This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

Another contributor to George Osborne’s dubious low-wage boom leaps nimbly from a Romanian lorry into the labour market.

The mystery is why this lithe person in a leather jacket, and his mates, have gone to so much trouble to evade the authorities – or why police in the Cotswolds bothered to round them up. I think it a very good bet that they will all still be here five years hence.

The world’s poor have discovered that the EU (that’s the country we live in, no point pretending there’s anywhere called Britain any more) has absolutely no clue how to stop determined immigrants.

In almost all cases, we allow them to stay, often because it is just too complicated and time-consuming to make them go away.

The astonishing abolition of internal borders, from Greece to Sweden, and from Spain to the Russian frontier, means that anyone who can get into the EU’s space can now get to Calais without any major risk of being stopped. And we know how hard it has proved to keep that gate closed.

Once they’re in, our own treasured freedoms work against us. Thanks to centuries of island freedom, when we were able to decide who came in and who didn’t, it is far easier to disappear in Britain than in almost any other country in the world. We’ll abolish those freedoms in the end, alas, but it won’t do any good.

And now the expensive navies of the EU are ferrying thousands more across the Mediterranean each week. The people-smugglers are saving a fortune on fuel, for they know their victims will be picked up before they are halfway across, in what are misleadingly described as ‘rescues’.

The only thing that will stop the flow is when the EU countries, including ours, become so like the places these people are fleeing from that there is no point in coming any more.

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Sir Tim Hunt, a biochemist of such brilliance that he has won the Nobel Prize, has been forced out of a professorship. Is this because there is anything wrong with his science? Has he committed a crime, or told a lie, or done a cruel thing? No. I do not know Sir Tim, but I know people who do and by all accounts he is a man of great personal integrity, kindness and generosity, reluctant to refuse any request for help.

What he did was say something unfashionable about women. And for this, one of our greatest minds must make a public apology, and ‘resign’ from a post of honour. Unreason is in charge.

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Why we will never escape from the EU

In the unlikely event of the ‘No’ side winning the EU referendum, what do you think will happen?

My advice is not to be too sure. On Thursday morning I called the Foreign Office, which is piloting the Referendum Bill through Parliament. I asked if there was anything in the Bill, or its schedules, about what specific actions would follow such a vote. I also asked if any Minister was on the record, in a speech or in the answer to a Parliamentary Question, on this matter.

There was nothing.

So there you are. I think we can take that as confirmation that they don’t think it’s a realistic prospect, and that there’s no pledge on the record. The Tory manifesto says they ‘will respect the outcome’. What does that actually mean? Knowing how slippery these people are, I don’t think that necessarily means a guaranteed exit.

Apart from anything else, would there be a majority for a British exit in either House? I can’t see how, given that so many Tories, including the PM and most of his ministerial colleagues, are keen EU enthusiasts in practice.

My own guess is that a ‘No’ majority would not lead to a British departure from the EU, unless the majority was so huge that it was embarrassing. Anything else, and we’ll be in for a new round of ‘negotiations’, another lot of ‘reforms’ and another vote in which you’d jolly well better vote ‘Yes’.

Eventually it will sink in. We’re not leaving.

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Suspicious death of crime figures

No matter how often I and others point out that the police crime figures are fiddled, and how they are fiddled, and that this has now been officially admitted, people still quote these discredited numbers as if they mattered. Or they tell me that the rival Crime Survey gives a true picture, even if the police statistics are confected rubbish.

Well, now they won’t even be able to say that any more. In news relegated to the bottom of obscure pages, it was revealed last week that the Crime Survey, too, is deeply suspect. Professor Sylvia Walby, of Lancaster University, found that the survey caps the number of times anyone can be listed as a victim of crime at just five. She calculated that without this cap, the number of violent and sexual crimes would rise by 61 per cent. At the same gathering, Adrian Leppard, Commissioner of the City of London Police, declared that ‘the notion of police recorded crime is history. It’s dead in the water’.

Remember these things next time any politician boasts that crime is falling. As in all crooked and ill-run countries, the truth can no longer be told. The figures are falling because crime isn’t. And they’re not going to do anything about it.

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No appetite for facts in our 'skinny' world

Skimmed milk was what they used to give to prisoners and workhouse inmates, to go with their porridge and gruel. It’s a punishment, not a drink.

Now there are coffee chains which do not even provide proper milk. And people ask for and seek out this disgusting, skimmed substance, or its close cousin, semi-skimmed milk, turning up their health-snob noses at proper milk. And they are all mad. There are no health benefits from drinking it, unless the shudder you experience as it goes down your throat is in some way good for you. Fat does not make you fat.

Nor is it bad for your heart. Owning a car (because you will stop taking normal exercise) is far worse for your heart than drinking full-fat normal whole milk. So is the sugar-crammed ‘low-fat’ cake you will have to buy to take away the foul bitter taste of your ‘skinny’ coffee. I have to exercise huge self-restraint each time the person in front of me in the station coffee queue asks for a ‘skinny’ drink. How can one begin to explain to these deluded people that their behaviour is irrational and unscientific, as well as nasty-tasting? It would only lead to unfortunate scenes, red mists and shouting.

They all believe, absolutely, that they are being sensible. It is much the same as the widespread belief that global warming is known for certain to result from human activity, and that it is already causing the sea to overwhelm the land.

In both cases, those who actually possess the facts are dismissed as eccentric dimwits, while those who are totally wrong glory in the warmth of majority righteousness. The insane popularity of skimmed milk is a good metaphor for our deluded civilisation.

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