A Night At The Randolph

Not one of my usual stopovers due to an extreme shortness of purse - but we were attending a function in Oxford, it was Susan's birthday, and the hotel was just down the road. The Randolph has got location, location and location. It also costs £20 to park your car !

We'd been out in the evening and wandered into the bar at around midnight to find a fair number of dinner-jacketed chaps in expansive mood, champagne and cigars much in evidence (my Guinness wasn't too outrageous, but the price of a glass of house Rioja made me decide to skip the champagne ...).

It turned out said chaps were American members (I tell a lie, some of them were Texan) of the Churchill Centre, on an eight-day pilgrimage to sites associated with the great man. They'd pretty much done the lot, from dinner at Blenheim to visiting the grave of Churchill's nanny, Mrs Everest, "that most excellent woman". So we sat and swapped Churchill quotes, lambasted the Guardian and Washington Post and generally reinforced each others prejudices in a most agreeable manner.

One of them, John David Olsen, was blogging the visit. I liked the story about Colin Powell's direct descent from Edward Longshanks.

Barry Manilow Triggered My Conversion To Islam

A shame for the Unionists, really. A few more years and Sinn Fein/IRA would have had more to worry about than the Six Counties. As I wrote last year :

"Strange times in the Irish Republic. The boom years have been on for 20-odd years now, the country's becoming much more secular, immigration and asylum levels are high, the youth/dance/drug culture is widespread - it's starting to feel much more like degenerate, decadent England. I can remember 17-odd years back seeing 'Life of Brian' in Cork just after the ban on the film had been lifted. At the time it was a big deal - it wouldn't be now. While in many ways the end of Catholic Ireland is a tragedy, it also cuts down the supply of volunteers motivated by Cathleen ni Houlihan and Our Lady Queen of Ireland. "

via the SAU blog, Jane Kelly with another cracking interview illustrating the enormous change in the Republic.

When Imam Ibrahim stands in the centre of Galway in his voluminous robes preaching the message of Islam, his main problem comes from other Muslims. There are over a thousand of them, immigrants from Iraq, Libya, Saudi and Algeria in what was until recently a quiet Irish town. He says:

I get abuse. They call me a Kaffir or infidel and say I should die.

He represents a reformist sect which orthodox Muslims dislike, but they are also a bit suspicious as he is in fact Irish. Ibrahim began life as plain Michael Peter Noonan, in Waterford. He is the only home-grown Irish Imam on the planet so far, and his conversion is surely a sign of the strange times in which we live.

Black Dolly, White Dolly

Sharing the main stadium box with Jeanne, Camera, and me, at my invitation, were Stan Smith, his wife Marjory, and their daughter Logan. The two little girls were happy to see one another. During Wimbledon in June, they had renewed their friendship when we all stayed near each other in London. Now Logan, seven years old, had brought Camera a present. She had come with twin dolls, one for herself, one for Camera. A thoughtful gesture on Logan's part, and on her parents' part, no doubt. The Smiths are fine, religious people.

Then I noticed that Camera was playing with her doll above the railing of the box, in full view of the attentive network television cameras. The doll was the problem; or rather, the fact that the doll was conspicuously a blonde. Camera owns dolls of all colours, nationalities, and ethnic varieties. But she was now on national television playing with a blonde doll. Suddenly I heard voices in my head, the voices of irate listeners to a call-in show on some 'black format' radio station. I imagined insistent, clamorous callers attacking Jeanne, and me:
'Can you believe the doll Arthur Ashe's daughter was holding up at the AIDS benefit? Wasn't that a shame?'
'Is that brother sick or what? Somebody ought to teach that poor child about her true black self'
'What kind of role model is Arthur Ashe if he allows his daughter to be brainwashed in that way?'
'Doesn't the brother understand that he is corrupting his child's mind with notions about the superiority of the white woman? I tell you, I thought we were long past that!'

