Asylum Timebomb

Lorries in the Cambridge area are being searched this morning in a co-ordinated hunt for refugees from a benighted era. According to police, a large group of Jews, sodomites and women were seen near the village of Great Shelton, Cambridgeshire, apparently fleeing the Middle Ages.

“It’s imperative that we track them down and that villagers do not attempt to succour them,” cautioned constabulary spokesdog Django Breeder. “Members of the public are advised not to approach the wayworn wretches as they are believed to be heavily vexed, and some may be piteous.

“If you see them hiding, let us know. If they seek refuge in your outhouse, burn them. That’s the best way to help them, in the long run.

“There’s a pernicious rumour doing the rounds that these persons may be your own flesh and blood, and that acts of cruelty towards them could redound in a paradoxical way, but we urge locals not to pay much heed to that.”

In particular, police are advising parents of Scouts and Guides to keep their children safely indoors in case one mistakes the needy folk for human beings and does them a good turn. A bite of bread or a sup of ale may seem harmless enough, but the editor of the Daily Mail newspaper is currently in intensive care suffering from apoplexy. It’s feared that acts of mercy will only make him worse.

“Any more earthquakes in the late thirteen hundreds,” he told nurses from those days, “and I shan’t be responsible for what I do!”

Rights groups have called for an overhaul of the temporal asylum system, and politicians agree, although the sort of reforms they have in mind are different. But Lin Homer, head of the Borders and Immigration Agency, is in no doubt that getting soft on women, sodomites and Jews from the past would set a dangerous president.

“While there’s obviously nothing wrong with gayness, womanhood or Jewry nowadays,” the firm official said, “in some epochs, these are quite bad sins.”

“The real risk though,” warned Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, “is that the wicked of our day will make copycat flights to a time when their crimes are no longer self-evident. It would be a terrible blow to us all if folk whose libidos happen to respond to some of the sensory cues that define infancy, Muslim ladies who prefer to dress in the traditional garb of their own people, foreigners, drug minorities and animals were to escape justice in a kinder future.”