Bow Down and Be Counted

I am sure we all agree that if there's one thing this country needs more of, it's bright ideas from the likes of Michael Gove and his chums. Policy Exchange, a "centre-right" (right-wing, in Standard English) think-tank founded by Gove and his almost equally sensible chum Nick Boles, has come up with a jolly wheeze for distinguishing between real and fake Britons. David Goodhart, who wrote a book squealing about the beastly migrants and the damage they cause to the social-democratic values which are so precious to the centre-right, has extruded a report squealing that the beastly migrants are using our jewelled isles as "a sort of economic transit camp". The solution, it appears, is to give everyone a number, which would be stored in a central database managed, no doubt, by some efficient, accountable company like those nice people at Serco and G4S. Students and short-term migrant workers "would not have full access to social and political rights, would not have an automatic right to bring in dependents and would leave after a specific period of time", rather than voting in every election, claiming benefits before they're off the boat and staying here forever with all their wives and cats and mothers, as they do at the moment. David Goodhart went to Eton. You can tell, can't you.