The voices became louder in my head. Despite the low humidity, I began to squirm in my seat. What should I do? Should I say, To hell with what some people might think? I know that Camera likes her blonde dolls, black dolls, brown dolls, Asian dolls, Indian dolls just about equally; I know that for a fact, because I have watched her closely. I have searched for signs of racial partiality in her, indications that she may be dissatisfied with herself, with her own colour. I have seen none. But I cannot dismiss the voices. I try always to live practically, and I do not wish to hear such comments on the radio. On the other hand, I do not want Logan's gift to be sullied by an ungracious response. Finally, I act.

'Jeanne,' I whisper, 'we have to do something.' 'About what?' she whispers back.
'That doll. We have to get Camera to put that doll down.' Jeanne takes one look at Camera and the doll and she understands immediately. Quietly, cleverly, she makes the dolls disappear. Neither Camera nor Logan is aware of any thing unusual happening. Smoothly, Jeanne has moved them on to some other distraction.

I am unaware if Margie Smith has noticed us, but I believe I owe her an explanation and I get up and go around to her seat. Softly I tell her why the dolls have disappeared. Marge is startled, dumbfounded.

'Gosh, Arthur, I never thought about that. I never ever thought about anything like that!' 'You don't have to think about it,' I explained. 'But it happens to us, in similar situations, all the time.' 'All the time?' She is pensive now.

'All the time. It's perfectly understandable. And it certainly, is not your fault. You were doing what comes naturally. But for us, the dolls make for a bit of a problem. All for the wrong reasons. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.'

I return to my seat, but not to the elation I had felt before I saw that blonde doll in Camera's hand. I feel myself becoming more and more angry. I am angry at the force that made me act, the force of racism in all its complexity, as it spreads into the world and creates defensiveness and intolerance among the very people harmed by racism. I am also angry with myself. I am angry with myself because I have just acted out of pure practicality, not out of morality. The moral act would have been to let Camera have her fun, because she was innocent of any wrongdoing. Instead, I had tempered with her innocence, her basic human right to act impulsively, to accept a gift from a friend in the same beautiful spirit in which it was given.
Deeply embarrassed now, I am ashamed at what I have done. I have made Camera adjust her behaviour merely because of the likelihood that some people in the African American community would react to her innocence foolishly and perhaps even maliciously. I know I am not misreading the situation. I would have had telephone calls that very evening about the unsuitability of Camera's doll.

Am I being a hypocrite? Yes, definitely, up to a point. I have allowed myself to give in to those people who say we must avoid even the slightest semblance of 'Eurocentric' influence. But I also know what stands behind the entire situation. Racism ultimately created the state in which defensiveness and hypocrisy are our almost instinctive responses, and innocence and generosity are invitations to trouble.

This incident almost ruined the day for me. That night, when Jeanne and I talked about the excitement of the afternoon, and the money that would go to AIDS research and education because of the event, we nevertheless ended up talking mostly about the incident of the dolls. We also talked about perhaps its most ironic aspect. In 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, some of the most persuasive testimony came from the psychologist Dr Kenneth Clark concerning his research on black children and their pathetic preference for white dolls over black. In 1992, the dolls are still a problem.

Once again, the shadow of race had fallen on me.

From Arthur Ashe's wonderful "Days Of Grace", a book I could quote till the cows come home. What a loss to America that man's death was. I think he should have let them play with the dolls - but then so did he, and that's why he was so angry.

Back blogging on Monday.

Dagenham Shootings Update

Amazing. 2 people shot yesterday and it hasn't made the BBC (or any news media).

From the comments :

"Well, they were right! Front page of the 'B&D Post' this morning: "Shooting:Two left for dead"

Apparantly, the victims of the 'Chicago style shooting' (the gang used tommyguns..? Escaped in cars with running boards..?) were rushed to hospital and are serious but stable - the gang who shot them escaped. No names or descriptions.

