The public know how these attacks happen — unlike the politicians

04 July 2007

Rod Liddle says that the car-bomb plot was the predictable consequence of multiculturalism, lax immigration, mad human rights laws and neocon aggression. Shame the government can’t see this

We are told these sorts of things in order to stop us coming to unpalatable conclusions, because the government still clings, ever more precariously, to the vestigial tail of that discredited ideology, multiculturalism. Take, for example, the issue of immigration. The aspirant, useless bombers who missed their targets at Glasgow and London came here from Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. A recent Mori opinion poll commissioned by the government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion showed that almost 70 per cent of British people thought that we had let far too many immigrants into the country. This figure, incidentally, included almost half of all black and Asian British citizens polled. It was a remarkable poll not so much for its statistics, however, as for the strange response to those statistics. The establishment — the government, the BBC, the race charities and so on — professed themselves very worried and wondered what on earth should be done. A task force charged with dampening down trouble in the immigration hotspots, maybe? A few more lessons in English for the incomers and maybe fewer translators? But at no point did any of the powers that be suggest the one thing which an overwhelming majority of those polled wished for: an end to immigration. A moratorium. Or, at the least, an influx which was vastly reduced and better regulated.

This suggestion, implicitly supported by almost 70 per cent of those questioned and opposed by only ten per cent, was not even considered; it simply didn’t figure on the radar. And you begin to understand why this might be when you remember that in 2003 the then Home Secretary David Blunkett insisted that he saw nothing at all wrong with unlimited immigration. And last year the director of enforcement and removals at Immigration and Nationality admitted that he hadn’t ‘the faintest idea’ how many illegal asylum seekers there were running around the country, getting up to mischief or otherwise. The government doesn’t think that immigration matters; the public does. And the public’s disaffection for mass immigration is not a reflexive racism and insularity, as the government and the BBC would seem to believe, but a worry based squarely upon the observable effects.