Some of Our Best Friends are Asylum Seekers

Mrs Battenberg's big birthday gong give-away is often the occasion for refreshing displays of British bad taste, but rarely more garishly than in this case. Seven Holocaust survivors have been awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Holocaust education and awareness: an award to rank with the Stalin Medal for Ukrainian famine relief or the Pol Pot-Kissinger Compassionate Award for Urban Beautification, and of course a magnificently smug and self-complacent bit of hypocrisy from the nation credited with inventing the modern concentration camp. The British Empire was much admired by Hitler for its forthright ways with the lesser breeds; and there can be few more forthright symbols of the nation's regard for its heritage than the image of the Queen Gawblesser patting refugees on the head, at this carcinogenic fag-end of the obsessively racist May premiership, a scant hundred miles from Calais.