Sunday, 1 November 2009


PETER HITCHENS BLOG   


31 October 2009 8:18 PM

The slow-motion New Labour putsch that swept our nation away

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Once again, one of the biggest stories of the week has been widely ignored by the official political reporters, who are not interested in politics. This is the disclosure, by a New Labour apparatchik, Andrew Neather, of the real purpose of his party’s immigration policy.

The Blairites’ aim was to undermine and get rid of traditional conservative British culture. They really did want to turn Britain into a foreign land.

Mr Neather wrote an article praising immigration because it provided lots of cheap nannies and gardeners for funky Londoners like him. Apparently thinking nobody would notice, he then revealed that there had been ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.

Andrew Neather 

He recalled coming away from high-level discussions ‘with a 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was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

I have to say I am not surprised. Nor am I so sure about the ‘main purpose’. In late 1996, an old friend of mine abandoned his long career as a distinguished journalist and went to work for New Labour. We held a sort of wake, since from now on we would be opponents. I asked him why he had done this awful thing. He replied: ‘You have no idea at all just how enormous the New Labour Project is.’

This was one of those moments when a shiver really does run down the spine. Knowing the Labour leader to be a Blair of Very Little Brain, I had assumed he was no more than window-dressing for a standard-issue high-tax anti-British socialist government. From then on, I began to suspect that something much bigger was afoot – a gigantic, irreversible cultural, social and sexual revolution, accompanied by huge constitutional change – a slow-motion putsch. 

I think that suspicion was borne out. Mass immigration, so vast that Britain would have to adapt to the migrants rather than the other way round, would be very useful in attaining this. You could smear your opposition as ‘racist’ if they dared to resist.

And they would run away. Anthony Blair’s hysterical speech ‘attacking the ‘forces of conservatism’ in September 1999 was a barely coded warning of what was to come. He all but blamed the Tories for murdering Martin Luther King and locking up Nelson Mandela. He specifically praised the curse of multiculturalism.

As my colleague Simon Walters points out, William Hague grasped what was happening, and in March 2001 he sought to oppose it with a bold speech. He warned that after two terms of Labour, Britain would be a ‘foreign land’. He was dead right. 

I have searched out that speech and read it carefully. There isn’t a bigoted word in it. But Mr Hague was knifed in the back by liberal Tories and the power-worshipping Murdoch Press, and knifed in the front by Labour, all of whom accused him of somehow playing dirty, ‘playing the race card’ or ‘playing the nationalist card’. A plot to replace him was openly leaked, months before a General Election. Rather than fight to the last, Mr Hague regrettably crumpled in the face of this onslaught.

And so perished the last attempt by any mainstream party to address this huge and dangerous issue honestly, or indeed to confront the revolutionary intentions of New Labour.

A few weeks later, Mr Blair told the Tories to accept his revolution. They did. And the British people are left without a legitimate voice at Westminster.




Good riddance to Professor Poison

Cannabis is an evil lottery ticket whose top prize is a lifetime gibbering in a locked ward. And it pays out rather more often than the other lottery. So it is pleasing to see the dismissal of the fatuous Professor David Nutt, the Government’s supposedly scientific adviser on drugs.

Professor Nutt seems strangely unaware of the mounting evidence of the dangers of cannabis, particularly the work of Robin Murray, who recently savaged Professor Nutt’s use of statistics and attacked the general sloppiness of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Professor Nutt’s diversionary tactic of claiming that tobacco and alcohol are ‘more dangerous’ than some illegal drugs is the age-old excuse of the hippy generation.

So what if they are? How does the existence of two legal poisons justify the creation of more? Why is it an argument against properly enforced laws to discourage them?

It is vital that we do all that we can to warn the young against these dangers. It is too late to ban alcohol, though many of us would like to go back to strict licensing rules.

The law worked against drunken driving and in reducing smoking. Our drug-corrupted political and media elite view Professor Nutt as a hero because he helps them excuse their own wrongdoing.


Fake patriots with phoney poppies

I did not wear a Remembrance poppy when I appeared on the BBC’s Daily Politics TV programme on Friday (though the BBC kindly offered me one). I think there is something deeply phoney about the way that Left-wing politicians and journalists, who until quite recently would not have bothered, now wear poppies on TV from around the end of September. There’s a lot of fake patriotism about these days. Poppies are for November.