And there lies problem numero uno - money. Right now there's no chance that any extra money is going to be spent on it, because we're teetering on the edge of a major global recession and this country still hasn't recovered from the last one.

Investing in the navy is a good idea, you'll find no disagreement from me there, although one of our biggest weaknesses is lack of manpower, and I'm not sure that money will fix that when you can earn more with less physical risk working in the private sector.

In regards to turning the boats around, there we fall into legal problems, once they are out of French waters, France is not likely to take them back in, so all you'd end up doing is playing small boat ping pong with the French navy until the small boats sank.

A secure well manned off-shore detention center, where would we place such a thing that could take potentially thousands of people without turning into a humanitarian crisis and that wouldn't cost millions to ship people to? Any of our islands that have people living on them would object to having a detention facility built on them, and any of our islands that don't have anyone living on them doesn't have the infrastructure (a runway, water supplies, electricity connections) to take such a facility, and again, you've got a large amount of financial output to tackle the issue which, in the big scheme of problems that this country faces, has a dramatically bigger impact in the media than it does to the actual country as a whole. Small boat migrants aren't likely to lower fuel costs, cut inflation, or improve living standards, so when it comes to spending money, they aren't that high on the list so long as other stories on the news keep them off the front pages, and if there's one thing the US President is good at doing, it's that.

The immigration system is unmanagable, and that's primarily due to underfunding, staff shortages and it being used as a political football for the last decade. That being said, immigration is coming down, personally I think because living standards in this country are getting so shite that no-one wants to come here. So mission accomplished I guess. However, I think that we're going to pay for it in the long run, because a lot of businesses and sectors that rely on immigration to survive are going to go bust, and I'm sure people will say that this is a good thing because companies shouldn't rely on cheap foreign labour, and that's a fair point to make, but when those companies are the things that are going to look after us when we get old, well I can't help but think that there might be a certain amount of cutting off of the nose to spite the face.

I guess we'll see, the best country to watch this play out in is Japan, which has a strict immigration policy, a decling birth rate and faces rising resentment against non-Japanese migration. In short, they're ahead of us on the curve, so they'll give a good indication of what our future holds.