The police's Trident team are investigating..... "

I Have A Vision Of The Future, Chum

"I'm not entirely sure it's a mark of a reactionary to be concerned about immigration's effect on social cohesion. (One reason I feel strongly at this is that my kids would be more vulnerable if things ever went badly wrong. They're already getting used to be mistaken for Muslims.)" - Clive Davis, yesterday.


"The celebrated decline of deference cuts more than one way. Society is much less gentle, more violent, than it was fifty years ago. Political allegiance is much less deep-rooted, more volatile, than it was. Our children are being taught to identify themselves as members of a particular ethnic group (my older children were given a form at school to fill in) rather than as Britons. There is enormous cynicism about politics and a culture which demands instant gratification. Ancient institutions which have served to preserve liberty over centuries have been emasculated or abolished. It's possible that given such a cultural background, national self-confidence (something we currently don't have) could take unpleasant forms.

In my worst visions my sons are on the streets, trying to stop people being attacked because of their race (and in danger of attack themselves), while in a thousand council offices ex-liberal careerists are hastily applying for the new Anglicisation Policy Co-ordinator posts ("under the Race Relations Act 2016, this post is only open to those of Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage") and the UN is wondering whether troops should be sent in." - this blog, March 2004.



"British citizenship has been granted to nearly one million foreign nationals since Labour came to power in 1997, official figures showed yesterday.

A record 161,000 obtained a UK passport last year, a 15 per cent increase on 2004, and a further 214,000 lodged applications that are now being processed. Similar numbers are likely to have applied this year, on top of 750,000 new citizens already created in the previous eight years.

The Home Office said the 64 per cent increase in applications for 2005 was mainly due to people submitting their papers before the introduction of the new "Britishness" test last November.

The rate of overseas settlement in Britain is now the highest ever and is four times greater than in the mid-1990s - reflecting unprecedented levels of immigration.

In the late 1960s, about 75,000 new citizens a year were accepted for citizenship but this fell to about 50,000 after new laws were introduced in 1971.

For about 25 years the annual figure remained near or below this level, falling to a low point of 37,000 in 1997, the year Labour took office. Since then, there has been a spectacular increase, with the rate of growth accelerating every year.

The scale of new settlements is a principal driver behind the increase in Britain's population, which is expected to grow by five million by 2020 while birth rates fall in other countries.

The Government has said there is no limit to the numbers who can come to this country ..."

Graphic - Daily Telegraph.



The Future ? Fiji - if we're lucky.

Speed Bonnie Boat ....

Have They No Shame ?

Let's raise money for Labour Party funds by auctioning a copy of the Hutton report into the death of Dr David Kelly !

Let's get Cherie and Alistair Campbell to sign it !

Chris 'Y-fronts' Bryant as auctioneer !





Tasteful or what.

Ian Dale has the gruesome details. Visuals via BBDO.

Google Power

I remember a year or so back finding a large number of Google hits on the blog for "Rod Liddle arrest", and lo, 'twas true.

If my stats are correct, two people were shot in Parsloes Avenue, Dagenham today. Since about two this afternoon I've been getting hits for "parsloes avenue gun shooting this morning", "shooting at parsloes park, dagenham", "parsloes avenue dagenham police incident", "double shooting dagenham" etc.

Yet there's zilch on the news.

Money Isn't Everything, Says Millionaire Etonian

"Tory leader David Cameron says there is more to life than making money, arguing that improving people's happiness is a key challenge for politicians.
In a speech to the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference, he said the focus should not just be on financial wealth.

Under a Tory government, the public sector would become "the world leader in progressive employment practice".

But he conceded that some on the right would believe people's well-being was nothing to do with politics."

Would they ? I thought the idea on the right was that independent people were happiest and that politics should facilitate this by getting the state out of the way as much as possible. Maybe not.

Mr Cameron does seem to be a bit of a Boho.

