This is a small, overcrowded borough with massive problems of unemployment and homelessness already. The local council is looking to axe £51 million in services over the next four years, with £19.6 million of that to be cut from next April. It is being forced to sell off the family slums because it can't afford to repair them. Five libraries, most of our advice centres, all of our old people's homes and some of our best-supported community centres are in line for closure. And yet still the flood of economic migrants across our borders continues unchecked.

These are not genuine refugees or asylum seekers. They come to Islington for the benefits that it provides or in the hope that they might find employment or a better way of life than in the places where they were born. Once here, they tell their friends and relatives back home of the good life they have found; and so the influx continues until we have no space left to accommodate our own people any more.

Some people argue that the numbers involved are relatively small, and that if we shared them around with some of our neighbouring boroughs we would be able to cope. This ignores the lessons that should be learnt from our experience in Islington. When I first came here in the 1970s, the number of economic migrants was tiny: Margaret Hodge (then Watson), Chris Smith and a handful of so-called "gentrifiers" in Barnsbury; a gaggle of genuine political refugees (fleeing from the Labour Party) in Duncan Terrace.

We didn't object to them then. They were few in number and hadn't yet started to swamp our indigenous culture with their imported way of life. They opened a few antiques shops and restaurants on Upper Street, it's true, but they still left us our cafés and workshops in Clerkenwell. They hadn't yet taken over the Royal Northern Hospital for yuppie housing or our factories and warehouses for loft apartments. You could still have rented Tony Blair's old house, a few doors along from Margaret Watson's, for a tenner or so a week. You could even have bought it (not that any of us could have afforded to) for about one hundredth of the £650,000 he got for it. Now even the old railway workers' cottages in Winkler Street go for about a quarter of a million each.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not prejudiced. I don't mind these rich, trendy bastards moving in and swamping the place with their foreign ideas and funny ways of life. Live and let live, I say. But there comes a point when you've got to call a halt. You can't go on forever letting every pie and mash shop in the borough turn into a Balti house or sushi bar, or allowing every pub from the Eagle to Upper Holloway put plain glass in its windows and sofas in the snug. Dammit, thanks to these people we've now got an area named after a pub -- the Nag's Head -- where they've changed the name of the pub to O'Neill's. You try asking for a single to O'Neill's on the 279.

The latest wave of immigrants knows how to play the system. They might pretend to be political refugees from Wandsworth or Westminster; they might talk New Labour politics in the delicatessens and wine bars. But just watch them when they get the chance. All they are really interested in is money: how much their house is worth, how high the council tax will be, how much they can "save" by taking the axe to local services. Sixteen years ago, when the local branch of the SDP took control of the council briefly, they were considered too reactionary to be allowed to join the national SDP-Liberal Alliance. Compared to the economic migrants now in charge of Islington Council, they seem like a bunch of raving Trots.

Enough is enough. Local people will not tolerate this never-ending flow of bogus asylum seekers into their borough. The last straw was not Jack Straw (although we had him as well) but the wave of new kinds of crime associated with these incomers. Yes, we've always had a problem with muggings and burglaries in Islington, but this lot don't just break into our houses -- they steal the whole, bloody house.

The solution is simple. I call upon our local government, with immediate effect, to institute strict border controls at each of the major crossing points into the borough. Since it is not possible to distinguish between visitors with legitimate business here and those whose sole intention is to present themselves at local estate agents in order to take advantage of our lax residency rules, everyone who does not have an Islington library card should be required to obtain visas for entry in advance.

These may be made available, on payment of the appropriate fee, from a stall outside the River Café between the hours of 2pm and 3pm on alternate Fridays when there is a "P" in the month. A limited number of work and residency visas may also be allocated by a strict lottery system. In order to maintain the cultural balance of our borough, however, trendy toffs, aspirant media celebrities and anyone earning more than three times the national minimum wage (as determined by parliament) should be ineligible for entry unless either their spouse or both parents have been employed in a low-paid, manual occupation for at least 12 of the preceding 20 years.

Oh yes, and if we do let you in, we reserve the right to lock you up in the local detention centre, insult and abuse you in the local paper and refuse to serve you in the local shops. You would expect nothing less from the borough that once gave asylum to both Lenin and Karl Marx.