Secret Labour plan to increase immigration said public's opposition was 'racist'

Ministers were accused today of drawing up secret plans to increase immigration - and branding opponents of the controversial scheme 'racist'.

A previously unseen joint Cabinet Office and Home Office report called for increases in foreign workers to meet the Government's 'economic and social objectives'. But it also stated that the public would be opposed to the shift because of 'racism' and urged ministers to try to alter public attitudes towards immigrants.

The document, which was written in July 2000 and released under the Freedom of Information Act, outlined plans for a step change in the number of both high and low skilled migrants. A draft version of the report emerged last week, but the full copy was finally released today.
In it, the authors warned: 'Policy development is constrained by public opinion and the current tone of public debate.'

'It is correct that public opinion favours relatively restrictive policies on immigration.'
Sections advising ministers to adopt a 'clear strategy for public opinion and public debate' to change views were removed from the published version.

Critics said the document showed ministers 'deliberately rode roughshod' over the public.
There was outrage last year after Andrew Neather, a former Labour speechwriter, revealed in a newspaper column that the loosening of controls in the early 2000s was part of a deliberate political agenda.

The 'immigration boom' of the last decade was engineered in part to change society by making it more multicultural, he said.

Mr Neather, who worked for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett and saw the early versions of the report, said senior politicians were nervous about publicising the policy because they feared public reaction.

The report states baldly that public opposition to immigration was 'closely correlated with racism'. Exposing the public to migrants would make them less hostile, it said. 'A new approach to migration policy ... would need to be not only accompanied by, but underpinned by, a clear strategy for public opinion and public debate.

'Government has tended to assume that negative public opinion on migration is a given that is beyond its control. In fact, research (and common sense) suggests that past governments have had a significant influence on public opinion...' On other issues, government has been strategic and proactive in addressing public opinion, it could do so on migration.

Andrew Neather revealed in a newspaper column that the loosening of controls in the early 2000s was part of a deliberate political agenda

'Recent research shows that anti-immigrant sentiment is closely correlated with racism rather than economic motives,' the authors wrote.

'Education and people's personal exposure to migrants make them less likely to be anti-migrant. The most negative attitudes are found among those who have relatively little direct contact with migrants, but see them as a threat.'

The report said immigration was rising sharply because of global economic forces but said it was all but pointless trying to prevent large numbers of new arrivals coming for work. It stated: 'Trying to halt or reverse market driven migration will be very difficult (perhaps impossible) and economically damaging.' Trying to stop low skilled workers was 'neither an available nor a desirable policy choice' because of 'market forces'.

The report went through numerous drafts during late 2000. One version was entitled Going with the Flow: Managing Migration in the 21st Century. But by the time it was published in early 2001, the document had become a bland endorsement of the economic benefits of immigration. Entire sections were removed, including all references to public opposition.

Instead it said: 'Social research shows that the majority consistently regards immigration as having a positive effect on British culture. This is true even for many of those who favour a more restrictive attitude to immigration controls.'

References to migration opening up 'new opportunities' for organised crime were also expunged.

The final report stated: 'There is little data specifically for migrants on such indexes of social exclusion as ... crime.'

Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary from 1997 until 2001, has dismissed Mr Neather's claims, saying they were 'just untrue'.

A fortnight ago current Home Secretary Alan Johnson said the suggestion of an open door immigration policy was 'mythical'. But Sir Andrew Green, chairman of pressure group Migrationwatch UK, said: 'This report confirms that ministers deliberately rode roughshod over public opinion in adopting a policy of mass immigration.

'They concealed their real intentions in the hope that they would benefit from the immigrant vote without losing their working class supporters.

'They are now paying the price.'

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: 'The Government has simply not been telling the truth about its policies on immigration. More and more evidence is now emerging to show that they deliberately planned a big jump in immigration for their own political purposes. Now they are trying to rewrite history to pretend those decisions never happened. Their conduct over all of this has been a complete disgrace.'
Daily Mail

Immigration: A plan to alter the nations soul

So now we know what Labour's immigration policy was really about. The "open door" was not simply held ajar in order to admit a fresh workforce that would help to fill gaps in the growing economy. Nor was it just a gesture of hospitality and goodwill to those who were fleeing from repressive or inhospitable regimes in order to seek a better life. Both of those aims would have been credible – if controversial and not thought-through in all their consequences. And so would the longer-term view that dynamic, cosmopolitan societies are generally healthier and more productive than in-bred, isolated ones, or that immigrants who tend to be ambitious for themselves and their families could help to counter the passivity and defeatism that tend to be endemic in the British class system.

