By Adam Walker-The EU received 301,000 asylum applications in 2011, the European Commission has announced.

The figure is an increase of 42,000 on the previous year.

It is estimated that around 90 per cent of claims were from new applicants and that around ten per cent were repeat applicants.

Most claimants were from the third world, particularly Middle Eastern countries.

Afghanistan led the way with 28,000 applications (or nine per cent of the total number of applicants), followed by Russia (18,200 or six per cent), Pakistan (15,700 or five per cent), Iraq (15,200) and Serbia (13,900).

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, said the most popular countries for asylum seekers were France, Germany and Italy.

France had 56,300 asylum applications in 2011, followed by Germany (53,300), Italy (34,100), Belgium (31,900), Sweden (29,700), the United Kingdom (26,400), the Netherlands (14,600), Austria (14,400), Greece (9,300) and Poland (6,900). These ten nations together accounted for more than 90 per cent of applicants registered in the ‘EU27’ last year.

In some ‘member states’, as the EU refers to them, a large proportion of the applicants came from a single country. Nations with the highest concentrations were Poland (63 per cent of the applicants came from Russia), Latvia (52 per cent from Georgia), Luxembourg (44 per cent from Serbia), Lithuania (43 per cent from Georgia), Bulgaria (39 per cent from Iraq) and Hungary (38 per cent from Afghanistan).

Including asylum seekers, almost 600,000 immigrants stream into Britain every year.

The situation is exacerbated by an ineffectual UK Border Agency, which last November ‘lost’ 124,000 asylum seekers and migrants due to gross incompetence.

With further drastic cuts to the already useless border agency planned by the Coalition, there are likely to be many more refugees that go ‘missing’ in the system in the near future.

Furthermore, it is important to note that Britain is under no obligation to accept any of these so-called asylum seekers.

According to the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, the United Kingdom is only required to allow entry to asylum seekers for whom the UK is the nearest ‘safe third country’.

As there are plenty of safe third countries between Britain and the third world, we should not have a single asylum seeker in this country. And under a British National Party government, we wouldn’t.