Julian Cole

THERE is a gap in the market for a new line in spectacles, and so this column is about to launch Dr Cole's Sensible Perspective Lenses. Once worn, the world will seem a saner place.

These new spectacles come in a tough case, guaranteed to withstand the daily battering of daft headlines and populist politicians on the make. Looking at the news recently you can see such spectacles would be handy.

Asylum-seekers have been occupying us again, in particular women beggars from Eastern Europe. To read some of the newspapers, you might think the country had been swamped by them.

The Daily Mail has been much exercised by the "curse" of Romanian gipsies and the "asylum flood", while the Sun alerted its readers to the "mounting menace of gipsy spongers" after a number of women appeared in court for begging, some with babies.

With the jingoistic sections of our national press in hate overdrive, and Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe in rent-a-rant, jail-the-lot mode, you might have thought the Government would stand up for refugee rights, and point out the obligations we owe the international community.

But, no - instead New Labour hears from one of its focus groups that immigration is a worry to voters, so cravenly lets it be known through a Sunday paper headline that "Immi-grants who beg will be kicked out of the country".

Time to take Dr Cole's Sensible Perspective Lenses out of their sturdy case. Slip on these useful specs and focus again. The hot mists lift and you see Eastern European women begging in London as a relatively small problem inflated out of all sense and proportion.

Through these glasses, you can clearly make out that these women present no threat to our way of life. For they are not money-grabbing scroungers but poor women from a poor country looking to feed their children as best they can. Many of these women will probably be sent home anyway, and beg while here because they have no money.

An inconvenience to some people perhaps, upsetting maybe - but hardly a problem worthy of so many hostile headlines. And certainly not an issue to stand alongside the health service, education or BMW's dumping of Rover.

On that last issue, the German car-maker certainly behaved appallingly in the sudden way it announced the sell-off. Yet to blame BMW for all of the British company's ills is absurd - or so it seems once you have donned Dr Cole's Sensible Perspective Lenses.

For BMW are just the latest culprits in a long and winding line that runs through successive British Govern-ments, unions, workers, unimaginative management and British drivers who prefer foreign cars, including BMWs.

Blaming the Germans is just an easy way out - especially for New Labour, whose old instincts are to help a once-nationalised industry, though that is now out of the question.

For a bit of light relief, let's put on Dr Cole's Sensible Perspective Lenses and look again at the new haircuts sported by the three Beckhams. Ah, something is wrong here. With or without these spectacles, all I can see is a bristled-headed footballer, his now blonde-tressed partner, and their shorn sprog.

Here's a great political story. Apparently, Tony Blair sent an e-mail to Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader. As he heard nothing, the Prime Minister wrote a letter too, which mentioned the earlier electronic note. Paddy's people were puzzled, and hunted through the e-mail drawers, until eventually finding a note reading: "High Pat! You will be amazed that I have now come into the modern world. Tony."

Mr Ashdown said his staff hadn't passed on the message as they thought it was "from some loony e-mailer".

I shall resist the obvious joke. By the way, e-mail - even from prime ministerial loons - can be directed to me at the address below.

23/03//00

If you have any comments you would like to make, contact Julian Cole directly at julian.cole@ycp.co.uk

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.