The Spectator

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, in a speech designed to show that Britain was no longer to be a ‘soft touch’ for immigrants, said that people from the European Union would have to show they had a ‘genuine chance of getting work’ in order to claim UK unemployment benefits for more than six months. The UK Border Agency was to be abolished, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, told the Commons, because its performance was ‘not good enough’, and ‘the number of illegal immigrants removed does not keep up with the number of people who are here illegally’. The agency would be split up and returned to the Home Office, with one half focusing on the visa system and the other on immigration law enforcement.

‘Distracted from distraction by distraction’ was one way in which T.S. Eliot described the inhabitants of ‘this twittering world’ in his Four Quartets. Eliot’s words seem more accurate today than even he might have expected. With the apparently ceaseless intrusion into our lives of permanent media feeds, gossip reported as news and news reported as gossip, it has never been easier to become lost by, and in, distraction. Not to mention the twittering. Easter briefly quietens the babble. Unlike Christmas, it’s a story that doesn’t lend itself to much commercial fuss: no kings or presents. Easter is a story of sacrifice, torture, abandonment and death — and, through it all, triumph over that death.