You know, presumably, that the Parliament is talking about limiting the special measures that were put in place in 1990ish to allow Russian Jews to get German visas more easily than regular Russians?

It's not, as James seems to think, a case of "Russians can come in unless they're Yids".

Hi, John.

You know, you remind me of someone I used to argue with on the Internet all the time.

Anyway, yes, I am aware of that.

We've had a certain amount of lecturing from the Germans in recent weeks about the importance of symbols, about how Prince Harry should be aware of the symbolic and historical connotations of the Nazi uniform and the Swastika. Apparently, these symbols are so important that they should be banned across the entire EU. Meanwhile, the German Parliament appear to be amazingly unaware of the symbolic and historical connotations of their debating whether they're letting too many Jews into the country and proposing a new measure that would only allow in useful Jews, just as the Berlin police appeared to be unaware of the symbolic and historical connotations of telling Jews not to look Jewish in public.

There are lots of ways they could have raised the issue. They could, for instance, have talked about standardising immigration rules for immigrants from outside the EU, or making the rules the same for all Russians. That's something I'd supported, as making the system simpler would mean less bureaucracy, fewer loopholes, and more fairness. However, the Parliament have chosen to make the debate about Jews, to issue statements about Jews. Elected politicians aren't stupid and always have an eye on the next election. They wouldn't have framed the debate in these terms if they didn't think there were votes in it.

Oops, my mistake. What I should have said was:

Elected politicians — with the exception of Clare Short — aren't stupid ...

Current Conservative party leadership?

Fair points, otherwise. It just seems a little churlish to criticise the Krauts for considering only favouring Russian Jews quite a bit instead of even more...

Fair enough, but that's not exactly what I criticised them for. It was the angling for votes by raising the Jewish Problem that bothered me. The fact that they're not really going to restrict Jewish immigration much, in a way, makes this even worse: it means that they've taken the decision to talk up the keep-out-the-Jews angle when there really isn't one. That's disturbing.

And you're right about Howard.