Airstrip One

The Foreigner Office

A foreign tourist is walking down Whitehall, he can't find where he's going and he stops a commuter.

"Excuse me, do you know which side the Foreign Office is on."

"Yours."

Old joke I know, but this article "Our Islamic Fifth Column by Farrukh Dhondy raises a couple of interesting questions. The first is the blanket aid given by the Foreign Office of Britons arrested overseas, including Islamic terrorists. I've said this before, but if you are a Briton on non-government service you should not expect the British government to ride to your rescue once you leave British territory, and thus the protection of British laws.

Another interesting point is the fundamentalist mosques and the role of Islamic immigrants. Immigration and foreign policy are linked in a way that makes someone of a broad brush libertarian tendency to feel split. On the one hand opening the gates to immigrants is a libertarian thing to do. However, once you allow in a large immigrant community a non-interventionist foreign policy becomes that much harder as you have created a number of instant lobbies for the "mother country", wherever that may be.