Given the number of Boston’s Great and Good who get a name check in Saturday’s Daily Mail, we expect that the circulation of the newspaper in the town has taken a distinctly upward blip.
The two page look at immigration in Boston – “The town that's had enough: We visit the place with the country's biggest influx of East Europeans” – by Robert (How I see It) Hardman, tells us … “They’ve stopped mincing their words in these parts. Even the social workers and the worthiest public sector grandees have given up dancing around one of the great taboos of our age and realise that it needs to be addressed head-on.
“Hence there is little talk of ‘multi-culturalism’ here in Boston, the Lincolnshire cabbage capital.
“Instead, everyone in this handsome old market town simply talks about ‘immigration’ — none more so, it seems, than the immigrants themselves ...”
He quotes a local Latvian community leader, who claims that the Romanians and Bulgarians, who will be allowed into Britain at the start of next year,  will see recent history repeat itself with job agencies and gang-masters hiring the new arrivals at a lower cost  instead of the Polish and Latvians and Lithuanians,.
So what’s the solution?
Surprisingly, Hardman quotes of our regulars on this page – Mandy Exley, of the South Lincs Community Voluntary Service as saying that the only answer is a padlock  – “I’m not kidding. We haven’t got any more jobs.’
Robert Hardman comments: “When community cohesion officers start calling for border controls, it is probably time for government ministers to acknowledge there is a big problem.”
He interprets the latest census figures – which show an increase in Boston’s population of more than 15 per cent to 65,000 in a decade – as representing the equivalent of London absorbing an extra 1.3 million people in under ten years.
And he also recalled the recent Question Time clash between local Rachel Bull and the Cambridge expert in Roman history Mary Beard in which Mrs Bull referred to  Boston as a “foreign country” at “breaking point.”
The last time the Mail took a look at Boston was in September 2011, when columnist Peter Hitchens penned a four page feature in the Mail on Sunday about “Boston Lincolngrad” which was dismissed by council leader Pete Bedford as “clichéd, jaundiced, inaccurate and one-sided.”
Perhaps one reason for this is that Mr Hitchens chose not to interview any of the local worthies, and declined an invitation from Councillor Bedford to return to hear the council side of events. He even went so far as to refer to our leader’s criticism as “concrete headed.”
This time, Councillor Bedford was on Robert Hardman’s guest list – but careful to avoid any direct quotes that might come back to haunt him later.
He began with a favourite line that he often trots out – that Boston has the lowest number of empty shops in the East Midlands.
Then he cited the recent closure of the local Blockbusters, which is now a Polish supermarket.
And even more good news – Boston has managed to hang on to its branch of Marks & Spencer, when others, including Grantham, have closed.
Mr Bedford said that the council has worked hard on its social impact report, and appointed the opposition Labour group to chair the immigration inquiry to give it cross-party credibility.
Some interesting points there.
As far as empty shops are concerned, recent figures are hard to find.
The ones we think Councillor Bedford uses were first quoted in May last year, and were then at least a year old – and who knows how they may have changed since?
The replacement of a film hire shop with a Polish supermarket is fine if you are Polish – whilst our local Marks and Sparks is still here but in desperate need of an overhaul.
We were interested to note the beneficent motive regarding the chairmanship on the social impact report.
Cross-party credibility is not a phrase we associate with our current leadership – and we would uncharitably suspect that the appointment of a chairman from Labour was more deeply rooted in avoiding political blame if the exercise failed.
One point that did emerge though is that Councillor Bedford “is adamant that there must be restrictions on any future arrivals, and acknowledges that the locals have had enough.”
But then, in the only directly quote in the interview, he offers the following pearls of wisdom.
“One of the biggest issues is one of noise.
“Boston was always a quiet town and a lot of Eastern Europeans are not, shall we say, used to talking quietly. You walk round town and you hear these loud foreign voices everywhere.
“You go into the local doctor’s surgery and you have a lot of locals sitting quietly as a loud foreign voice tries to deal with the receptionist. So people think: ‘They’re taking over.’”
If the problem was as simple as that, it could be easily solved.
We were reminded of the leader’s rejection of claims that the town was a risky place after dark, when he trotted out his own experience leaving an early evening concert and finding the place peaceful – simultaneously declaring that problems are in the eyes of the beholder –  i.e. his view meant that others were wrong.
The report ends with a night-time tour of the town with Tory Councillor Mike Gilbert, the portfolio holder in charge of communities.
“All the voices we hear, in the space of an hour, are speaking another language, writes” Robert Hardman.
Councillor Gilbert has another favourite  political hobbyhorse.
This is the one which criticises locals who leave school and are unwilling to take on factory work  - without asking whether the great and the good should be doing more to bring a better quality of employment to the area.
His words close the report – and they are those of a latter day Cassandra*
“As councillor Mike Gilbert observes, things can move fast round here.
“A few years ago, the council elections delivered a shock landslide majority to a group that wanted a bypass for Boston.
“‘If it can happen for a bypass, then who says it won’t happen for an issue that inspires much more extreme opinions?’”

*Cassandra : A prophet of disaster, especially one who is disregarded.

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