Paying the price for a decade of deception
COMMENTARY By Sir Andrew Green
Chairman of MigrationWatch and former British Ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia
So there was indeed a Labour conspiracy to change the nature of our society by mass immigration.
New evidence confirms claims made by a Labour political adviser last October which he subsequently tried to recant.
In an article for the Evening Standard, Andrew Neather revealed that ‘it didn’t just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year ...was to open up the UK to mass migration’.
Community spirit: Today's Britain is multicultural
He went on to describe a Government policy document which he had helped to write in 2000.
He said that ‘drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was paranoia about it reaching the media’.
The paper eventually surfaced as a purely technical product of the research department of the Home Office but earlier drafts that he saw ‘included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.
We in Migrationwatch have now obtained an earlier draft of that policy paper, circulated in October 2000.
It had already been censored but it was to be neutered still further. In the executive summary, six of eight references to ‘social’ objectives were cut from the version later published.
What could have been meant by social policy in the context of immigration, especially as it was dressed up as combating social exclusion?
This must surely have been code for increasing the numbers substantially, as Mr Neather revealed. If not, why all the secrecy?
Why the censorship that has now been laid bare?
Reading between the lines of these
documents it is clear that political advisers in
Number 10, its joint authors, were preparing a
blueprint for mass immigration with both economic
and social objectives.
None of this was in the Labour manifesto of 1997 or 2001. One passage in the report that the political censors failed to cut was a prediction about foreign immigration from outside the European Union.
This had it climbing from 142,000 in1998 to nearly 180,000 in 2005 (in fact, it reached nearly 200,000 by that date).
But what this shows is that ministers were clearly warned about a continuing rise in immigration which, even leaving aside the East Europeans, has been even greater than expected.
Tony Blair: Labour wanted to use immigration to make the UK multicultural
So what can we deduce from all this? Mr Neather later withdrew some of his remarks but examination of the texts shows that he had, in fact, blurted out the truth.
It seems there was a project led by Downing
Street political advisers to introduce
a secret policy of mass immigration.
Their economic arguments surfaced in an obscure research document but the social objective of greatly increased diversity was entirely suppressed for fear of public reaction – especially from the white working class.
These are the very people who are now paying the price for a decade of Labour deception. What the Government now fears is that they will take their revenge on election day.
Why on earth should they have taken such a risk with their traditional supporters? Was it pure ideology or were there other factors at play?
One point to consider is the impact on the
electorate. It is not generally realised that
Commonwealth citizens legally in Britain acquire the
right to vote in general elections
as soon as they put their names on the electoral
register.
In Labour years we have now seen an additional 300,000 from the Old Commonwealth and about one million from the New Commonwealth.
They may well have been conscious that they have much stronger support among the ethnic communities than their Conservative rivals.
Given that mass immigration is heavily in Labour’s electoral interest, they may have thought that they could get away with it.
The trades unions have been silent despite the
concerns of their members. And they
may have calculated that anyone who opposed it could
be silenced by accusations of racism.
They have not succeeded but we are left with a tale of betrayal which has generated a very dangerous current of extremism which could yet come to haunt us.