In spite of all the huffing and puffing from both Labour and Tory parties, nothing really effective is going to be done about asylum seekers.

The suggestion from Downing Street that asylum seekers travelling to the Kent ports should be immediately returned to France was, to say the least, disingenuous.

It was a straightforward attempt to catch the public mood and garner a few votes - a headline grabber that could not be taken seriously.

For the fact is that only five weeks ago, the Law Lords ruled it illegal for Britain to return asylum seekers to France.

The sheer humbug, the brass necked lying, the hypocrisy surrounding the issue that has come from both sides of parliament in recent years is disgraceful.

The fundamental reasons that Illegal immigrants find Britain so attractive are twofold.

First there is the absurd generosity of the state benefits system. Secondly, there is the sloppiness and ineptitude of those officials who are meant to monitor the immigrants once they are here.

The figures speak for themselves. Only one in four of those who had their asylum applications rejected in 1999 actually left the country. The rest melted away into the economy.

By 2000, this figure had worsened to nearly one in ten. This year, inevitably, the discrepancy will be even greater. But there is an even more alarming aspect to all this.

The astonishing 'guesstimate' of a million people working illegally in Britain's black economy has been given credibility by Lord Desai, Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics.

Illegal immigrants are working across the country in restaurants, hotels, building sites, food processing plants and so on, mostly for pathetically poor wages and no tax or national insurance arrangements.

As Lord Desai pointed out so provocatively, these people are so entrenched that if they were all to be rounded up and jailed or deported, the economy would collapse. It is that serious.

This in turn begs the question about why they are employed with no checks on their legality. The answer of course is greed.

In our 'greed is good' society, employing people for low wages who dare not complain to anyone is excellent for profits. It is an attitude I used to think, in my naivety, we had put behind us at the end of the Victorian era.

It is deeply shaming that no government has found the political will to really take hold of this problem and deal with it.

The combination of the chaos of the Home Office's arrangements for dealing with refugees and Jack Straw acknowledging that international criminal gangs really control the flow of immigrants is a frightening indictment of the system.

As for today's Anglo French summit in Cahors, Tony Blair and Jack Straw are hoping to reach some kind of agreement with President Chirac about new ways of handling the problem.

And, of course, the cow might jump over the moon.