Will the immigrants be asked to say ‘Cheese’?

It would be interesting to know what prompted Monmouth’s MP David Davies to say that they should use dental checks to establish whether migrants from the Calais ‘Jungle’ should be allowed into Britain. Nobody with any sense is saying it’s a good idea, including the British Dental Association, which has declared it’s unethical. It also doesn’t work, apparently. Well done, David.

I’m not sure why the Tory MP made the suggestion but I can’t help but remember after Sadaam Hussein was captured. Do you remember those close-up photographs that showed his captors making him open his mouth while they probed around inside it looking for …I don’t know. Maybe a very small nuclear device.

But I remember at the time feeling uneasy, as if I was watching some act of intimacy between two people. That probably was the intention, except it was strictly a one-way intimacy: the captors asserting their right to explore any and every orifice the captive possessed. And, needless to say, do so on TV.

Could that have been it? Could David Davies have been thinking of how a dental exploration would somehow reduce the humanity of the potential immigrants, help show Britons that while they were to be congratulated on their generosity in letting these young immigrants to enter their country, they were doing so in a way that showed the world and all immigrants – and let’s not forget the British voting public – that these people were a lesser breed without the law. Maybe worse: maybe, like a man buying a horse, it made sense to check their teeth.

What a pity there isn’t an examination that would establish if our public representatives have even the faintest trace of humanity.