ONCE more, the Blackburn with Darwen Council Forum was treated to moralising, self-righteous nonsense as various 'lead' members of the Labour group attempted to disguise their expensive, selfish and unhelpful asylum policy.

This was in response to serious questions asked by the Conservatives about how and why the South East is overflowing with asylum seekers, swamping a system designed to deal with the few thousand genuine cases that occur each year.

Rather than send the illegal immigrants home, Labour merely lets them disappear into an underground economy that costs us all. So far this year, more than 200,000 have disappeared.

Labour won't sent them home. The message this sends to the rest of the world is loud and clear -- 'Britain is a soft touch.'

The South East's asylum processing centres are now so overcrowded that the rest of the country has to help house them, including Blackburn and Darwen.

Yet we won't receive any extra funding to help with this from the Government for more than two years yet.

The asylum seekers being sent here are mostly bogus and many will disappear into the system, creating a new underclass of people who can't work or claim benefit legitimately -- and the local Labour party won't admit there's anything wrong with this! Labour are hypocrites when they denounce those who dare talk about it.

While Labour leaders sanctimoniously accuse Conservatives of being Nazis, the situation gets out of hand, and it's the genuine asylum seekers who suffer.

Their cases now take up to a year to hear and when they finally are granted asylum, they are treated with suspicion by a country inundated with bogus asylum seekers.

Under a Conservative government, we would still have the list of 'safe countries' and we would actually send back the illegal immigrants straight away.

We wouldn't be inundated with bogus asylum seekers and, most importantly of all, it wouldn't take a genuine asylum seeker a year to have their case heard.

We'd also be able to offer those who were granted asylum a genuine welcome into our community.

COUN GRAHAM POUND (Con), Wycollar Road, Blackburn.