SIR - What planet are we living on?

A story that could quite easily serve as a script for a Monty Python sketch has it that prison vans are to cruise the streets of Britain searching for illegal immigrants! We are further informed that these "mobile detention centres" will aim to catch recently arrived foreigners as they emerge from people-smuggling lorries.

If said detainees are found to be here illegally, police will escort them to Oakington detention centre in Cambridgeshire, from where they will be repatriated.

Unfortunately, Labour's "cunning plan" has a number of rather obvious weaknesses.

The first is that would-be "asylum seekers" tend to rid themselves of all documentation on entering Britain for the very purpose of making it deliberately difficult to identify from where they came!

Second, they need only utter the magic words "seeking asylum" to immediately qualify as fully-fledged members of the asylum-seeking fraternity - affording them access to our legal and benefits system and therefore delaying their deportation indefinitely.

MARTIN ROBERTS, Worcester.