The trouble was, I could never think of another one.""What was this terrific pair?"" `Railway junction' and `sea food'.""There males are two identical-sounding phrases meaning `railway junction' and `sea food'?""Yes. Crewe Station and crustacean."We thought about that in reverent silence The conversation could only go downhill from there.. Tricky business, this matter of foreigners males Tricky html for Conservatives, html anyway. Consider Michael Portillo, fighting a directive about the rights of EU workers toiling in other countries because it infringes the free movement of labour and means "putting up the shutters at national frontiers" Quite right, good point. html And yet, at just the same time, all around Mr Portillo, we have the opening males of Schengenland, the borderless, shutterless continental space which symbolises free movement And Schengenland, of html course, excludes Britain. How males could it be otherwise for a country ruled by a party which is emotionally html addicted males to shutters and congenitally suspicious of foreigners? This implies a contradictory attitude to foreigners and an ambiguous attitude to our own country.

Britain is rightly against the Brussels directive, not just because it is bureaucratic but because, as a low-wage and relatively poor European country, we need to let our people go abroad to earn money. (Mr Portillo's allies in Brussels were the Irish, the Portuguese and the Spanish, which tells us a bit.)But we are against Schengen, because we don't want other people flooding in. We are, it seems, a curious country, which is economically poor enough to need to export workers to richer neighbours; yet so attractive that we are frightened of being "swamped" by abandoning our border-controls with the rest of the EU.Now, it is perfectly true that our borders are not like other people's borders.

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Indeed, they aren't borders at all (with the exception of the Irish one) but a coastline. This, by definition, cannot be "internal" to the EU: beyond it lies the whole world.So the argument goes that if we are to keep a check on terrorists, drug- smugglers and would-be illegal immigrants from beyond Schengenland, then we have to maintain coastal defences.This has some merit, though it is hardly leakproof in logic. France has rather a lot of coastline too, yet this has not stopped it opening its road and rail borders with other countries.There is another strong reason to be against the extension of Schengenland to Britain, which is that it would be used to force British citizens to carry identity papers. I loathe the idea, which smacks of leather-raincoated men moving through trains in war films, and which I think would lead to harassment and little-Hitlerism here.

(Why don't Tory patriots make more of the unBritishness of this? Because, oops, most of these guys are passionately in favour of identity cards.)So let us now admit the patently obvious. The Government is against Schengen not because it has weighed the pros and cons but because it could not possibly be in favour. Not in this mood of political xenophobia, which it has partly caused and which it hopes to use in an election. You can't go around implying that Abroad is a horrid place you get rabies and Brussels directives from, and then say oh, and by the way, we're dropping most of our passport checks.The truth, though, is that the British have less of a foreigner problem than their politicians pretend.