Discrimination against whole groups is obviously unfair to individual claimants.The justification offered was that this had been going on already, as indeed it had, for instance when Roma were sent back en masse from Dover. In 1996, 80 per cent of Tamil asylum-seekers were admitted to Canada; the equivalent figure for Britain is 0.2 per cent. It is hard to be confident that applications for asylum in Britain are assessed impartially and objectively.We also hear of economic migrants. A British professor taking a post in the United States for a higher salary and a lighter teaching load is an economic migrant but so is someone fleeing inescapable poverty who has seen his children die from malnutrition, and hopes, if allowed in, to be able to send his family money to live on until they can come to join him. I believe that we ought to admit anyone trying to escape conditions that deny him or her the chance of a tolerable human life, whether these are persecution, war or destitution.We need to overhaul our dealings with asylum-seekers: humane, impartial assessment of their claims, an end to detention centres, thoughtless dispersal, vouchers and other punitive measures, and an amnesty for those who have been waiting for three years or more.We also need to adopt a far more liberal immigration policy, not just poaching the highly qualified. That will help our economy, resolve our demographic difficulty, discourage the “evil traffickers” and, at the same time, go far to solve the “problem of asylum”..

When people read the work of writers like John Diamond or Ruth Picardie, articulate and amusing almost to the very end, they often think that dying from cancer really needn’t be so bad. It’s great if we break down taboos about death and start to talk more honestly about the way we would like to go. But what often gets forgotten is that for a lot of people, the reality falls far short of the ideal of a good death. I have seen two people whom I love die from cancer, my father and my grandmother Those were not easy deaths. Those were sometimes agonising struggles.If you have watched by the bedside of somebody who is dying of cancer, you might have seen that kind of struggle. You might have seen an articulate, forceful, energetic personality felled even before death; felled not by fear, but by pain. Neither my father nor my grandmother endured their pain in the hope of some miracle cure.

When their cancers were finally diagnosed, for both my father and my grandmother, the diseases were unquestionably terminal, with extensive secondary tumours that had long been growing undiagnosed Both of them immediately understood that death was imminent They refused treatments that held out false hopes. What they wanted was excellent palliative care, to ease upon the midnight with no pain.
And sometimes they got decent pain relief that turned off the suffering and gave them back their normal selves. But sometimes they were in situations where they were left to suffer. If you’ve ever had to chase doctors around a hospital or a hospice, literally begging for more morphine for a dying person, you will know what a callous face our health services can show towards the dying.That’s why I was so delighted to read that Britain’s leading cancer specialist, Professor Karol Sikora, had spoken out last week in a bid to change the priorities of the NHS when it comes to treating patients with terminal cancer. He said that more resources should go to improving the quality of patients’ days among the living.

He spoke eloquently for a change in attitude, and reminded his audience that in the 19th century, when doctors had fewer treatments to hand, they were sometimes imagined as dancing with death rather than fighting it. He said, “We have to return to dancing with the angel of death and not just fighting a war on cancer.”This is the last thing that most doctors would say. Because when it comes to cancer, even cancer that is known to be terminal, the language of war dominates. I spoke to Karol Sikora after he delivered his talk, and he said that doctors often collude with patients who have terminal cancer in pretending that the fight goes on “Many patients are seeking immortality.

And we have raised the expectation that there is always something that can be done. Over the next 10 years, as new treatments come on stream for cancer care, that will be even more the case. Hopes will be raised unrealistically.”He has seen that doctors can persist in giving more and more chemotherapy to ravaged, dying people, so increasing their suffering and only prolonging their lives by short periods, rather than encouraging them to die an easeful death “Palliative care is still the Cinderella in hospitals Pain control just isn’t done very well It isn’t prioritised enough. There is still this belief that one should face pain bravely. There is still a fear of high doses of morphine.”Amazingly, this fear does persist.