"To calculate a person's status, you take his net worth and multiply it by his antimaterialistic attitudes. A zero in either column means no prestige, but high numbers in both rocket you to the top of the heap. Thus, to be treated well in this world, not only do you have to show some income results; you have to perform a series of feints to show how little your worldly success means to you.... You will ceaselessly bash yuppies in order to show that you yourself have not become one. You will talk about your nanny as if she were your close personal friend, as if it were just a weird triviality that you happen to live in a $900,000 Santa Monica house and she takes the bus two hours each day to the barrio. "


It's the education bill today, in which Labour MPs will once again try to deny working class kids the sort of education most of them had. Tim Worstall has the links here and here.

Robert Crampton tells it like it is :

The people I’ve met who went to grammars learnt in greater depth and breadth than I did. Their lessons were more rigorous and more challenging. Roy Jenkins? Denis Healey? Harold Wilson? I don’t think they were baking sheets of paper in the oven to make them look like medieval parchment for history homework in the Thirties, as I was 40-odd years on.

I didn't do that at grammar school either. But my sons did, in year 8 comprehensive.

They should consider this, these Labour men and women who detest their leader and educational selection in equal measure. For more than 30 years, from the death of Hugh Gaitskell to the death of John Smith, when the grammar school generation was on stream, the Labour Party did not feel the need to choose a public schoolboy for its leader. Since 1994, when the comprehensive generation started to become available, they’ve had Blair from Fettes, and soon they’ll have Brown, the product of a ruthlessly selective fast-track education. And before too long, I suspect, we’ll have Cameron from Eton. He’ll be that school’s nineteenth Prime Minister. We’re still waiting for the comprehensive system to produce its first.

Fight ! Fight ! Fight !

Brute Anderson :

"Britain exists for the benefit of the British. Foreigners are here by sufferance. If they become a nuisance, they should be deported."

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown :

"We immigrants should withdraw our labour for a day. I feel ashamed of being an immigrant. We take the abuse when we should be rising, as they are in the US."

Brute : "There is no case for admitting Kosovan gangsters or Somali criminals"

Yazza : "Any man with swarthy skin is now suspect"

Brute : "immigration has worked to our advantage, by controlling wage inflation"

Who's this 'our', paleface ?

Yazza : "Have you noticed, no businesses join in the demonisation of migrant labour ?"

At last the Indie comes out in support of unfettered capital !

Brute : "If we find ourselves apparently bound by international conventions on refugees and asylum which pre-date mass air travel and are reminiscent of the era when all the political refugees in London couldhe accommodated in the British Museum Reading Room, we should repudiate them. If we find ourselves restricted by international laws which oblige us to treat foreigners as if they were British we should repudiate those as well. After the war, the shattered nations of continental Europe, whose legal systems had been polluted by dic tatorship and occupation, felt it necessary to rebuild them according to abstract international principles. Forty years later, the nations who had escaped from the Soviet empire also decided to draw on others'experience in order to introduce the rule of law. Hence the popularity of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

In Britain we had no problem with either human rights or the rule of law. We had enjoyed both for more than two centuries. We signed the ECHR to encourage the foreigners, not because we thought that it could ever be needed here. In the 1960s we abolished the death penalty, legalised homosexuality, liberalised divorce and permitted the mass murder of foetuses - which now seems to be regarded as a human right - without foreign help.

Today human rights legislation incites prisoners to spend their idle hours dreaming up compensation claims, while schoolmasters wonder whether they are entitled to confiscate their pupils' mobile phones. Those who believe in Britain for the British also believe that our people should elect our Parliament to make our laws,and that legal disputes should he adjudicated by our judges. Those who think like that take a benign view of British history. They feel grateful that they were born to a double privilege: the Queen's subjects, they are also British citizens. They believe that over the centuries their country has been a powerful force for good. At least until the port has been circulating they will be too modest to attribute this to moral superiority. They will merely point to the geopolitical advantages ofthe English Channel.

