The Great Betrayal

Mass immigration, and how Labour tried to destroy Britishness

By Simon Heffer

Last updated at 7:56 AM on 22nd February 2012

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Throughout the tenure of the last Labour government this newspaper, and others — while praising the huge contribution immigrants had made to this country in the past — attacked the laxity of what were supposed to be our border controls.

It was clear the very nature of our society was being changed by a new kind of uncontrolled mass immigration — and without the British people ever having been asked whether they supported the policy.
Uncontrolled: Immigration surged under Labour

Uncontrolled: Immigration surged under Labour

Labour arrogantly accused its critics of racism — though most of the incomers were white — and of scaremongering.

It claimed it had no choice but to open our borders to the nationals of ten mainly ex-Soviet bloc countries which joined the EU in 2004.

The truth was that — as other EU countries which restricted immigration from these states proved — it did have a choice.
Action: Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that the UK Border Agency will be split

Action: Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that the UK Border Agency will be split
Useless

The cynicism did not end there. Such, Labour claimed, was its commitment to ensuring that only people with a right to be in Britain could come here that in 2008 it set up the UK Border Agency. The truth, unfortunately, was very different.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has announced that the agency is being wound up next month precisely because it is useless, and the officials who ran it — rather like the borders they supposedly policed — were out of control.

Despite the strong threat from international terrorism, the evidence of eastern European criminal gangs infiltrating Britain, and our overburdened public and social services, 500,000 unchecked people were let in to Britain via Eurostar between 2007 and last year, while countless so-called students were just nodded through.

Though Labour clearly left the system in a shambles, it should be noted that it has taken almost two years for this Government to admit the mess our immigration procedures are in, and to do something about it.

So Mrs May’s department — and notably the Immigration Minister Damian Green — also have a case to answer.

They seemed unaware that their officials, too, were ordering the relaxation of controls. Yet while the Coalition has been derelict, Labour was downright malign.

The game was given away in 2009 by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Home Office and Downing Street adviser, who revealed that mass immigration was a deliberate policy by the Left to change the social fabric of the country and to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

This appalling policy was never discussed publicly because Labour strategists feared it would upset the party’s traditional white working-class support. For self-interested political reasons, the public could not possibly be consulted.

Mass immigration gratified the Left in two ways that have inflicted enormous damage on our country. It furthered the bogus notion of multiculturalism — undermining national identity and common values, and preventing the successful integration of immigrant communities into the British cultural mainstream.

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Moreover, at a time of growing economic crisis, it added an enormous number of people to Labour’s client state.

Recent immigrants were grateful for their admission to the country, and for the costly safety net of the welfare state that was provided for them: a gratitude that, Labour hoped, would help it garner more votes at elections.

That aside, it is generally accepted that new arrivals to a country — who are often relatively impoverished — are more likely to vote for Leftish governments.

So although present ministers have much explaining to do, this cocktail of ideology and blatant gerrymandering is of the Left’s making.

In the interests of creating a society with which Leftist ideologues felt comfortable, and which would help shore up Labour’s vote at elections, the wishes of the vast majority of the British people, and their security, were ridden roughshod over.

The idea of multiculturalism was advanced with varying degrees of stealth over several decades by politicians, civil servants and council officials. Its doctrine was spread in schools and in teacher-training colleges.
Self-hate: Former BBC Director General Greg Dyke slammed Britain's 'hideously white' mainstream culture

Self-hate: Former BBC Director General Greg Dyke slammed Britain's 'hideously white' mainstream culture

Weak as it so often is, the Church of England appeared to welcome it, even though it posed a mortal threat to that institution. The BBC, never to be found wanting when political correctness was required, suppressed any debate about mass immigration, took the tenets of multiculturalism as its gospel and preached it to the nation.

Internationalism is one of the core principles of the Left. It abhors the nation state, which it sees as a foundry of bigotry, racism and aggressive nationalism.

The Left has always understood this: that if you manage to wreck a national culture and a national identity, you shatter the ties of history and nationhood forged over centuries.

Although there used to be patriotic Leftists — and there still are one or two — many in the New Labour project in the Nineties and Noughties were, effectively, self-hating Britons.

They tortured themselves with post-imperial guilt, wanted the country to lose its independence and be ruled by Brussels, and sought to have what a BBC executive called the ‘hideously white’ mainstream culture diluted by ‘diversity’.
Threat

This was immensely dangerous. In a world where even Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality Commission, highlights the threat that multiculturalism poses to social cohesion, it is surprising it has taken ministers so long to become alert to this danger.

However one of them, at last, has. Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, has said that the culture of the majority will once more be given pre-eminence in society.

This is utterly sensible and, indeed, indispensable if we wish for a coherent and settled society of shared values.
Social cohesion: Trevor Phillips

Social cohesion: Trevor Phillips
Shared values: Eric Pickles

Shared values: Eric Pickles

To promote — as opposed to tolerate — the practices of other cultures is to drive people into ghettos. It prevents integration and assimilation and causes strife in society between religious and social groups who find themselves gazing at one another suspiciously across the social divides created by multiculturalism.

Mr Pickles has specified what this assault on multiculturalism will mean. He has said that public bodies’ obsession with translating leaflets into all known languages — and spending a fortune in public money on doing so — should end.

Learning English is one of the fundamentals of grasping the British way of life.

He has argued that tolerance of the beliefs of others should not extend to disowning those of the majority.

He deplored the disciplining of Christian workers who wear crucifixes, and the recent decision to ban prayers before the meetings of a town council in Devon. He has called all these issues ‘the politics of division’, and he is right.


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Ludicrous

In a society that remains more than 90 per cent indigenously British, it is ludicrous to be ashamed of national traditions, rooted in common values from a shared past.

And it is entirely right to expect those who come here to accept those values and traditions, and not be made — usually by mischievous, politically-motivated white liberals — to feel hostile towards them.

When even many atheists recognise the central importance of Christianity to the culture and institutions of our country — and I am one of them — it is offensive to the intellect as well as to the spiritual to seek to downgrade or marginalise that faith.

Our society needs an end to mass immigration.

This is not just because the parts of the country where immigrants most wish to settle are overcrowded, and the public services and infrastructure are cracking under the strain, or because we have 2.7  million unemployed.

It is principally because our national identity — founded on Christian values of tolerance and decency, and on a history of which we can be exceptionally proud — has been gravely injured by Britain’s Left-wing enemy within, and needs to recover from its wounds.

The best way to guarantee a harmonious future for all our people, of whatever racial background, is to make that culture strong again, and for us all to embrace it.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2104550/Mass-immigration-Labour-tried-destroy-Britishness.html#ixzz1nDCm96Gk