......................The Case ..............Immigration..................Rest.!

The Neatherworld of Britain's busted political class

TUESDAY, 27TH OCTOBER 2009

Let me spell this out again very slowly.

The neo-Nazi British National Party now has two MEPs, one million votes and a claim to a place in the legitimate political life of Britain principally because a very significant proportion of the electorate believe that Britain’s culture and identity are being steadily transformed by mass immigration.

Last Friday a former speechwriter for government ministers, Andrew Neather, who wrote a seminal speech in 2000 for then Immigration Minister Barbara Roche which signalled the loosening of immigration controls, blurted out that the ‘driving political purpose’ of this ‘major’ shift in policy was to bring about mass immigration and a ‘truly multicultural’ society. This purpose was deliberately kept secret from the British people because ministers knew they would react very badly against it.

There could scarcely be a more profound abuse of the democratic process than to set out to destroy a nation’s demographic and cultural identity through a conscious deception of the people of that nation. There could hardly be a more worthy issue for the Conservative party to leap upon. Yet the Tories’ reaction so far has been muted. In the Commons yesterday, there was merely a feeblequestion about this from Tory home affairs spokesman Chris Grayling which was swatted away by the Immigration Minister. Today David Cameron gave apress conference. As far as I can see this was not even mentioned. The Tories’ priorities are instead the NHS and ‘climate change’.

In the Evening Standard today Jack Straw, one of the ministers for whom Neather worked, has written this denial:

Myths can be halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on. So it is with the great weekend story that in 2000 Labourministers had ‘a deliberate policy’ but a concealed one to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’. Its source was a former (and good) speech writer of mine, Andrew Neather, who worked for me when I was Home Secretary. I'm glad to see that he now says that his ‘views have been twisted out of all recognition’. I read the original stories, and more comment on it yesterday, with incredulity, since they are the reverse of the truth. I spent my time as Home Secretary seeking better to control immigration, by new laws and more effective administration.

What Straw is actually talking about so disingenuously is asylum, on which he did briefly try to clean up the mess created by the collapse of Britain’s border controls. He is talking mainly about the 1998 Immigration and Asylum Bill; but what Neather was referring to was a major change to immigration policy made in 2000. (As for Neather’s claim that his remarks were ‘twisted out of all recognition’, see below.)

The change in policy in 2000 was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair's Cabinet Office think-tank. Neather wrote last Friday that ministers were so terrified that the public would learn how their country was to be transformed through mass immigration that this report went through a number of sanitising drafts before it was deemed safe to publish.  Now another Standard story today claims that possible links between mass immigration and some crimes were censored from this document:

The report originally contained passages highlighting the risk that organised criminals had exploited higher migration.  But they were taken out of the published version, a milestone study that shiftedLabour policy towards encouraging economic migrants.

The story quotes the Tories’ immigration spokesman Damian Green saying about this latest revelation:

With every day that passes it becomes increasingly clear that the Government tried to deceive the British people about immigration policy. This is a disgraceful episode.

Despite the efforts of Messrs Neather and Straw, this issue is therefore escalating. But one limp soundbite from Damian Green is simply nowhere near enough. It is very telling that the Tories haven’t made more of this. It shows that they are still running hopelessly scared of this seminal issue.

Tomorrow is Prime Minister’s Question Time in the Commons. David Cameron must use the opportunity to demand an explanation of Neather’s original claims and to challenge the government finally to come clean about its immigration policy. People are desperate for the Tories to defend this country against the civilisational onslaught mounted against it by the Left over so many years. It is the fact that such people don’t believe the Tories have any intention of mounting such a defence -- indeed, that they even understand what it is they must defend, and against what -- that is sending them into the arms of the BNP. If David Cameron won’t raise the roof even over the fact that the British have had their cultural identity deliberately destroyed by stealth, then what on earth is the point of the Conservative party?

Here for convenience is what I wrote about this in the Daily Mail yesterday:

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.

Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate?

The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate.

There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.

This astonishing revelation surfaced quite casually last weekend in a newspaper article by one Andrew Neather. He turns out to have been a speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

And it was he who wrote a landmark speech in September 2000 by the then immigration minister, Barbara Roche, that called for a loosening of immigration controls. But the true scope and purpose of this new policy was actively concealed.

In its 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised ‘firm control over immigration’ and in 2005 it promised a ‘crackdown on abuse’. In 2001, its manifesto merely said that the immigration rules needed to reflect changes to the economy to meet skills shortages.

But all this concealed a monumental shift of policy. For Neather wrote that until ‘at least February last year’, when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration.

This has been achieved. Some 2.3million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since 1997, the number of work permits has quadrupled to 120,000 a year.

Unless policies change, over the next 25 years some seven million more will be added to Britain’s population, a rate of growth three times as fast as took place in the Eighties.

Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The Government’s ‘driving political purpose’, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’.

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

Spitefully, one motivation by Labour ministers was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Even Neather found that particular element of gratuitous Left-wing bullying to be ‘a manoeuvre too far’.

Yet apart from this, Neather sees nothing wrong in the policy he has described. Indeed, the reason for his astonishing candour is he thinks it’s something to boast about. Mass immigration, he wrote, had provided the ‘foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners’ without whom London could hardly function.

What elitist arrogance! As if most people employ nannies, cleaners and gardeners. And what ignorance. The argument that Britain is better off with this level of immigration has been conclusively shown to be economically illiterate.

Neather gave the impression that most immigrants are Eastern Europeans. But these form fewer than a quarter of all immigrants.

And the fact is that, despite his blithe assertions to the contrary, schools in areas of very high immigration find it desperately difficult to cope with so many children who don’t even have basic English. Other services, such as health or housing, are similarly being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers.

But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners for the likes of Neather. It was to destroy Britain’s identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country’s.

A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether.

It also conveniently guaranteed an increasingly Labour-voting electorate since, as a recent survey by the Electoral Commission has revealed, some 90 per cent of black people and three-quarters of Asians vote Labour.

In Neather’s hermetically sealed bubble, the benefits of mass immigration were so overwhelming he couldn’t understand why ministers had been so nervous about it.

They were, he wrote, reluctant to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all to Labour’s core white working class vote. So they deliberately kept it secret.

They knew that if they told the truth about what they were doing, voters would rise up in protest. So they kept it out of their election manifestos.

It was indeed a conspiracy to deceive the electorate into voting for them. And yet it is these very people who have the gall to puff themselves up in self-righteous astonishment at the rise of the BNP.

No wonder Jack Straw was so shifty on last week’s Question Time when he was asked whether it was the Government’s failure to halt immigration which lay behind increasing support for the BNP.

Now we know it was no such failure of policy. It was deliberate. For the government of which Straw is such a long- standing member had secretly plotted to flood the country with immigrants to change its very character and identity.

This more than any other reason is why Nick Griffin has gained so much support. According to a YouGov poll taken after Question Time, no fewer than 22 per cent of British voters would ’seriously consider’ voting for the BNP.

That nearly one quarter of British people might vote for a neo-Nazi party with views inimical to democracy, human rights and common decency is truly appalling.

The core reason is that for years they have watched as their country’s landscape has been transformed out of all recognition — and that politicians from all mainstream parties have told them first that it isn’t happening and second, that they are racist bigots to object even if it is.

Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather’s eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen - and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters.

As Neather sneered, the jobs filled by immigrant workers ‘certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley –fascist au pair, anyone?’

So that’s how New Labour views the white working class, supposedly the very people it is in politics to champion. Who can wonder that its core vote is now decamping in such large numbers to the BNP when Labour treats them like this?

Condemned out of its own mouth, it is New Labour that is responsible for the rise of the BNP — by an act of unalloyed treachery to the entire nation.