As an island, we were insulated from the ravages of foreign wars. We should now exploit our insularity, both legal and geo graphical, to protect us from the ravages of foreign judges and uncontrolled immigration. Whether in Nato or the EU, it might be necessary to give up some righhts to take our own decisions, making lesser conces- sions to achieve greater goals. But we remain sovereign. That is a prospect which appals those who take a different view of British history: the Ken Livingstone campp. To them, our history is a criminal record of oppression and exploitation. It is not a matter for pride but for apology (there have been moments when Tony Blair seemed to endorse that view). Whenever Britain was in dispute with another nation, Britain must be in the wrong (until the blessed day when we quarrel with George Bush's America). It would be absurd to suppose that we could dispense with the EHCR - if anything we need it more than the other Europeans do.

The Livingstonians so dislike their country that they wish to transform it out of recognition. To them immigration is an agent of irreversible cultural change : the more disruptive and less assimilable the immigrant, the better."

Yazza : "Why didn't we move to Canada when we could have ? We need to say enough is enough. Immigrants, refugees and their descendants are in this together. We should launch an Immigrants Proud campaign, organise nationwide marches and boycotts, monitor speeches by politicians and rain down objections on those who play this card, expose bigoted bureaucrats and officials, engage in robust debates with academics, boycott media outlets guilty of serial hostility against immigrants and so on. To accept animus in perpetuity as a condition of citizenship is an intolerable deal and we should now be bold enough to reject it."

First They Came For The Firemen ....

You do have to wonder if some Guardianistas in Essex are closet BNP activists.

"Patriotic students have been banned from bringing the St George's flag into college during the World Cup - in case it causes offence.

Teachers are refusing to allow teenagers at Palmer's College in Thurrock to get behind their team and have ordered them to leave their England flags at home."

UPDATE - and now they come for the taxi drivers ...

UPDATE2 - now they come for the taxi-drivers of Cheltenham ...

"The council has cited safety concerns over the flags. A spokesman for the borough council said the ban was not just on the grounds of taste."

UPDATE3 - now they come for the (Asian) taxi-drivers of Rochdale and Oldham ...

Taxi proprietor Farooq Yousaf came unstuck with Oldham Council when they banned him from sticking posters in the back of his cabs bearing the flag of St George and the words ‘Come on England’.

The council told Mr Yousaf, who owns Motown Private Hire which has 40 taxis, the stickers were a form of advertising and therefore banned.

He said: "It’s ridiculous. They told me we were advertising, but what are we advertising?

"All I am advertising is England. I think it’s the ‘Come on England bit’ that’s upset them. I can’t understand it. It’s just a show of support of England for the World Cup."


What with Mr Harker's 'Is it just me, or is anyone else slightly worried about the number of St George’s flags flying from road vehicles right now ?', it's time to repeat a two-year-old post.


"It must be the flag they are aiming at ..."



"Would it not be wiser to take it in ?"

"Strike my colours!" cried the captain. "No, sir, not I"; and as soon as he had said the words, I think we all agreed with him. For it was not only a piece of stout, seamanly, good feeling; it was good policy besides and showed our enemies that we despised their cannonade.

from Treasure Island, by R.L. Stevenson.



Bowler-Tip - The England Project

More Demographics

"Birth rate increase may reflect Blair policies, says expert"

Thus the Guardian.

The birth rate has climbed to its highest point in 13 years to an average of 1.8 children for every woman in England and Wales, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday.
The climb from an all-time low of 1.63 children per woman in 2001 is still significantly below the level needed for replacement - which is more than two. But there was speculation yesterday that the childcare reforms of the Blair government might be having an impact.

Huzzah for Sure Start !

"We looked at the reasons for this slight, hopeful rise," said Julia Margo, author of a report called Population Politics published in February by the Institute for Public Policy Research. "It seems to map on to 2001 when Labour started pushing on family friendly policies and childcare. There is a better deal now from government than ever before."

Hooray ! We won't all have to work till we're 156 ! The family lives !

Yes, but whose family ?

