Since my last column, I’ve gained a son-in-law. The Good Lady Wife and I are happy with Patrick and, most importantly, my youngest daughter, Izzy, is head over heels in love with him. For a while, though, it looked like the wedding might not take place. It wasn’t due to Izzy or Patrick getting cold feet. It was down to our border controls.

At this point, let me give you a brief bit of background. Izzy and Patrick met a couple of years ago when he was a serving soldier in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. As many of you will know, the British Army is pretty cosmopolitan – Tidworth’s full of Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans, Fijians, to name but a few. Patrick is a Canadian citizen but served our country, including a stint in Afghanistan. He left the army late last year and returned to Canada to prepare for their married life. Then came the time for him to return for the wedding.

Izzy and Patrick have played everything strictly by the book and they enquired whether he would need a visa to return for the wedding. He was only ever going to be here a fortnight or so – just time to marry, honeymoon and then whisk my daughter back to British Columbia and he was advised that he did not need a visa. It turns out that he was misadvised. At Heathrow, immigration officers said something like: “Where do you think you’re going, sunshine? Please wait in this cell whilst we decide if we’re going to let you in or not.” A rather fraught few hours followed. To be fair, the immigration officers seemed to accept that he wasn’t trying to sneak into this sceptred isle and with some much appreciated help and support from Claire Perry’s assistant, Anna, Patrick was allowed in.

That’s the closest experience I have to the way our border controls work. And from that, they appear to me to be pretty stringent. Yet every week it seems we read another scare story about immigrants streaming across our borders in uncontrolled swarms. You see headlines about ‘them’ coming over here, taking our jobs and, somehow at the same time, living off our benefits. The terminology often suggests insect, rather than human, life and it’s all too common to see a distasteful racial element creep in.

Now don’t get me wrong, my nationality is British but I am a proud Englishman – a winner of the lottery of life, to borrow a phrase from Cecil Rhodes. My haircut and thoughts on the European Union might suggest a friend of Nick Griffin, but appearances can be deceptive.

To me, England is a living, ever-changing entity. We should be open to people who want to come here to help us move forward. We also have a humanitarian duty to take our share of those who have nowhere else to go through no fault of their own. And if they or others have skills we need and we have jobs that need to be filled, then we should welcome people who want to work hard and contribute.

Many people want to pull up some imaginary drawbridge and declare admission to have closed 50, 100 years or even longer ago. But where would that leave us? For a start we would be without the likes of Mary Seacole, Winston Churchill, John Sentamu, Daley Thompson, Idris Elba, Oscar winner Steve McQueen, Brunel, Paddington Bear, Handel, T S Eliot and Freddie Mercury.

England can’t just be a dumping ground but neither can we afford to be too closed and insular. Rather than a slanging match, we need a proper and informed debate about immigration. Has anyone at the top got the guts to kick it off?