An international row over the refusal to grant visas to a Pakistani pipe band has ended with egg on the Government’s face after it emerged that a secret memo described the Third Worlders as “habitual absconders.”

At the beginning of October, talks between Home Secretary Alan Johnson and the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari were overshadowed by Pakistani complaints that the Patiala Pipe Band from Lahore were refused visas. The Pakistanis tried to claim that the refusal to grant the visas was unfair and many newspapers in that country claimed that it was “another example of British racism.”

However, a leaked secret memo, signed by Labour’s Immigration Minister Phil Woolas, said that the pipe band and an accompanying Pakistani trade mission had been denied entry because they have a “track record” of absconding while in Britain.

In a letter to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, the memo said that the Home Office had “direct and reliable intelligence” that the pipe band visit was going to be used as a ruse to gain entry to Britain.

The 30 band members were refused entry in August and another 35 members of a trade delegation from Lahore, which is twinned with Glasgow, were also refused visas.

The leaked memo says that the “visas were refused given their track record of leaving the UK with fewer people than they had arrived with and following receipt of direct and reliable intelligence that the pipe band visit was going to be used again to facilitate entry into the UK.

“Visas were also refused to a Pakistani trade delegation because the documents provided to support the applications were at best inadequate and at worst non-existent. In the applications where financial evidence was provided, bank accounts showed sums of money far below the minimum required; in some cases bank accounts contained less than £5.”

The Pakistani government refused to hold a joint press conference with Mr Johnson during his last visit to Pakistan to show their displeasure over the ruling.

Earlier it emerged that over 200,000 Pakistanis had applied for leave to enter Britain over the last few months alone. The flood of applications had utterly overwhelmed the visa processing office and it has been reported that fewer than one in 2,000 applicants were being interviewed.