What a hoot!

The news that net emigration from Britain since 1997 has now reached 800,000 and net immigration 2.4m is an apposite comment on the grim state of an increasingly dysfunctional country presided over by an increasingly dysfunctional government.

Despite the vast sums lavished on them, both the NHS and schools are in a state nearing collapse, with patients dropping like flies and children leaving school ever more obviously ignorant. Transport is a disaster, the roads clogged and trains late, dirty and ever more expensive. The economy meanwhile, masterminded by our 'greatest ever chancellor' over exactly the same period, is poised on the brink of a serious downturn, with house prices falling, inflation rising and growth slowing. All the while, the public sector expands relentlessly, inventing new means of pointless regulation and devising yet further ways of raising taxes while paying itself larger and larger sums of public money.

The government itself consists of a collection of spineless, plotting nobodies under the thumb of a brutish, incompetent bully who increasingly resembles a care-in-the community reject.

And all this before the great ID-card scam has even got properly underway.

Simultaneously, the armed forces, about the only arm of the government still enjoying widespread public trust, are systematically underfunded and under-equipped yet nonetheless dispatched on unwinnable foreign conflicts.

So, on the whole plenty of good reasons of clearing off while you still can, I'd say.