Peter Hitchens — Daily Mail April 22, 2018
I am deeply grateful every day for my late father’s wise foresight, one autumn day in 1959, in registering my birth with the British authorities, helped by the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Command, which I somehow suspect no longer exists.
Otherwise, I might now be in some trouble. For I was born in the colonies, specifically in Malta GC – which now disowns me as an imperialist, and would only give me a passport in return for a huge pile of money.
My birth, surrounded by anxiously praying nuns, was registered by a Valletta police sergeant on a huge form the size of a pillowcase which I once had but which went missing during one of my many moves. And my arrival in Britain a year or so later as a squalling infant was not, as far as I know, recorded anywhere.
Who knows what sort of hole I might have fallen into, at the hands of the modern British state, if my father had not bothered?
Cruel, rigid bureaucracy has replaced common sense in this country. This is the real lesson of the wretched treatment of longstanding British subjects who have been deprived of medical service, threatened with deportation and generally destroyed and trampled on by callous officials.
How did this happen? By a strange paradox, it happened because of the crazy policy of uncontrolled mass immigration begun under the Blair government and continued by David Cameron.
Blair and Cameron wanted this mass migration. Blair and his Eurocommunist sponsors wanted to erase Britain’s culture, history and traditions. Cameron couldn’t have cared less about Britain, but he saw the easy economic advantages of a low-wage economy kept going by ultra-cheap imported labour.
But they grasped it was unpopular, so they pretended to be against it. From this came the ‘hostile environment’, supposedly directed against illegal migrants, introduced by the charming and likeable Alan Johnson, who may not be quite as nice as he looks.
Later on, it led to Theresa May’s shameful and embarrassing ‘Go Home’ lorries trundling around London, a crude and cheap pretence at toughness that fooled almost nobody at all.
Both these measures were in fact gestures of contempt towards Middle Britain. They were a London liberal’s idea of what might please the despised voters. Because that elite think the rest of us are all intolerant, bigoted Nazis.
Actually, British people are, in general, immensely kind and tolerant towards newcomers. I think this is because they have felt so safe for so long, unlike most peoples who have to endure invasion and occupation every few generations.
In all my travels around the world, I have yet to find a country which has made a greater effort to integrate, or succeeded better. Those nice civilised continentals, especially in the Netherlands and France, have race problems far worse than anything we have experienced.
And most of us now regard the Windrush generation, from our former colonies in the Caribbean, as something pretty close to family. Hence the universal disgust at the discovery that such people and their children have been icily deprived of the most basic freedoms and of entitlements they have earned by long years of working and taxpaying.
They came to a Britain that still valued its liberties, that still understood that its long island history was an advantage. It was because it was difficult to get here, for migrants and invaders alike, that we had the miraculous freedom from bureaucracy and intrusion that I still remember.
Nobody bothered you if you obeyed the law. You didn’t have to register with the authorities, show identity papers to stay in a hotel, let alone to get or keep a job.
But that was not to last. It is now 18 years since a secret report was circulated among the commissars of the Blair government, with special precautions taken to stop it reaching the media. It was rashly revealed by one of those commissars, Andrew Neather, a few years later.
In a 2009 article laced with scorn for working-class people worried about the immigration revolution, he rejoiced at the new multitudes of cheap servants for types like him, and sneered at the British poor as ‘fascists’, saying: ‘The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive.
‘It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners – although frankly, it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them. Their place certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley – fascist au pair, anyone?’
Comrade Neather disclosed that the published version of Labour’s plan had been censored, revealing ‘the 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.
‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.’
This is the reality of New Labour, a coterie of Eurocommunists secretly planning to change the country beyond recognition while emitting cosy, dishonest slogans about education and crime to fool the masses. Later they would pretend to be ‘tough’.
The trouble was that this ‘toughness’ had real effects on real lives. We have, as New Labour secretly planned, become a different country and a much less free and fair one.