But, she added, there were other possible reasons that do not hold out promise for the rise across all groups which is needed for a sustained increase in births. "We don't have access to the background data, which would tell us whether there are socio-economic differences, whether professional women will still be having less children." It could be that the rise is restricted to poorer women and those from migrant groups, who traditionally have had larger families.

The figures are here.

The figures by health authority (.xls) and local authority are interesting. The lowest birth-rate ? The hideously white north-east (which you may recall has the highest bastardy rate in England). The highest ? West Midlands and North London.

A quick Excel sort gives us the following top ten local authorities, ignoring Rutland, where a woman having quads seems to have distorted the figures.

Newham
Blackburn with Darwen
Bradford
Barking and Dagenham
Luton
Oldham
Peterborough
Pendle
Slough
Boston

Yes, that last one's right - Boston, Lincs.

The bottom 20 or so are interesting, too. Three categories.

a) wealthy white urban areas - there aren't enough yuppies moving back into town. Chester, Cheltenham, Warwick, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham.
b) poor white city centres - Sunderland, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle under Lyme. Same phenomenon ? Natives avoiding the cities ?
c) certain London boroughs - Islington, Camden, Ken & Chelsea, Westminster. By the time you can afford to live there your breeding days are over.

Doing The Jobs We Don't Want To Do ...

In a Home Office style. Who says John Prescott's had no effect on policy.

Are you a cultural competent helping professional ?

Via Faceright, the Seattle School Board website in all its ghastly glory.

This may seem an extreme case, but the same principles are at work throughout the UK public sector, and have been ever since the principle of 'treat others as you'd like them to treat you' was abandoned as hopelessly ethnocentric, and replaced by 'to treat people the same you have to treat them differently'.

I was reading Susan's 'Nursing Times' the other day, and a midwife was describing how she was coping with the challenge of diversity. When introduced to a family she shook hands with the mother, but the father greeted her outstretched hand by putting his firmly behind his back and turning away.

Our heroine was quite miffed by this, but fortunately she discovered later that the clients came from a culture where a male could not touch a pregnant woman (our midwife was with child) to whom he was not related. So it was all right after all !

This would just about be justifiable if applied consistently. But imagine if the guy came from, say, a neo-nazi survivalist cult, and didn't want to shake hands because of her race ! No NHS treatment for you, scumbag !

Turns out in practice all cultures aren't equal. But the cultures you can discriminate against are limited to one ethnic group. Can't imagine why.

To quote this old post :

I was in a Government legal department a day or two ago. The walls and stairs were covered with anti-racist and 'diversity' posters, and as I awaited my appointment I could read the rules against discrimination of any kind on grounds of sex (sorry, gender), race, disability or sexual orientation.

During my interview I noticed a Bible on a shelf, used for swearing affidavits. 'Do you have a Koran ?' I asked. 'Oh yes', said the woman behind the desk, 'but women aren't allowed to touch that - I have to ask a man to get it.'

Cracking Stuff ...

Shuggy with a long, thoughtful, beautifully argued post on regime change in Iran. RTWT.

Shuggy's either
a) writing a lot in the evenings
b) during the day when he should be teaching
c) knocking this stuff out in his lunch break, in which case he's a genius

There's A Small Postette

At Biased BBC.

Satire Throws In Towel ....

"The under-fire Home Office has suffered a fresh blow with the news five illegal immigrants were found cleaning one of the department's offices in London.
The Nigerians were arrested after checks on their immigration status.

They were working for a firm which was contracted to clean Becket House, part of the Immigration and Nationality directorate (IND)."



Passport forgery law is repealed by accident.

The Home Office faced fresh controversy last night after ministers were accused of accidentally repealing the law which makes it an offence to have a forged passport.

In an extraordinary development, it was claimed that Labour's Identity Cards Act had repealed the existing laws before the new laws to replace them come into force.

One court case involving two men who were caught with forged passports has already had to be adjourned.

