Melanie Phillips’s outrageous hypocrisy on immigration

Below is an abridgment of Melanie Phillips’s October 26 column at the Mail, “The outrageous truth slips out: Labour cynically plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain without telling us.” As you read the article, and particularly the passages I’ve highlighted in red where Phillips expresses her shock, her shock, that Labor was using immigration to turn Britain into a multicultural society, consider the fact that Phillips herself, while constantly moaning about the Islamization of Britain and the loss of British traditions and historic identity, has never once pointed to the role of immigration in making these things happen, and has never once called for immigration to be reduced by even one immigrant per year. To believe Phillips in this column, you’d have to believe that in all these years, right up to the moment of Andrew Neather’s revelations this past week, which at her blog she calls an “amazing revelation,” it never occurred to her that mass immigration was undermining Britain’s historic culture, and it never occurred to her that Labor was supporting the immigration for precisely that reason.

Phillips writes:

In its 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised ‘firm control over immigration’ and in 2005 it promised a ‘crackdown on abuse’. In 2001, its manifesto merely said that the immigration rules needed to reflect changes to the economy to meet skills shortages.

But all this concealed a monumental shift of policy. For [Andrew Neather, former speechwriter for top Labor leaders Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett] wrote that until ‘at least February last year’, when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration….

Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The Government’s ‘driving political purpose’, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’.

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

Spitefully, one motivation by Labour ministers was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’. [LA replies: In other words, the object was to change Britain so much that there would be no historic Britain left to defend. This was what I repeatedly said was he driving purpose of the 2007 Comprehensive Immigration bill in the US.]

Even Neather found that particular element of gratuitous Left-wing bullying to be ‘a manoeuvre too far’….

But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners for the likes of Neather. It was to destroy Britain’s identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country’s.

A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether.

It also conveniently guaranteed an increasingly Labour-voting electorate since, as a recent survey by the Electoral Commission has revealed, some 90 per cent of black people and three-quarters of Asians vote Labour.

In Neather’s hermetically sealed bubble, the benefits of mass immigration were so overwhelming he couldn’t understand why ministers had been so nervous about it.

They were, he wrote, reluctant to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all to Labour’s core white working class vote. So they deliberately kept it secret.

They knew that if they told the truth about what they were doing, voters would rise up in protest. So they kept it out of their election manifestos.

It was indeed a conspiracy to deceive the electorate into voting for them. And yet it is these very people who have the gall to puff themselves up in self-righteous astonishment at the rise of the BNP.

No wonder Jack Straw was so shifty on last week’s Question Time when he was asked whether it was the Government’s failure to halt immigration which lay behind increasing support for the BNP.

‘No wonder Jack Straw was so shifty… when he was asked whether it was the Government’s failure to halt immigration which lay behind increasing support for the BNP’

Now we know it was no such failure of policy. It was deliberate. For the government of which Straw is such a long-standing member had secretly plotted to flood the country with immigrants to change its very character and identity.

This more than any other reason is why Nick Griffin has gained so much support. According to a YouGov poll taken after Question Time, no fewer than 22 per cent of British voters would ‘seriously consider’ voting for the BNP.

That nearly one quarter of British people might vote for a neo-Nazi party with views inimical to democracy, human rights and common decency is truly appalling. [LA replies: What an idiot. She’s still calling the BNP a neo-Nazi party.]

The core reason is that for years they have watched as their country’s landscape has been transformed out of all recognition—and that politicians from all mainstream parties have told them first that it isn’t happening and second, that they are racist bigots to object even if it is. [LA replies: But Phillips herself never once objected to the way immigration was transforming Britain.]

Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather’s eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen—and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters. [LA replies: Another “transformation” of British politics heralded.. I’ll believe it when I see it.]

As Neather sneered, the jobs filled by immigrant workers ‘certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley—fascist au pair, anyone?’

So that’s how New Labour views the white working class, supposedly the very people it is in politics to champion. Who can wonder that its core vote is now decamping in such large numbers to the BNP when Labour treats them like this? [LA replies: Why is Phillips complaining about Neather calling BNP voters fascists, when she herself just called them neo-Nazis?]

Condemned out of its own mouth, it is New Labour that is responsible for the rise of the BNP—by an act of unalloyed treachery to the entire nation.

[end of Phillips column]

- end of initial entry -

When Phillips’s column was initially published on the 26th (the Oct. 28 date of the Mail article is the date of the updated article), John Hagan sent her an e-mail about it:

From: John Hagan
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 3:45 PM
To: Melanie Phillips
Subject: immigration

Ms. Phillips,
I’m scratching my head over your befuddlement that the elites in the British government were intent on smashing British culture to pieces with their policy of mass immigration ? The policy always seemed purposeful to me. What do you suggest the government do now ? Stop all immigration, or slow it down ?

Yours, J.H.

When Phillips didn’t reply, Mr. Hagan wrote again:

From: John Hagan
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 10:17 PM
To: Melanie Phillips
Subject: immigration

Ms. Phillips,
I’m still curious like I mentioned in my prior email to you about your reaction to the discovery that the British government had purposely tried to destroy British culture and civic life through massive immigration. What do you feel about such behavior that borders on treason ? Will you speak out now more forcefully on halting immigration to Britain ? If this is such a threat to Britain, and you have this platform to speak out about it…. don’t you think that you are duty-bound to speak up about this situation ?

Yours, J.H.

Still no reply.

October 30

Alex A. writes:

You’re always very tough on Melanie Phillips, but I think your criticisms are justified. As usual, she draws no conclusions from her most recent immigration “expose”—investigating what amounts to a Labour government conspiracy to flood the UK with peasants from the Third World and an attempt to embarrass the opposition in the diversity contest. Apparently, she does not have the backbone to follow through and call for an end to immigration and a program of enforced repatriation.

I guess you know why she never follows through? My opinion is that’s she’s afraid of being called “racist” and that she’s really a closet liberal.

LA replies:

I’m not sure that it would be correct to call her a “closet” liberal? Let’s remember that she has never called herself a conservative. I think she would still consider herself a liberal.

At the time, she sides with U.S. neoconservatives on most every issue. Also, she speaks with great urgency about the need to defend “British culture,” which makes her sound like a traditionalist conservative or Tory. Yet her refusal not only to discuss immigration, but to explain to readers why she won’t discuss it, indicates, in combination with the above, something more complicated than just liberalism. She’s in some kind of hysterical state. On one hand, she is panicked over what is happening to Britain, which makes her rush to the defense of “traditional British culture.” On the other hand she seems totally unable to take any non-liberal position against that threat. So, at bottom, her liberalism does seem to be the answer.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 29, 2009 02:00 PM | Send