There is only one word to describe the colonial hauteur of Foreign Office officials responsible for the plight of islanders from Diego Garcia who have arrived in Britain. It is racism.

It is the nastiest kind of racism that has no regard for the sensitivities or physical well being for a group of people they clearly consider rather less than inferior.

More than 30 years ago, Britain, which owns their tiny Indian Ocean island, simply evacuated 2,000 of the indigenous Ilois islanders across the sea to Mauritius.

They were an inconvenience to the Tory government of the time, led by Edward Heath, which had other plans for the island - such as letting off a huge chunk of it to the Americans to use as an Indian Ocean military staging base.

Just imagine the international furore if Tony Blair let his friend George Bush build a military base on the Isle of Man and shipped off two thousand Manxmen to Northern Ireland to make room for it!

It is not surprising one commentator described the forced evacuation of Diego Garcia as 'an act of late colonial arrogance, breathtaking in its execution.'

As it happens, Tony Blair does have a hand in the predicament of the islanders, whose numbers have increased from two to five thousand over the past thirty years.

Largely uneducated, living in slum conditions around Port Louis on Mauritius, they were given British passports last year as some sort of belated compensation.

However, the Foreign Office added a cynical caveat to the 'gift'. The islanders could only use their passports to come to Britain if they arranged their own accommodation here before leaving Mauritius.

Predictably, that caveat has been ignored by the thirty islanders camped out at Gatwick. And it will be ignored by the other five thousand still in Ports Louis who have their hopes set on a new life in Britain.

They too will be coming unless the Foreign Office sorts out this nonsense now.

The whole messy situation is another example of the morass this administration chooses to call an immigration policy. It is the result of the arrogance of one government, thirty years ago, compounded by the cynicism of another today.

Unarguably, down the years, Britain has been immeasurably enriched by successive groups of immigrants and asylum seekers. But our island, our culture as well as other prosperous Western cultures cannot continue absorbing immigrants at present rates. It is a critical, 21st century problem the West must find a way to address.

An international body, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations, has already been mooted to set up some kind of regional protection zones. But whatever happens, the present ad hoc arrangements of individual countries doing their own thing and wailing about the results cannot continue.

If they do, the throngs of displaced people arriving at Gatwick and Heathrow or wherever, and expecting a welcoming hand will never stop coming.