here than in France, to Iranians who remember friendly relations with the last Shah and that BP was once the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
Interestingly, asylum applications from Iraq and Iran quadrupled last year, to 7,080 and 5,170 respectively, to take first and fifth place and account for one in six of all applicants to the UK.
Taken together with cultural and historical ties, the near universality of the English language and the promising images served up by satellite television across the global village, the UK's record of freedom and democracy is an obvious attraction for the dispossessed.
London is home to "the mother of parliaments", not to mention state schools and universal healthcare still free at the point of use. Home, too, increasingly, to the "snakeheads" and triad gangs who trade in the underworld of loan-sharking, illegal gaming, extortion, prostitution . . . and the smuggling or trafficking of men, women and children prepared to risk lives and livelihoods, whether in flight from persecution or in pursuit of a dream.
British Home Secretary Jack Straw has identified the role of organised crime in encouraging clandestine entrants. He told the Home Affairs Select Committee: "They generate a higher level of illegal entry because, after all, they are trading in people and need to maintain demand . . . I do not think there is any doubt that a very high proportion of those who are unfounded asylum-seekers have been facilitated by criminal gangs."
And the select committee has heard evidence that these gangs "have infrastructures and surveillance capabilities far in excess of anything that the law-enforcement agencies in transit and source countries can muster, and the ease with which they operate across international boundaries means that the chances of their activities diminishing is negligible".
Labour and the Conservatives are locked in pre-election battle to show which can be toughest on the "bogus" asylum-seeker and most effective in deterring the illegal entrant. The Tories compare the figure of 76,000 asylum-seekers last year to 29,000 in their last full year in office in 1996. About 80 per cent of applicants are refused, but currently only some 7,000 a year are known to be leaving the country. The government hopes to increase this to 30,000 a year by 2004. However, the select committee suggests that under present arrangements the Home Office won't achieve its goal.
While the number of asylum-seekers provides no indication of the numbers simply bypassing the system, Trade Secretary Stephen Byers has admitted the numbers illegally remaining in Britain could run into hundreds of thousands.
A study of applications processed at one flagship refugee centre in Cambridgeshire showed that only 28 out of 763 applicants were granted permission to stay. Of the failed applicants, 231 departed the country, while some 504 stayed and simply disappeared. One factor apparently accounting for such large numbers is that the judiciary here uses a more liberal interpretation of the Geneva Convention's definition of "persecution".
The select committee has also urged the government to reduce other "pull" factors which combine to make the UK Europe's favourite destination for asylum-seekers.
These "pull" factors include the perception that those entering legally or illegally will fare better than in fact is the case. Some Romanians recently told of their expectation that they would receive £800 sterling in benefits, when in reality those admitted get around £36 sterling, largely paid in vouchers, plus accommodation.
With dispersal having failed, London clearly provides the surest track into the black economy. It is easy to disappear and checks are negligible, a problem the select committee says government might deal with by introducing a new "entitlement card", which would require anyone wanting to see a doctor or send their child to school to prove legal entitlement to be in the country. Denmark operates a similar scheme, while France has its identification card.
But organisations such as the Refugee Council are quick to point up the committee's acknowledgement that increased measures to deter illegal entrants at one place inevitably leads to new pressures elsewhere. If checks on lorries and tough fines for drivers have had an impact, they might well just be the precursor to a spate of small boats fast-landing on remote beaches.
They highlight, too, the inconsistencies of a system which expels a young woman from the Philippines - her application refused after a successful six-year stint working as a nurse - who returns home to find the British government has been recruiting former friends and colleagues.
And with the UN suggesting that Britain needs to attract large numbers from overseas to help care for the elderly, for example, workers in the field say trained doctors and nurses should be allowed to work their passage rather than be reduced to menial cleaning jobs while waiting, sometimes for five to seven years, to learn their fate.
The home office minister, Barbara Roache, has also tried to open up the debate about closing the back door and enabling a more relaxed approach at the front. "I wanted to be the first immigration minister to say immigration is a good thing," she declared recently. But with the Tories promising mass detention camps and fast-track clearance - and Labour never knowingly outflanked on such sensitive issues on the right - that debate is not going to take place until the other side of the election, if at all.
