It’s a lie in two fundamental ways. Firstly, it implies the kind of cheerful customer service that doesn’t exist in Britain, where you’re generally regarded with hatred, suspicion and withering contempt if you dare to offer money in the hope of obtaining a product or service. 

 

Secondly, you’re not welcome. That much is made clear when you head towards the baggage reclaim area and arrive in the now familiar queues at border control. You’re not welcome: you might be a potential TERRORIST or CRIMINAL. You need to be shunted into queues in a drab, joyless expanse of grey carpet, and made to stand and wait, and wait, and wait. You need to stand and watch as the ultra-expensive biometric passport scanners fail to work, again. You need to be made to feel like a piece of crap, for having the nerve to want to enter Britain in the first place. 

 

The queues experienced by a long line of miserable passengers [2] at Heathrow recently might be explained away as exceptional, unfortunate, whatever – but they are just an extreme example of something that has been happening for a long time. 

 

This has been coming for a while. “Tougher checks take longer,” mewl the electronic displays as you stand in the seemingly endless queue at whatever airport you’ve decided to come to. As if it’s your fault, as if you somehow demanded tougher checks at some point. Do you remember doing that? I don’t. I don’t recall thinking what a wonderful idea it would be to make the experience of entering the country a miserable, tedious and loathsome one. If I wanted to be treated like scum for crossing a border, I’d go to the United States. I don’t want it here. 

 

But then this is the state that New Labour made, attempting to portray itself as being ‘tough’ on immigration, a war it would never win against tabloids who were desperate to portray the former Government as deliberately opening the borders to all kinds of undesirables, tapping into their readers’ spectrum of opinions ranging between mild xenophobia and out-and-out racism.

 

It was Labour, too, who snipped back all kinds of civil liberties, with the simple explanation of “Because of terrorism” every single time. The balaclava-clad paramilitary special forces who took to the streets the other day during a bomb alert were part of the same legacy, as is the ultra security lockdown of London ahead of the Olympics, including missiles on tower blocks. 

 

To scare us, our leaders talk of “heightened” terror threats, of “Cobra” and “Gold Command”, things that sound like they should be in the kind of books read by sad men who dress in camouflage gear in their bedrooms and have a hard-on for Guns-and-Ammo type magazines. Our lawmakers are so terrified of being blamed for another terror atrocity, of letting someone slip through the net, they find themselves buying into all this macho garbage. 

 

Which means, when you come to Britain, you’re not welcome. You’re made to stand in a queue snaking around a tiny room, or one of many queues in a space especially reserved for queuing misery. The Tories won’t dismantle it, even though they try to vaporise as many public-sector workers as possible – so the end result is even longer queues, meaning even more travellers get their first impression of Britain as a place that couldn’t run a hot bath, let alone a border control.  

 

For those of us who live here, and who have the misfortune of having to go through Britain’s border every now and then, it’s becoming more and more tedious. And it’s just for show: it doesn’t stop home-grown terrorism; it doesn’t prevent criminality; it doesn’t do anything other to show that it’s there, to be seen to be doing something. It’s a great waste of time, money, resources and workers, and it makes Britain look hateful and incompetent. 

 

“You’re welcome,” says the sign. Not any time soon, you’re not.