IMMIGRATION regulations keeping the country free of artists have been welcomed by people who are not dicks.
Border agency paperwork that flummoxes beret-wearing pseuds that use words like ‘dialectic’ is stopping them from infesting London’s cafes, according to an open letter signed by Salman Rushdie, Bridget Riley and dozens of other people who are dicks.
Rushdie said: “Just the other month me and eight of my friends were denied the pleasure of watching a Czech artist drape the walls of a Mayfair ‘space’ with old pages from the Littlewoods catalogue.
“All because of the petty bureaucracy designed to keep out an entirely different kind of scrounger, rather than people I want to drink Merlot with and talk about olive farms.”
Immigration officers have reported increasingly desperate examples of artists trying to smuggle themselves into the UK, with an experimental dance troupe recently found in Melvyn Bragg’s luggage and a performance poet disassembled and labelled as livestock feed in a freight lorry at Dover.
A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “We have a points-based system rating the skills a person can bring to the UK and I’m afraid the ability to read a whole Milan Kundera novel without wanting to burn down a library isn’t one of them.
“Short-term visas are awarded to artists on a daily basis and you don’t see the likes of Beyoncé or Johnny Depp being detained at customs, very possibly because people will actually pay money to see them perform.”
Rushdie has vowed to take his complaint further, threatening to write a letter to the prime minister that is an impenetrable 400 pages long, will be read by nobody but will universally be described as brilliant because dicks do not like to look stupid.