Peter Briffa channels Gary Younge (among many others) ...

"But this is Blair’s Britain, where black footballers are tolerated just so long as their white colleagues get all the limelight ..."

Joseph Harker, whose work I usually admire, beats him hollow ...

"I've been looking at the drivers of these flag-waving vehicles, and - OK, I admit this isn't exactly scientific - half of them are in white vans, and the rest are white, male, tattooed, pot-bellied 35 to 55-years-olds: exactly the type I've been seeing on TV for the past month complaining about "our houses going to the asylum seekers", or that "we're losing control of our country". I can't tell if these drivers come from Barking and Dagenham, where the BNP gained 11 seats, but that borough is just a short drive from where I live, so who knows?"

Followed by :

"There is a serious point to this."

At Least They're Honest II

Former Home Office minister John Denham :

I think the real problem is that community cohesion ends the idea that a diverse society can be built without the white majority having to change very much.

The change-over from "they're a tiny minority - your fears are groundless" to "there are other cultures than yours - you might want to consider changing" (with its unspoken 'or else') is almost complete. Only compulsion is left to follow.




Denham's article is apparently (I couldn't find it) available at Catalyst, a tax-funded magazine produced by the Commission For Racial Equality. It also contains an entertaining article by one Rachel Pillai, bemoaning the tendency of some tabloids to "play loose and fast (sic) with the statistics they publish".

"In the lead-up to the last round of EU enlargement, one of the tabloids claimed that 1.4 million eastern Europeans were on their way to Britain – a completely unsubstantiated claim."

As she doesn't name either the tabloid or its publication date, her claim is also completely unsubstantiated. But let it pass.

In contrast to the evil tabloids with their right-wing agenda, the Home Office estimate was 5,000-13,000 - and this was backed up by the Guardian, quoting an unreferenced "new survey".

British fears of an influx of immigrants from eastern European countries joining the EU in May were rubbished in Brussels yesterday as a new survey found that total migration into existing member states after the EU's biggest ever enlargement is likely to be about 1% over the next five years. If correct, the figures mean there will be about 220,000 immigrants a year into all 15 current members. That suggests that the government's original "open-door" estimate of 5,000 to 13,000 a year coming to the UK is realistic and does not require limits on benefits, quotas or other restrictive measures.

"This study confirms the commission's view that fears of a huge wave of migration from the new member states will be proven to be unfounded," insisted Margot Wallstrom, commissioner for employment and social affairs. Pat Cox, the Irish president of the European parliament, was blunter. "The biggest flood we've had to date is not of humans, but the flood of ink on tabloid red tops," he said.

The actual number - according to the BBC, was about 329,000 over 18 months. The unnamed, unsubstantiated tabloid estimate was out by a factor of 7. The Government estimate was out by a factor of about 20. What a pity the CRE don't see fit to share those "unsubstantiated claims" with us.

It Gets Worse ....

I missed this - the reason why we've lost large numbers of foreign criminals. It's our old friend "management by target".

"The Home Office instructed immigration officers not to deport foreign convicts because of fears that they would claim asylum, a senior Whitehall insider has alleged. The policy was implemented more than two years ago as part of a wider, undisclosed strategy to reduce asylum claims so that the Home Office could meet Tony Blair’s target of driving down the number of applicants for refugee status.

This undermines claims by Blair and Charles Clarke, the home secretary, that a simple breakdown of communication between immigration and prison service officials was to blame for the fiasco."

So Blair's asylum promises of 2004, apparently so effective, are actually being produced like this. Reading councillor (now an MP) Robert Wilson went out on patrol with Thames Valley Police.

"Wilson, a councillor at the time, was stunned by what he saw that Saturday night. “The vast majority of people being picked up and processed by Thames Valley Police were not in the UK legally,” recalled Wilson. “That surprised and shocked me.”

