Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser

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.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. Read more
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Lord Carey 'appalled' by Pope's treatment of Dr Rowan Williams

Lord Carey of Clifton has called on his successor as Archbishop of Canterbury to complain to the Pope in person about not being consulted over plans to admit disaffected Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church.

Lord Carey warned that the Pope’s strategy could damage relations with the Vatican. Lord Carey, who stepped down in 2002, urged Dr Rowan Williams to protest strongly when he visits the Pope in Rome next month.

Lord Carey was speaking after the joint press conference this week between Dr Williams and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, to announce the move. Under an apostolic constitution decree, the Pope will set up personal ordinariates, or extra-geographical Roman Catholic dioceses, such as those that already exist in the military, to take in former Anglicans who oppose women bishops and accept the Petrine ministry of Rome.

Dr Williams appeared distressed when he said at the press conference, hosted by the Roman Catholic Church in Eccleston Square, that he had known nothing of the initiative until two weeks ago. He was notified formally only when Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, visited last weekend to fill in some of the detail. Read more
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Priests in London and Yorkshire say they are tempted to join Rome

The villages of the ancient parishes of Broughton, Marton and Thornton nestle in a corner of North Yorkshire that is perilously close to the Lancashire border. And even closer to Rome.

For the rector, the Rev Canon Nicholas Turner, editor of the traditionalist magazine New Directions, the Pope’s decree was the fulfilment of a long-held dream. But he must now decide whether to be reordained as a Roman Catholic priest. And if he does, what will happen to the churches and his parishioners?

To visit the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Thornton is to enter a Norman building that gives every appearance of being Catholic already. There is a statue of the Madonna and Child. There are candles and incense. Father Nicholas celebrates Mass, occasionally in Latin, hears confession and grants absolution.

The three parishes in the united benefice voted in the 1990s for resolutions granting them distance from the Bradford Diocese. Now the three parochial church councils may face a further vote: whether to join their priest and defect en masse to Rome, albeit a version of Roman Catholicism that would allow them to maintain much of their Anglican identity.

If it came to that, though, a hurdle would remain. Their three churches would still belong to the Church of England; unless a deal were reached, where would the new Catholics worship? In Father Nicholas’s ideal world, one church would pass into the control of the Anglican Catholics while the other two remained with the Church of England.

His world is not ideal, however, because his wife, Canon Ann Turner, is the local deacon and the Roman Catholic Church does not accept female deacons. Some tough decisions lie ahead.

“The Pope’s decision is a wonderfully generous move to unity,” he said. “It would be wonderful if the Church of England could return to full communion with Rome while still being the Church of England. But I can’t just abandon over 30 years of ministry as though they never happened. These are exciting times, but one can’t ignore the history of a village church. It is at the centre of the community and I hope we can forge a path that allows all of us to stay together.”

In Walthamstow, East London, Father David Waller sits on a green chair, a black and white cat draped across his knees, and offers a cup of tea. “This could be the most significant thing to happen to the English Church since the Reformation,” he says. Read more
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BBC slurs evangelicals in home school debate

Some evangelical parents need monitoring by the state because they may ‘intimidate’ their children with ideas about God, sin and hell, a BBC radio host has said.
Listen to the comments:

The Government’s Schools Minister replied by saying this is part of the reason for conducting a review of the rules on home education.

The comments were made on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Programme, broadcast on 18 October.

The programme featured an item on the Government’s controversial proposals for regulating parents who choose to educate their children at home.

The show’s host, Roger Bolton, spoke of “authoritarian” evangelical fathers of “Victorian periods” who threatened their children with theology.

He was interviewing Schools Minister, Diana Johnson, and went on to say, “some people will worry that this is possible now under home tuition, that this could happen.”

He continued: “and you would not be able to do anything about it because people would just say, ‘we’re simply telling them what we believe’”.

The Schools Minister replied, “that’s part of the reason why we have asked Graham Badman to do this review because at the moment we don’t know what’s happening”. Read more
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Desperate bishops invited Rome to park its tanks on Archbishop’s lawn

Rome has parked its tanks on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lawn after manoeuvres undertaken by up to fifty bishops and begun two years ago by an Australian archbishop, John Hepworth.

