When most of us hear the words "bank holiday", simple things like lie-ins and trips to the seaside most readily come to mind.

Not so for Daniel Kawczynski. The Conservative MP, whose family immigrated from Poland, has introduced a bill proposing a new bank holiday honouring Poles’ contribution to modern Britain, from WWII pilots to the hundreds of thousands of Polish workers in Britain today.

The snag? Poles aren’t going for it.

This year’s annual Hay-on-Wye Festival has just ended. In his column in last week’s Sunday Times, Jeremy Clarkson wrote this about the annual twelve-day jamboree:

‘You might imagine that Hay is a lovely day out for all the family, a chance for children to meet all the authors they love… Of course, it’s no such thing. Mainly it’s a chance for ramblers and hippies to gather in a field and convince themselves everyone thinks the same way that they do.’

2008 is European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. I bet you didn’t know that.

According to its own dedicated website, the purpose of the year is ‘to encourage all those living in Europe to explore the benefits of our rich cultural heritage and to learn from different cultural traditions’.

Boudicca. Ambrosius. Hereward the Wake.

What do these three British characters have in common?

According to legend, all three put up stiff, if doomed, fights against foreign aggressors – the Romans, Saxons and Normans respectively.

Yet none was of “native” British stock: Hereward was an Anglo-Saxon, Ambrosius a Roman, and even Boudicca’s Celtic ancestors had displaced the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge.

Their story is that of Britain: a nation of incomers, each wave resisting the next before finally mingling with it.

Now we’re at it again. The government has announced plans for a new citizenship test, which hopeful immigrants must overcome before becoming British.

Despite all the appalling details to have emerged in today's press about the truly dreadful 'honour killing' of Banaz Mahmod, given yesterday's guilty verdict of her father and uncle for arranging her murder, the true and horrendous significance of one aspect of her case, to my mind, has yet to have be adequately noted or commented on.

It makes details of her murder even more chilling and disturbing, if that is possible, than those that have already emerged and been noted by the media.

So, there we have it, at last, a final admission by no less than the Labour Minister responsible for immigration, Liam Byrne, that the large-scale volume of net immigration his party has deliberately engineered with such machismo these last ten years has 'damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country’, to use the words employed by the Times yesterday in its account of what he has admitted.