But as it turns out, the policy was motivated by something far more radical and fundamental than any of this. The full text of the draft policy paper composed in 2000 by a Home Office research unit – the gist of which had already been made public by a former Labour adviser – was released last week under Freedom of Information rules. Properly understood, it is political dynamite. What it states quite unequivocally was that mass immigration was being encouraged at least as much for "social objectives" as for economic ones. Migration was intended specifically to alter the demographic and cultural pattern of the country: to produce by force majeure the changes in attitude that the Labour government saw itself as representing.

Tony Blair's "forces of conservatism" speech; his improbable presentation of Britain as a "young country"; the advocacy of a multicultural society which would have to reassess its own history, replacing traditional pride with inherited guilt: all of this could be facilitated by a large influx of migrants whose presence in the population would require the wholesale deconstruction of the country's sense of its own identity.

This may all sound rather far-fetched now, but try to recall just how much hubris the New Labour tide brought with it in the beginning: the contempt for history and the Year Zero arrogance with which they set about "modernising" the nation's institutions. It was, in this respect, a prime example of the new direction which Left-wing parties were forced to take in the wake of Marxism's collapse. Having lost the great economic argument of the 20th century, the Left had to switch its focus to society itself: if humanity could not be transformed through the redistribution of wealth and the socialist command economy, then it would have to be transfigured by altering social relations.

The object of the exercise was still to produce, in the words of an old Left-wing protest song, a "new world" based on a "new man". But now the new man (sorry, "person") would be formed not by changes in the power of capital or the ownership of the means of production, but in cultural attitudes and behaviour. The revolution now had to be confined to what went on in people's heads: to their values, their assumptions and their reactions to each other.

The phrase "altering consciousness", which had once meant awakening the proletariat to its own economic enslavement, now referred to raising awareness of social injustices, such as intolerance of cultural differences, social inequality, or discrimination against minorities. But the subtext was always self-examination and personal guilt: the indigenous Briton must be trained (literally, by the education system) always to question the acceptability of his own attitudes, to cast doubt on his own motives, to condemn his own national identity and history, to accept the blame even for the misbehaviour of new migrants – whose conduct could only be a reflection of the unfortunate way they were treated by the host population.

Included in this programme for the newly constituted British psyche was a whole package of subliminal assumptions, which were adapted from the Old Left stable: international solidarity rather than national sovereignty, collective values rather than personal conscience, and "social equality" rather than individual achievement. It was a peculiarity of New Labour's vanity that it actually tried to persuade the country that, under the miraculous Blair dispensation, it could have both sides of these dualities at the same time. But the full consequences of the new country that it envisaged, and the role that immigration was to play in the creation of it, broke the most basic rule of the democratic process: the electorate was never told it was voting for that.

The goal was a social revolution abetted by the influx of a huge variety of diverse cultures, which would provide both the need and the pretext for reshaping British life. It may have been relatively new (at least in Britain) as a specific political policy, but it was much of a piece with the conventional objective of Left-wing political movements, which is to transform human nature.

When you decide whether to give your support to a party of the Left or of the Right, you are actually making a judgment about what you think politics is for. If you believe that it is the function of government to alter or determine people's perceptions and responses – their innermost feelings about themselves and others – then you will probably opt for the Left. If you take the view that the state should concern itself only with behaviour – with what people do, especially insofar as it affects other people, rather than what they think or feel – then you will be more likely to veer to the Right. So this is really a question of whether you want politics to be concerned with what goes on in people's heads as much as with events in the objective world.

But of course, at least since the 1960s, when "raising consciousness" became the refrain of every group that sought change in any sphere, almost all parties have had to talk this way to some extent. It has become part of the politician's acknowledged brief to suggest ways in which the internal lives and attitudes of voters can be influenced or directed. There is scarcely a party leader now who would dare to say that these matters are none of his (or any government's) business.

Almost no one seems prepared to discuss the obvious danger: that if politics becomes a replacement for religion by taking upon itself the responsibility for transfiguring human nature then politicians, of all people, become the prophets and the priests. Just at the moment, I can't think of a more absurd idea.

Janet Daley - Daily Telegraph