As leader of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a breakaway group claiming to represent up to 400,000 laity worldwide, he went to Rome seeking a means to achieve full, visible unity for his flock.

As a former Catholic priest himself, divorced and remarried with three children, he would be unlikely to be recognised by Rome as a priest or bishop, even under the structures brought in by the new apostolic constitution. He has nonetheless always received a warm welcome in Rome — in particular from Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who has made the running in Rome with the backing of his predecessor at the Congregation, Pope Benedict XVI himself.

In England, negotiations with the Vatican have been led by two of the “flying bishops” — the AngloCatholics sanctioned to provide pastoral care for opponents of the ordination of women as priests. The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Right Rev Andrew Burnham, and the Bishop of Richborough, the Right Rev Keith Newton, visited Rome at Easter last year for talks with Cardinal Levada. Read more
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Notting Hill shows: Only prison will deter the thugs that roam our estates

It was just over 40 years ago that the English judicial system finally learned how to deal with violent intimidation against the post-war wave of new Commonwealth immigrants. By the late 1950s areas such as Notting Hill Gate in London had become the hunting ground of young thugs whose idea of a good night out was to terrify the local black population. The judiciary had seemed either uninterested or insufficiently motivated to stamp this out. Then one judge – and family pride motivates me to record that he was a maternal cousin – broke with the head-in-the-sand consensus: this was Mr Justice Cyril Salmon.

In September 1958 nine young men were found guilty in his court of what they had called "nigger hunting" – chasing black citizens around the streets of Notting Hill, while armed with iron bars and table legs. They were, said their defence lawyer, in attempted mitigation of their crimes, "victims of the society in which they live". As Time magazine recorded: "Justice Salmon was unimpressed. Said he: 'Everyone, irrespective of the colour of their skins, is entitled to walk through our streets in peace with their heads erect and free from fear...As far as the law is concerned you are entitled to think what you like, however foul your thoughts; to feel what you like, however brutal and debased your emotions; to say what you like, provided you do not infringe the rights of others or imperil the Queen's Peace. But once you translate your dark thoughts and brutal feelings into savage acts such as these, the law will be swift to punish you, and to protect your victims.'

"Justice Salmon forthwith sentenced all nine youths to four years' imprisonment. Shocked at the severity of the sentence, relatives and friends in the courtroom gasped in dismay, and burst into hysterical sobs outside. Two of the boys were so shaken they had to be helped down the 32 steps to their cells. But that night, all was quiet in Notting Hill." Read more
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Pope Benedict XVI paves way for thousands of disaffected Anglicans to cross over to Rome

Pope Benedict XVI has paved the way for thousands of Anglicans who are disillusioned by the church’s stance on female clergy and homosexuality to convert to Roman Catholicism.

The historic move will allow groups of Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Holy See while allowing them to retain some of their traditions, and could see married Church of England clergy ordained as Catholic priests.

It has dealt a serious blow to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has tried to keep traditionalists in the fold despite their bitter disputes with liberals over the direction of the Anglican Communion, although he denied it was an “act of aggression”.

Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said: “Those Anglicans who have approached the Holy See have made clear their desire for full, visible unity in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. At the same time, they have told us of the importance of their Anglican traditions of spirituality and worship for their faith journey.”

In recent decades thousands of conservative priests and parishioners in England, America and Australia have left the 80 million-strong Anglican Communion in protest at the ordination of women and openly homosexual clergy, which they say go against scripture and church tradition. In England, more than 400 clergy resigned when women priests were introduced in the 1990s. Read more
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BBC unveils drama about 'first modern lesbian'

The life and times of Anne Lister, the woman dubbed the first modern lesbian by scholars of sexuality and known as Gentleman Jack to her Yorkshire neighbours, is to be the subject of a lavish new costume drama.

