Sunday, 11 April 2010
Dissolving the European People
As much misery as it caused, the German Democratic Republic never actually tried to displace the German people. The natives of Britain haven't been so lucky:
Nearly every one of 1.67m jobs created since 1997 has gone to a foreigner
Daily Mail
By James Chapman
8 April, 2010
Immigration was at the centre of the election campaign today as it emerged that virtually every extra job created under Labour has gone to a foreign worker.
Figures suggested an extraordinary 98.5 per cent of 1.67million new posts were taken by immigrants.
The Tories seized on the revelation as evidence that the Government has totally failed to deliver its pledge of 'British jobs for British workers'.
{snip}
Mr Brown rejected the idea of an immigration quota, which he said would do 'great damage to British business'.
This report rhymes with Andrew Nether's revelations from last fall.
Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser
The TelegraphBy Tom Whitehead,
23 Oct 2009
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.
Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons.
Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.
Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the "major shift" in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.
(I discuss this affair in more detail here.)
On the heels of Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC comes this fascinating headline in the Telegraph:
Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser
In other news, Playboy subscribers have announced that they don’t read the magazine just for the articles.
The story continues:
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.He said Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote”.As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.Critics said the revelations showed a “conspiracy” within Government to impose mass immigration for “cynical” political reasons.Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the “major shift” in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.
In Monsieur Neather’s Evening Standard column, he positively revels in the little social experiment he helped concoct:
It didn’t just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners—although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.Their place certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley—fascist au pair, anyone?
Translation: right-wingers and traditionalists are stupid and disgusting people who are rightly shunned from society. Those Third World migrants, on the other hand…
[T]his wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London’s attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it’s pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.Field and Soames complain about schools where English is not the first language for many pupils.But in my children’s south London primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit.My children have half- or wholly Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Congolese, Chinese and Turkish classmates.London’s role as a magnet for immigration busted wide open the stale 1990s clichés about multiculturalism: it’s a question of genuine diversity now, not just tacking a few Afro-Caribbean and Bengali events on to a white British mainstream. It’s one of the reasons Paris now tends to look parochial to us.
If you had only read Neather’s column, and hadn’t, say, visited London, you might think your average refugee was a dashing and genteel flaneur with a famous Austrian Duke as an uncle and a habit of peppering his speech with foreign bon mots, to the delight and cultural enrichment of his hosts. And the rest are “Polish plumbers.” In Neather’s imagination, he and Tony turned London into a dazzling salon that puts old Paris to shame (a city which, by the way, has experienced much the same demographic transformation). Neather doesn’t dwell too long on who the immigrants actually are. (For your information, the vast majority of them come from the Pakistan region, followed closely by Africans and Afro-Caribbeans.) My impression upon visiting London recently was that it’s become a crime-ridden, vulgar, dysfunctional, generally unpleasant counterfeit of its former self. I probably should have stayed away and just read about “diversity” in the Evening Standard.
Neather also makes no bones about the brazen deception involved in the scheme:
But ministers wouldn’t talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.In part, too, it would have been just too metropolitan an argument to make in such places: London was the real model. [Tony Blair’s immigration minister Barbara] Roche was unusual in that she was a London MP, herself of east European Jewish stock.But Labour ministers elsewhere tend studiously to avoid ever mentioning London. Meanwhile, the capital’s capacity to absorb new immigrants depends in large part on its economic vitality and variety. There’s not a lot of that in, say, south Yorkshire. And so ministers lost their nerve.
And as is so often the case with disastrous government projects, Blair’s immigration policy can be traced back to some highly connected think-tank that’s accountable only to the Prime Minister (the Performance and Innovation Unit) and some unelected “minister” (in this case, the adorable Miss Roche.)
In another outburst of honesty, Neather correctly states that it’s not a case of the London economy needing tons of immigrants in order to be efficient and dynamic; it’s the other way ‘round: only a pre-existing dynamic economy would be able to “absorb” millions of Third World newcomers. I don’t think I’m overstating the matter when I write that Neather is arguing against most everything everyone always tells us about immigration. (We’ve always had the horse in front of the cart here at Takimag, however.)
The line from Neather’s column that will probably go down in anti-racist lore reads,
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.
It wasn’t only “the Right” who got their noses rubbed in diversity, and one hopes that the British people will make Blair, Neather, Roche, and the whole crew bewail the unintended consequences of their immigration policies.
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