At the time, police avoided his questions on the numbers of foreign nationals being arrested by saying they did not keep such statistics. Most of the drug-related crime in the area, Wilson was assured privately by officers, was being carried out by foreign gangs. He now claims police officers in any major town in England will have a similar story to tell."

"When he was elected to parliament as a Conservative MP for Reading East last year, Wilson pursued the issue with more vigour and more authority. In the course of investigating the level of foreign criminality in his constituency, the MP drew out comments from senior police officers and immigration officials. Their testimony has convinced him the Home Office is turning a blind eye to foreign criminals for an easier sweep-up of law-abiding individuals and families who have had their applications for asylum rejected."

Hence the Samina Altafs and Sarah Hatas of this world. It's just less hassle to get a mum and two kids on a plane than to sort out criminals.

“The immigration service has been told to pick the low-hanging fruit,” says the MP. “They have turned their back on anybody who could cause the least bit of difficulty.”

It makes a kind of perverted sense, I suppose. For thirty years now law-abiding natives have been left to fend for themselves while the people who make their lives a misery have had state funds, lawyers, social workers and safari holidays chucked at them. It seems only fair, and in keeping with previous policy, that the least offensive, and most law-abiding illegal immigrants should get the 5 a.m. knock on the door, while the real bad boys go untouched.

By now Wilson had made enough waves to generate a flow of information towards him. In a letter to the MP, one senior immigration official, who remains anonymous, confirmed that immigration officers were forbidden from going on police operations or dealing with immigration offenders arrested by the police unless they were failed asylum seekers.

The immigration service officer wrote that his colleagues’ hands were tied by orders to specifically target failed asylum seekers.

“Immigration service personnel are under instruction not to get involved in assisting the police with offenders unless they happen to be failed asylum seekers,” wrote the officer. “This is because these offenders are likely to claim asylum and tip the scales the wrong way. Thus are the figures massaged.”

“Reading is no different from any other town or city in the UK, every economic hub will have the same problems as we do,” said Wilson.

“The only difference is that I have uncovered police and immigration officers who are willing to give me the information that shows it is illegal foreign nationals who are involved in most of the criminality here.

“The police have done me that service because they fear for the public and the lives of their officers.”

Immigration - Don't Know, Don't Care

I think the full evidence will be worth a read when it turns up on the Parliament website. Notice in the BBC report the appearance of a new panacea.

"Mr Roberts said he could "understand the public's frustration" but the system would be tightened up when new "electronic borders" came into effect."

Electronic borders, eh ? The ID card will save us all !

Times - "The committee was told by the chief economist at the Department for Work and Pensions that between 200,000 and 300,000 national insurance numbers were issued each year to foreigners and that immigration checks were carried out on only 2 per cent."

BBC - "A senior immigration official has told MPs he did not "have the faintest idea" how many illegal immigrants there were in the UK.
David Roberts, of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND), added there was little point trying to hunt individuals who overstayed their visas."

Telegraph - "In the past, immigration officers went to addresses given by asylum seekers or potential illegal immigrants only to find they were not there."

"The committee questioned other officials over the distribution of National Insurance numbers to foreign nationals. These are used by people who have no right to work in this country to prove they are eligible to do so.

Jonathan Portes, the Department for Work and Pensions chief economist, said NI numbers were not meant to prove entitlement to work, so Jobcentre staff issuing them made no checks about an applicants' immigration status.

Again, the MPs were nonplussed. Mr Denham said: "Given that there is very limited enforcement, would it not be sensible not to issue NI numbers to people who are not legally in the country?"

Mr Winnick said: "Has that thought never occurred to you? Millions will think it the most sensible thing to do."

But Mr Portes said it was the task of the Jobcentre interviewer to establish that the applicant was who they said they were. "It is not about ascertaining whether someone is legally in the country or has the right to work."

At another hearing, Sir Gus O'Donnell, the head of the Civil Service, said the release of foreign prisoners with no attempt to deport them was unlikely to result in the dismissal of any officials."