Shameless star Maxine Peake, whose previous roles include Myra Hindley, is due to play the heroine in the one-off special for BBC Two. Filming of The Scandalous Diaries of Anne Lister is expected to get underway next month at the 19th century polymath’s former home Shibden Hall near Halifax which she shared with her “wife” - another local heiress called Anne Walker with whom she underwent a same-sex marriage ceremony.

Lister chronicled her pioneering life and wide-ranging travels as well as her relationships in an at times sexually charged four million word collection of diaries which she kept until her premature death in 1840 aged 51 after being bitten by an insect while travelling in the Caucasus Mountains. Read more
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Geert Wilders arrives in UK and explains his 'problems with Islam'

Police held back a crowd of Muslim demonstrators as Geert Wilders met Ukip peer Lord Pearson opposite the Houses of Parliament.

Explaining his controversial views on Islam, he said: ''I have a problem with the Islamic ideology, the Islamic culture, because I feel that the more Islam that we get in our societies, the less freedom that we get.''

The leader of the Dutch Freedom Party was allowed into Britain after overturning a Government decision led by former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to bar him from the country.

It was feared that his outspoken views on Islam could spark religious violence, but this was rejected by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal on Tuesday.

Mr Wilders denied responsibility for the publicity which has greeted his visit.

The 46-year-old said: ''If anybody has responsibility for this publicity, it is the UK Government and the Home Secretary and not Geert Wilders.''

Mr Wilders, who wants the Koran banned, insisted: ''I am not extreme, I am not a racist either.'' Read more
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Johann Hari: The looming threat of terror that comes from the far right

Britain is facing the real risk today of a bombing campaign that targets random civilians for death – but it is being virtually ignored. When its supporters step closer every day to mass murder, nobody notices. When its perpetrators are caught, there is (at best) a little flick of information in News in Brief, before everyone goes back to talking about the Strictly Come Dancing race row. This silence suggests something dark about us – and requires us to change our behaviour, fast.

The campaign I am talking about is not being planned by jihadis or fringe Irish nationalists but by white "neo-Nazis" who want to murder Asians, black people, Jews and gays in the bizarre belief it will trigger a "race war".

They have struck before. Exactly a decade ago, a 22-year-old member of the British National Party called David Copeland planted bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane (where I live), and a gay pub in Old Compton Street. He managed to lodge a nail deep in a baby's skull, and to murder a pregnant woman, her gay best friend, and his partner. He bragged: "My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There'd be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people would go out and vote BNP."

The police are warning ever-more urgently that similar attacks seem to be coming today. Read more
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BBC ‘endangering public’ by inviting BNP leader to Question Time

The BBC was accused yesterday of threatening public safety by its decision to invite the British National Party leader Nick Griffin on to its Question Time programme.

In a letter to Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, Hammersmith and Fulham Council called on the corporation to move the programme from Television Centre, in White City, West London, over fears that thousands of protesters will picket the building. In a letter, the council demanded that the BBC foot the bill for extra security if it refuses to relocate.

Baroness Warsi, the Tory spokeswoman for community cohesion and social action, is to join the panel on October 22, The Times understands. She is set to appear alongside Bonnie Greer, the black writer and broadcaster, Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, and Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman.

Unite Against Fascism, which regularly demonstrates against the BNP, has said that it will try to blockade Television Centre to prevent Mr Griffin gaining access next Thursday. Read more
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Britain's success in Afghanistan is measured in small steps

Both parents were inconsolable. They stood at the front gate of my patrol base in Wishtan, Sangin, and pleaded for help to find their child. We could give no satisfaction — their six-year-old daughter had stood on a Taleban pressure-pad IED (improvised explosive device); there was nothing left of the poor child. The parents continued to plead — a small part of her broken body would suffice. They had to have something to bury. The 2 Rifles Battle Group know about grief: we have seen friends killed but we had at least been able to salute a coffin. With the heaviest of hearts, my riflemen watched helpless as those heartbroken parents returned home to mourn the loss of a Muslim child who could not be buried.

