If ever there was support to the argument for more stringent border controls, it must be the news that the dead swan which was poised to spark a bird flu pandemic and kill half the British population wasn't, in fact, one of "our birds" at all, but a fly-by-night foreigner who had sneaked into the country, probably knowing full well that it was infected with H5N1 and without doubt coming over here to take advantage of our much-vaunted National Health Service.

Swanny Foreigner had most likely come over with a bunch of immigrants from Scandinavia, carking it just off the Scottish coast and being washed up in Cellardyke before it could get a council nest, sign on for benefits and enjoy a cup of tea with the Queen while it took its citizenship exam.

It was a close call for all of us, and we should take the opportunity to beef up our immigration policies to make more checks on these birds who think all they have to do is catch an air-current and coast into Easy Street in SoftTouch Britain.

How fed up are you with seeing all these foreign birds hanging about on street corners, pecking at the pieces of bread left by honest English folk for good old British birds?

There have been documented cases of birds that have flown over to Britain eating more birdseed in a single day than many indigenous species have to live on over a whole week.

Once they get set up with a cosy nest and some crusts of bread from the welfare state, these incomers are quite happy to lay eggs with abandon. And who ends up footing the bill for these babies? You've guessed it. Joe Blackbird and his fellow British birds.

Is it any wonder that the good, honest sparrow who never leaves these shores and puts in nine or ten hours a day sitting on telegraph poles feels like a second class citizen in its own country, while Johnny-Come-Latelies such as the nightingale lounge around in top-notch roosts like Berkeley Square, taking advantage of everything this country has to offer? And who gets poems and songs written about them? Not the sparrow, I can tell you.

It has even been suspected that migrating birds come into the country and try to pass themselves off as British birds. The infected swan that died in Scotland was, the security services believe, planning to make its way south and pose as nothing less than one of the Queen's very own swans.

The problem doesn't just lie with the freeloaders who have their eye on the main chance, either. There are unscrupulous gangs of birdtraffickers who will quite happily stuff dozens of geese in the back of a vehicle and smuggle them into the country. Even normally quite patriotic magpies, sad to say, have had their heads turned by a fistful of shiny coins and transported desperate foreign birds on to British soil.

The time has come to call a halt. There is a pecking order in this country, and British birds are at the top of it. Britain is sinking under the weight of foreign feathers and, as the case with the infected swan goes to show, no good can come of letting all and sundry into this oncegreat nation.

This has been a party political broadcast on behalf of the Bird National Party.