It was with some interest that I read the reports and comments in last week's Journal about a battle that is probably already lost, given the reported comments of the various parties.

With a local MP who seems to believe that an open planning process is all that is required, vacuous comments from The Bishop of Dudley, enthusiastic "nimbyism" from Peter Luff and Liz Tucker and a local newspaper that has, in my experience, never put its head over the parapet on any topic, the objectors are, at the very least, faced with a Herculean task.

Does Sir Michael suppose that the professional planners are going to enthusiastically blight their career prospects by assisting elected representatives to go against the wishes of Central Government on such a high profile project? Does he equally suppose, that even if the District and County elected representatives decided to oppose any planning application, they would have the capability to mount the intellectual argument against the Home Office.

Not much comfort for the objectors in this approach I would venture.

Without doubt, they will be told that the redundant airfield at Throckmorton is an undeveloped rural brown site, possibly contaminated as a result of previous military use, which serves no useful purpose. Clearly, then, the site is ideal for use as landfill, burial of foot and mouth carcasses and construction of a residential asylum centre, being sufficiently large for the various activities past and planned not to impinge on, or contaminate, each other.

Furthermore, they will be told that the "asylum seekers" who will occupy the Centre will be doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers and other professionals and their families who have been imprisoned and/or horribly tortured for their political beliefs, who, will, once they have become proficient in English, make a huge contribution to the Economy and pay all our pensions over the next 50 years.

So, "blighted properties", "enough is enough" and other "hand wringing" arguments put forward by Peter Luff and Liz Tucker are likely to carry as much weight with Lord Rooker and his central Government colleagues as they did in the campaign against the burial of carcasses.

Unless the objectors embrace the fact that this Government is totally unprincipled, has no immigration policy nor the will to develop one and has little to lose in rural Worcestershire, they will have no understanding of the nature of the battle they are undertaking nor how best to win it. Having won the battle of the carcasses, the Government is once again planning to dump the result of its failures and shortcomings on Throckmorton, in the full expectation that it will find the opposition equally ineffectual. This Centre, along with the others proposed, has to be challenged on the fundamentals. The vast majority of those who will occupy them will not be talented professionals who have escaped torture and imprisonment (in France?) by clinging to the sides of freight trains.

They will be economic migrants, with unproven qualifications, who may well have paid criminal gangs to smuggle them across Europe.

Far from being fully occupied in their shiny new centres, as Lord Rooker would have us believe, too many of them, based on experience in other UK and European towns, will spend their time disrupting local communities by shoplifting, begging, stealing and other anti-social activities.

Unless objectors are prepared to swallow their politically correct credentials and articulate real objections to the Centre, based on its likely impact on the indigenous population, there will be no intellectual basis for any objection to the present proposals. After all, the proposed Centre, as outlined by the Government, is, otherwise, no different from a self-contained boarding school or agricultural college - to which few would object.

Of course, such objections will inevitably result in charges of racism and the like - this Government's standard response designed to smear objectors. But, unless a strong and determined stand is taken, and soon, we risk the prospect of letting a delightful country town become a future no go area !

John Huband, Cottons Lane, Ashton under Hill