New Labour’s one woman ideas machine, Hazel Blears comes up with another cracker - information packs for the ill-mannered dusky hordes flocking to our shores. She’d like to teach the world to queue in perfect harmony:

The guidance is intended to illustrate the information local authorities could include such as details on how to access local provision like English language classes, waste and recycling services and employment services; practical information on rights and responsibilities including national laws and rules around paying taxes alongside background on social norms such not littering, not spitting and queuing in shops.

Sounds great. It’s like a finishing school in patronising paper form. When’s it being rolled out to the indigenous population then? The pack could also include chapters about not letting your dog shit in the street and not hitting your kids in Tesco. Thinking twice about your choice of tattoo. When it’s acceptable to use depleted uranium munitions. When you think about it, the bloody thing’s going to be six inches thick.

Like ID cards, surely this information pack is just an initial pilot scheme with immigrants being the guinea pigs. The plan must be to have compulsory good manners for everybody in Britain by 2012 or so, please? Then once we’ve cracked it at home, we can start exporting our good manners to foreign markets. It’ll kick start a whole new knowledge-based economy. Imagine Gordon Brown declaiming that Britain is at the forefront of the battle against beastliness.

Let’s bomb Helmand Province with copies of ‘The Blears Complete Miscellany of Refined Deportment’. The whole shooting match will be all over in a week.