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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article6898174.ece
Labours secret scheme to build multicultural Britain
Can the recent success of the British National party be explained by the misguided immigration policy of the government? That was the killer question from the floor during the notorious episode of Question Time 10 days ago. Four times it was put to Jack Straw, the justice secretary, and four times he avoided answering it. Until that evening I had thought Straw was a fairly decent sort of bloke, for a politician. No longer. In a man so central to the new Labour project, who has served in cabinet under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who has been home secretary and foreign secretary, evasion on such an important subject is shocking.
In his first evasion Straw waffled about Enoch Powells recruitment of immigrants to work for the National Health Service. But that was more than 40 years ago and, as David Dimbleby pointed out, Labour has been in power for the past 12 years and Straw should answer the question. Again he waffled irrelevantly, this time about identity.
Dimbleby challenged him for a third time: Are you saying there is no worry about the scale of immigration in this country? Is that the point youre making? I cant get out what youre saying. Straw responded by saying that new figures show a reduction in the rate of increase in migration and added something about the new points system, all of which was offensively irrelevant.
So, for a fourth time, Dimbleby pressed him to answer the question. Again Straw failed to do so, but concluded by saying: I dont believe it is.
An answer emerged the next day in a London evening newspaper. I then learnt that giving Straw the benefit of this doubt had been naive: the explanation is much more sinister. In an astonishingly insouciant article Andrew Neather a former adviser to Straw, Blair and David Blunkett revealed that Labour ministers had a hidden agenda in allowing immigrants to flood into the country.
According to Neather, who was present at secret meetings during the summer of 2000, the government had a driving political purpose which was: mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
Whats more, Neather said he came away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended even if this wasnt its main purpose to rub the rights nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.
Ministers longed for an immigration boom but wouldnt talk about it, he wrote. They probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasnt necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working mens clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.
The revelations get worse. There was a reluctance ... in government, he wrote, to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labours core white working-class vote. The social outcomes that ministers cared about were those affecting the immigrants. This, Neather explains, shone out in a report published in 2001 after these confidential deliberations.