Trying to stuff the cat back into the bag
In the Daily Mail, I have written about the amazing revelation in last Friday’s Evening Standard by Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter to various Labour ministers, that the government had not only deliberately encouraged mass immigration to Britain in order to destroy its identity and transform it into a multicultural society but had covered up what it was doing because it was well aware that the public would rise up in revolt. Such a deliberate transformation of Britain’s society while keeping the public in the dark can only be described as treachery.
However, in a further article in the Standard, Neather has tried to backtrack on his explosive disclosure. Accusing
excitable Right-wing newspaper columnists
for presenting his views in such a way that they were
twisted out of all recognition
he claims that the speech he wrote in 2000 that introduced the new, looser immigration policy and the ‘sensitive report on migration by the Prime Minister's Performance and Innovation Unit’ on which that new policy was based were merely mooting changes to make it easier for skilled workers to come to the UK. He writes:
Multiculturalism was not the primary point of the report or the speech. The main goal was to allow in more migrant workers at a point when - hard as it is to imagine now - the booming economy was running up against skills shortages. But my sense from several discussions was there was also a subsidiary political purpose to it - boosting diversity and undermining the Right's opposition to multiculturalism.
I was not comfortable with that. But it wasn't the main point at issue. Somehow this has become distorted by excitable Right-wing newspaper columnists into being a ‘plot’ to make Britain multicultural. There was no plot.
But this is what Neather actually wrote last Friday:
I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.
That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair's Cabinet Office think-tank...Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled ‘RDS Occasional Paper no. 67’, ‘Migration: an economic and social analysis’ focused heavily on the labour market case.
But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended -- even if this wasn’t its main purpose -- to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront,there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all forLabour's core white working-class vote. [My emphasis]
This shone through even in the published report: the ‘social outcomes’ it talks about are solely those for immigrants. And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour's 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.
According to Neather’s first article, creating a multicultural society was the main point at issue. The subsidiary point was rubbing the Right’s nose in it. And he described how there was ‘paranoia’ among ministers that the people who voted for them might learn the truth about what the government was up to.
Neather’s second article is therefore an absurd attempt to pretend that he didn’t say what he did say. But he can’t stuff this particular cat back into the bag. What he blurted out last Friday is a scandal. Or should be, if the media and Conservative opposition were not paralysed into silence over immigration.
For what is almost as astonishing as Neather’s revelation is the fact that it has occasioned so little comment. As far as I can see, the BBC hasn’t even reported it. Yet last Friday Neather revealed that the demographic composition of this country had been deliberately altered by the government in a deliberate deception of the British electorate who had voted it into power and whose cultural identity was now being deliberately and covertly destroyed. And yet everyone is either too indifferent or too intimidated to talk about this.
Truly, this country is in a lethal trance.
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