This week, Ukip announced its firm, but fair, immigration policy at the Emmanuel Centre in the heart of London. I was delighted to be flanked on stage by many of our candidates, some of them immigrants, or first or second generation immigrants themselves, who know that we have the most ethical and sustainable policy of all the parties.

This is because Ukip realises that for decades Britain’s net migration numbers hovered around 30,000 a year. That is sustainable for our country – though even those figures sparked fierce debate in the United Kingdom.

And yet, under this Conservative government, which promised to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” – we now have 300,000 people, net, coming into the country every year. This is up from 196,000 under Labour – who opened Britain’s borders to new EU citizens – in 2009.

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So when Ukip talks about immigration control – especially the Australian-style points system we’ve proposed – the national media goes into a frenzy. Let me give you an example. It’s apparent to anyone who’s willing to be honest about it, that nine million more people in this country – through natural growth as well as via immigration over the past 20 years – has added to the strain on our National Health Service, on our school places, and on our housing situation.

And yet, when I say that our Australian-style points system would prohibit those with long-term diseases coming to this country, there’s uproar. Well, just like Australia does, a British immigration system would look at the quality of the candidates who wish to come into the country. For instance, how old are they? What skills do they have? What languages do they speak? And yes, do they have a long-term ailment that would require them to use the resources of the NHS upon entry, and at great cost?

10 things immigration has done for Britain Show all 10 1 /10 10 things immigration has done for Britain 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Mini The 1959 classic, that is, perhaps our greatest piece of industrial design, a miracle of packaging and revolution in motoring. Its genius designer was Sir Alec Issigonis, who was an asylum seeker. His family, Greek, fled Smyrna when Turks invaded this borderland in around 1920, and he wound up studying engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. He went on to create that most English of motor cars, the Morris Minor, as well as the Austin-Morris 1100, all much loved products of his fertile imagination. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marks and Spencer Once upon a time there was no M&S in Britain, difficult as that may be to believe. We have one Michael Marks to thank for our most famous retailer, and he was a refugee from Belarus, arriving in England in about 1882, and soon after set off to flog stuff around Yorkshire. He eventually teamed with Thomas Spencer to create the vast business we know today. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Thunderbirds And many other TV shows created, funded and otherwise produced by that largest of larger-than-life characters, Lew Grade (also a world class tap dancer). The man who dominated commercial television gave us memorable entertainment such as The Prisoner, the Saint and brought the Muppets to Britain (a sort of fuzzy felt wave of immigration), as well as puppet shows where you could see the strings. All this from a penniless Jew from Ukraine, born Lev Winogradsky, who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine with his family in the 1890s. His nephew Michael Grade has also done his bit for British television. Rex Features 10 things immigration has done for Britain The House of Windsor Or the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until George V prudently rebranded the family during the First World War. Well, our royals are a pretty German bunch, as well as having various types of French and other alien blue blood coursing around their veins. ‘Twas ever thus. There was William the Conqueror, Norman French, who certainly broke the immigration rules; William of Orange, a direct import from Holland; the Hanoverian King Georges, the first barely able to speak English; Queen Victoria, who married a German, Edward VII, who couldn’t stay faithful to his wife, a Danish princess; George V wed another German princess; Edward VIII married an American (though she hardly visited England and prompted his emigration and exile); and the Queen is married to man born in Corfu. The embodiment of the British nation, to many, but one thinks of them as quite multicultural really. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain I Vow To Thee My Country Our most patriotic hymn was the product of a man named Gustav Holst (pictured), born in Cheltenham, but of varied Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, who adapted part of his suite The Planets to put a particularly stirring and beautiful poem to music, just after the Great War. As the second verse has it, “there's another country/I've heard of long ago/Most dear to them that love her/most great to them that know”. Imagine if the Holst family had been kept out because the quota on musical European types had been reached. Creative Commons 10 things immigration has done for Britain Curry and Cobra Chicken Tikka Masala is, so they say, a dish which not only the most popular in Britain but specifically designed to cater for European tastes. For that we probably have to thank an Indian migrant, Sake Dean Mahomed, who came from Bengal to open the first recognisable Indian restaurant, the magnificently named “Hindoostanee Coffee House”. History does not record if a plate of poppadoms and accompanying selection of pickles and yoghurts were routinely placed on the table for new diners, but we do know that we had to wait until 1989 to taste the ideal lager for a curry - Cobra. That brew was brought to us by Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, a Cambridge law graduate who hailed from Hyderabad. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain That big red swirly sculpture at the Olympic Park Or Orbit, to give it its proper name, the work of Anish Kapoor, who arrived in 1973 from India and had the artistic imagination to fill a power station. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Sun Love it or hate it, and many do both, this has been a symbol of much that is successful and a lot that is awful in British journalism since its inception in 1969. In its turn it spawned the Page 3 Girl and some nastily xenophobic headlines. All the stranger when you consider its creator was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, born 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marxism OK, Karl Marx’s philosophy was not much of a gift to the world, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. Though we might not dare admit it, Marxism still has a few insights to offer to anyone wanting to understand the workings of capitalism, though too few to excuse everything that was done in its name. Born in Germany spent much time in the British museum and the British pub, buried Highgate Cemetery. Oddly, his ideas never really caught on in his adopted homeland. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The NHS They came from many, many backgrounds, including Ireland, the Philippines, east Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, as they still do, but the contribution of the black nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean to heal and care for is a debt of honour that must be recognised. It so sometimes forgotten that it was Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health (1960-62), who campaigned to recruit their skilled nurses to come and work over here. One abiding legacy we can thank Enoch for. Getty Images

You’d think all these things were normal things to take into consideration. After all, cancer and HIV treatments aren’t cheap, and it isn’t fair or ethical to expect the British taxpayer, who has paid into the system their whole lives, to fund the treatment for a migrant who has just arrived here and hasn’t yet made the requisite contributions.

That’s why we’d ensure that people who came to the UK on work visas had health insurance, too. It’s a policy that is moral, as well as one that keeps the interests of the British public at heart. And that’s not to say that HIV-positive people are going to be turned around at the border. It is to say that the points system will weigh against people will long-term illness, so as not to cause further strain on our NHS.

I know it’s not necessarily the most popular thing to say, nor is it the nicest thing to have to enforce. But if we truly believe in a sustainable solution to the problems caused by immigration – if we want people to start feeling that immigration is a net positive, not negative thing – then we have to take firm but fair decisions.

Cameron has lost his nerve over TV debates

So David Cameron has this week shown his true colours; yellow. I mean even the Liberal Democrat leader had the gumption to debate against me ahead of the European elections. But Mr Cameron is frit. And he’s sending the Tory punchbag Grant Shapps onto television to take beatings from the other parties and the national media over the issue.

Remember, once upon a time, Mr Cameron was a big proponent of televised leaders’ debates. Then he began to look less keen. It might be because if he was held to account by me on the national stage, he knows he’d have to answer for his record in government. He knows he’d have to look at the list of policies he announced in 2010, when he said, “If I don’t deliver, kick me out” – and be shown up to have been completely ineffective.

It might be that he’d have to admit to a lost five years in government, during which he has doubled Labour’s 13-year debt in less than half the time, and then used the proceeds of that borrowing to Astroturf economic growth. Or maybe it’s because he promised to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands, and yet under the Tories, it’s now the highest it’s been in a decade.