It is this kind of IED that has been the Taleban’s indiscriminate and careless weapon of choice in the Upper Sangin Valley this summer. I have seen too many Afghans fighting for their lives in my trauma bay. As a battle group, 2 Rifles has dealt with more than 400 IED incidents in our six months here, finding more than 200 devices.

In my first tour of Northern Ireland in 1991-92, my platoon dealt with four IED incidents. We had nine platoons in the battalion then, so perhaps my commanding officer at the time had to deal with 36. These statistics provide some notion of the scale of the fight. One more will suffice — last year in the same period, there were 158 incidents.

And it is in the face of such adversity and such an insidious enemy, which adjusts its tactics almost weekly, that the courageous men and women of this battle group have fought. It is hard to describe the courage required to operate at all, let alone leave one’s base and take the fight to the enemy. But the riflemen and fusiliers of this battle group have patrolled Sangin and its immediate area daily to protect its people. The commitment, grit and indomitability have been humbling to observe. Read more
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Roger Scruton: TV will never poison my children’s minds

To my amazement the Australian Government has come out against television. Admittedly its report is confined to the effect on small children, and takes the form of undemanding guidelines: the report says that no child under the age of 2 should be allowed to watch telly.

But no section of the population is more addicted to the telly than politicians, who vie with each other for a place on the screen, and I have despaired of hearing the truth about this ubiquitous poison from someone with the power to control it. Governments that take a stand against television are as unlikely as distillers who oppose the use of alcohol or dairy farmers who campaign against milk.

It has been known for 20 or more years that television induces mental disorders, such as enhanced aggression, shortened attention span and reduced ability to communicate, and that these disorders involve an even greater social cost than the obesity and lethargy that are TV’s normal physical side-effects. Research by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kubey has shown that television is also addictive, setting up pathways to pleasure that demand constant reinforcement. As a threat to the nation’s health, it stands far higher than alcohol, drugs or tobacco, and the worry is that it may be too late to do anything about it, since the addiction is all but universal. Read more
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God is not the Creator, claims academic

Ed: Interesting that this is reported by the science correspondent, not the religion correspondent. For serious reactions, start here.

The notion of God as the Creator is wrong, claims a top academic, who believes the Bible has been wrongly translated for thousands of years.

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate".

The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth". Read more
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China calls time on dollar hegemony

You can date the end of dollar hegemony from China's decision last month to sell its first batch of sovereign bonds in Chinese yuan to foreigners.

Beijing does not need to raise money abroad since it has $2 trillion (£1.26 trillion) in reserves. The sole purpose is to prepare the way for the emergence of the yuan as a full-fledged global currency.

"It's the tolling of the bell," said Michael Power from Investec Asset Management. "We are only beginning to grasp the enormity and historical significance of what has happened."

It is this shift in China and other parts of rising Asia and Latin America that threatens dollar domination, not the pricing of oil contracts. The markets were rattled yesterday by reports – since denied – that China, France, Japan, Russia, and Gulf states were plotting to replace the Greenback as the currency for commodity sales, but it makes little difference whether crude is sold in dollars, euros, or Venetian Ducats.

What matters is where OPEC oil producers and rising export powers choose to invest their surpluses. If they cease to rotate this wealth into US Treasuries, mortgage bonds, and other US assets, the dollar must weaken over time.

"Everybody in the world is massively overweight the US dollar," said David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC. "As they invest a little here and little there in other currencies, or gold, it slowly erodes the dollar. It is like sterling after World War One. Everybody can see it's happening." Read more
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The demise of the dollar

Ed: Read also this

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years. Read more
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Four words no man should ever have to say – Harriet Harman is right. But only about topless models

Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and even Harriet Harman speaks sense once in a blue moon - in this case when she mocks that British institution, Page Three.

I’m not a big fan of the St Paul’s Girls School-educated Minister for Equality, whose brand of second-generation feminism makes fundamentalist Mormonism seem rationalist in comparison. I also think she represents more than anyone else the political caste’s betrayal of and disgust for the working class.

