Andrew Neather of the Evening Standard was — and, for all I know, still is —
a decent man. Although he worked as a speech writer for Jack Straw around the turn of the millennium, by the time I knew him he in the late 2000s, he had sensibly decided that bicycling was more
interesting than politics. I could never have imagined him at the centre of a political controversy until 2009, when Neather wrote an article that sparked a conspiracy theory. As Joe Murphy, the
Standard’s political editor, reported a week later:
“Pressure was growing today for an independent inquiry into claims that immigration was encouraged by Labour for political gain. It followed the charge by a former Government adviser that a policy change to welcome economic migrants was partly designed to wrongfoot Conservative opponents of immigration. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair and Home Office adviser, revealed in last week’s Standard that in confidential meetings ministers gave the impression they wanted to encourage multiculturalism for partisan reasons, as well as the stated aim of helping businesses fill vacancies in the booming economy. Mr Neather, now the Standard’s Comment editor, wrote: ‘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was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to run the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.'”
Well, you can imagine how fantasists seized on what they inevitably called “Neathergate”. Labour was deliberately flooding the country with immigrants to boost its electoral chances; undermining Britishness and imposing alien cultures on the subject peoples of these islands just to wrong foot the Conservative opposition. The right wing press and blogosphere went wild with delighted fury. The Standard had confirmed their worst suspicions.
I spoke to Neather at the time and he said words to the effect that the people who found evidence of a plot in his piece were nuts. He told his old boss Jack Straw that his “views have been twisted out of all recognition”. Straw replied in the Standard:
“I read the original stories, and more comment on it yesterday, with incredulity, since they are the reverse of the truth. I spent my time as Home Secretary seeking better to control immigration, by new laws and more effective administration. My 1998 Immigration and Asylum Bill was not heralded by anyone as an ‘open door’ policy, because it was the opposite. I was damned by many on the Left for my pains.”
I can assure you that Straw was telling the truth because I was one of those on the Left who damned him for building a system which closed the airports to genuine refugees as well as bogus asylum seekers. Whatever happened later in the decade, the policy when Neather worked for him was to clampdown hard. But Straw also knew that whatever he said, the damage had been done. “Myths can be halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on,” he sighed, and no more so than in the age of the Web. There was enough in the original piece to feed paranoid delusions. I don’t know how it got there, but as someone who once worked for the Standard, and was mightily relieved when we parted company, I can say that when presented with a piece of writing its old bosses had the unfortunate habit of — how to put this politely? — throwing one too many eggs into the pudding bowl.
The excellent journalists on the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang are reporting everything they can find about Anders Behring, the extreme rightist accused of massacring their countrymen and women. Here courtesy of the anti-fascist site Harry’s Place is an account from VG of Behring raving that the British Labour party sought to annihilate Europeans with its multicultural policies. (Harry’s Place resisted the temptation to tidy up the English Google Translate produced because it thought that the document was too important to fiddle with.) Behring wrote:
“Labour adviser said the Government opened up the UK borders Mostly to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration. This proves therefore that some of the motivation for mass immigration is not based on humanism (cloak) but more due. direct hatred of people with conservative values as us, the cultural conservatives. A large part of them hate all European and want to destroy it through multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is an anti-European hate ideology designed to destroy a European culture / traditions, identity, Christianity and the Nations sovereignty. The goal is a utopian Marxist superstate. To accomplish this, the first all European annihilated. […] Has anyone tried to make an estimate of our opponent’s intentions? This will be relevant to a possible future Nurnbergprosess. It is of course difficult to prove this, because almost everyone uses kulturmarxister humanistic tire alibis.”
Because of a small and stupid controversy in Britain two years ago, Behring thought that the Labour Party was out to destroy Europe via mass immigration. I’m sure if he had not had that fantasy in his mind, he would have found another one. But, still, the story reminds us to never ignore the conspiratorial screams that echo around the madhouse of the Web, or believe that they do not need to be answered roughly and with hard arguments. Every now and again, they kill.
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