WITH a record 60,000 asylum-seekers a year seeking the comfort and safety of this country - at a cost of some £600 million to the taxpayer - we need more like a hole in the head.

But it turns out that we are getting them courtesy of the French who are putting Eastern European and Balkan "refugees" on cross-Channel Eurostar trains and even paying their fare to ship them here so we, not they, end up with the colossal bill for them.

There have, we are told, even been instances of French police intervening to stop British train staff turning away passengers without tickets or passports off the train.

Are we to put up with this buck-passing trade in people without protest? Our Foreign Office should tell the French to allez off in no uncertain terms.

But isn't the root of the problem the lure of our soft-touch social security system?

Home Secretary Jack Straw, quite rightly, tried to put a stop to the "refugee" gravy train by replacing cash welfare benefits with the right to just basic necessities, but bleeding-heart liberal Labour MPs threatened to revolt.

Yet isn't the answer to the refugee flood and the perfidious French shoving "their" asylum seekers on to us, simply a matter of denying all welfare in this country to anyone who has never contributed to the social security system?

The time for getting tough is long overdue.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.