But, anyway, she’s right about the topless models on Page Three of the Sun. Read more
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The two policewomen and OFSTED

The creeping invasion of the state into what was once the preserve of the family and the individual – the databases, the intrusive checks, the inevitably disastrous attempts by bureaucrats to engage in social engineering through the promiscuous use of shoddy legislation and lazily-devised "initiatives" – has become so much a feature of modern life that most of us no longer notice it. Until the day it comes knocking at the door.

For Detective Constable Leanne Shepherd, that day was Friday July 10 of this year when an official from the Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) called at her home in Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire. A CID officer in Thames Valley Police, she was enjoying a day off with her daughter, Edie, just two-and-a-half years old, when the bell rang.

“She was really lovely, the Ofsted lady,” remembers DC Shepherd. “She said there was a report that I was child-minding illegally. When I asked her what she meant – was I committing a criminal offence or something - she said she wasn’t 100 per cent sure.”

DC Shepherd’s alleged "crime" – and even in the age of the nanny-state-gone-wild, this takes some beating – was to have embarked on an arrangement with her friend, colleague and job-sharing partner, DC Lucy Jarrett, by which they took turns to look after each other’s daughter during days off. It was, according to both women, a “perfect” arrangement that lasted more than two years and allowed them to pursue challenging careers part-time (they conduct investigations together), and spend sufficient time with their first-borns in the years when they needed their mothers most.

There was no rigid pattern to the arrangement – its virtue was its flexibility – but it was reciprocal: each woman received a benefit in the form of two, and occasionally more, days of free child care during most weeks of the year. This supposedly violates the Childcare Act of 2006, which prohibits adults not registered as child-minders looking after other people’s children for more than two hours a day for reward – the reward being the free care. Read more
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Let the decent citizens reclaim our streets

All the crime figures over the past 50 to 100 years show how anti-social disorder has gradually taken over. In my constituency of Birkenhead, there are now more violent crimes against the person than there were in the whole country 50 years ago. When I first started campaigning in Parliament against anti-social behaviour there were too many unruly youths in Birkenhead, but I didn't come across more than six "families from hell". Now the Prime Minister puts the total at 50,000 across the country. This is a national emergency, and it is time for the Government to empower decent citizens to reclaim the streets.

At present, the neighbourhood can go into court and get a warrant issued against these low-level community terrorists. But because this is deemed a private action, the police will not enforce the warrant to bring the thugs into court that day. The bench must be given power to rule that neighbourhood-inspired action is a public action, and to enforce the warrant immediately. This would, for example, have allowed Fiona Pilkington's neighbours collectively to have protected her family and themselves. It is a reform that could be enacted in 10 days' time, when Parliament returns, and at a stroke would change the balance of power in favour of decency.

We must also address the fact that our country is increasingly losing the knack of producing good parents. In short, we need a government that believes in turning out good citizens as seriously as did our Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. Only then will the fight against the evil forces that destroyed Fiona and her family be made more equal. Read more
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England wasn't built on babysitting bans

What would Orwell make of a nation in which mothers are investigated for looking after each other's children?

When did it happen? When did the English, described by George Orwell in his famous essays, as a byword for tolerance, eternally suspicious of "power worship" and the overweening authoritarian state, turn into people who report their neighbours to the authorities for babysitting each other's children without permission?

The case of two female police officers who have been subjected to accusations of running an illegal childminding business seems to exemplify the new England.

Someone – apparently a neighbour – anonymously reported that detective constable Leanne Shepherd, who has a two-year-old daughter Edie, had a reciprocal childcare arrangement with her job share partner and friend DC Lucy Jarrett, who also has a toddler, Amy, aged three.

After an unannounced visit from Ofsted established this was indeed the case, the two families were ordered to stop the arrangement forthwith as neither was registered as a childcare provider with the appropriate authorities.

Surely this is painful, monstrous nonsense? "It was devastating, I was crying all day. Every day Edie says 'going to see Amy?', but it's just not possible," said Shepherd, who has had to place her daughter in an expensive private nursery so she can continue working. Read more
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