Daily Mail, December 4 2002

The shadow of Joseph McCarthy now stalks the Palace of Westminster. The late, unlamented American senator lent his name to the infamous anti-communist witch-hunt, in which many innocent individuals had their reputations viciously smeared and lives wrecked as a result.

But now we are seeing disturbing signs of a McCarthyism of the left. Under the protection of parliamentary privilege, the Home Secretary made an astonishing accusation against the Times journalist Anthony Browne. In Monday’s debate over his proposal to accept 1200 asylum seekers from Sangatte, David Blunkett claimed that Mr Browne’s articles were ‘bordering on fascism’.

Anyone unfamiliar with Mr Browne’s work, which has been carried in the Mail, would surely conclude from this that he should be treated as a pariah. After all, isn’t fascism one of the most odious of all doctrines, a violent repudiation of democracy associated with oppression, persecution and genocide?

But nothing he has written could remotely be considered akin to such a repugnant creed. All he has done is to present -- in a series of articles and a book for the think-tank Civitas -- facts and figures about immigration which reveal the frightening impact of current immigration policy, and expose the unmitigated hypocrisy of those who argue in its favour.

Using official statistics and logical analysis, he blows an enormous hole in virtually every argument used to support mass immigration. As he has asked, why should a densely crowded island, with four million people who want to work but who are not working, need a rate of immigration that will quadruple population growth, cripple already desperately overstretched public services and create parallel societies?

He has also written that most of the alarming increase in HIV has been caused not by gay people but by immigrants from Africa – a fact which he says has been stifled by political cowardice.

One does not have to agree with every aspect of his analysis to realise that he has helped provoke a debate that has been all but stifled by the fear of precisely the kind of accusation that has now been made against him. To say he borders on fascism is a quite astonishing and disgraceful smear, and a gross abuse of Parliament.

But smears don’t stop at Anthony Browne. In the same debate, Mr Blunkett abused the Tories as a ‘rabble’ who would back the far-right to scare people into believing that ‘managed migration’ was the same as ‘clandestine asylum seeking’.

Under the jargon, this was as misleading as it was offensive. The 1200 from Sangatte aren’t ‘managed’ migrants. They’re being allowed in only because Mr Blunkett has failed to ‘manage’ his negotiations with the French, and is using work permits cynically to conceal the fact that not one of these migrants is entitled to come here.

To accuse the Tories of backing the ‘far right’ was to top this ignominy with a collective slander, provoking Michael Howard -- who represents Folkestone, which has borne the brunt of the Sangatte debacle, and who is himself a Jew -- to understandable rage.

Nor do the smears stop there. Sir Andrew Green, founder of the think-tank Migrationwatch which has made a significant impact in a very short space of time, is also getting the treatment.

Sir Andrew, a former distinguished ambassador, founded Migrationwatch because he was horrified that a policy of mass immigration had effectively been introduced with no public debate whatsoever – indeed, the public was unaware it was happening. Through diligent use of official statistics, which showed that at current rates Britain was allowing in the equivalent of a city the size of Cambridge every five years, Sir Andrew alerted people to facts which had been suppressed.

For that, he and Migrationwatch have inevitably been labelled ‘right-wing’. The Observer, which tried very hard last weekend to smear him, was so short of ammunition that it resorted to damning him by association as a ‘close friend of disgraced former minister Jonathan Aitken’.

It also tried to damage his collaborator, the distinguished demographer Professor David Coleman, whom it labelled ‘right-wing’ because he had previously advised Tory ministers. But Professor Coleman happens to be the most eminent demographer in the country precisely because of his work’s dispassionate rigour and freedom from political bias.

Notably, the facts and figures produced by Migrationwatch or Anthony Browne are not contested. Their opponents resort instead to the tactics of smear, innuendo and vilification – the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt.

The reason the left cannot deal with immigration honestly and effectively is rooted in a profound shift in its ideology. With the collapse of communism, the left’s whole focus changed. It could no longer be economics, since capitalism had so comprehensively routed its enemies.

So the attack on western society moved instead into issues of personal identity, ethnicity, race and nation. The very idea of defending a culture and traditions that go back centuries became damned as imperialist and illegitimate. The only permitted model for society was multiculturalism. So anyone arguing against the transformation of our culture through mass immigration had to be racist.

And because the left claims the moral high ground, anyone else must be -- by definition – both right-wing and evil. So ‘right wing’ has become the label to hang round the necks of anyone who dares disagree.

It has become code for ‘no decent people should have anything to do with this’. It is a smear. It is the McCarthyism of our political élites.

As a tactic designed to shut down public debate, it has had a good deal of success. For we have reached a situation where ordinary, decent people have become not only too frightened to say what they think, but even to think it for fear of believing themselves to be racist.

Certainly, there are people who hold prejudiced, unpleasant and dangerous views about immigrants and other minorities. But there are also thousands of liberal, tolerant people who have found that their legitimate concern that their culture cannot survive the unrestricted migration of the poor of the world is branded uncivilised.

These illiberal – even totalitarian – instincts of the left aim to stop the truth being told. The truth is that the government has lost control of our borders. The truth is that migrants are targeting Britain because this is the one country in the world which will lose them. The truth is that asylum is being abused.

Immigration has done this country a great deal of good. But Britain is not a country of immigrants. It has had a settled culture for a thousand years, and until recently the number of immigrants was minute. Immigration only works to a society’s benefit if it is managed at a rate which allows the indigenous culture to assimilate the newcomers.

It is truly disgusting to smear those who voice such concerns as ‘anti-immigrant’. There are plenty of black, Asian and other minority Britons who are appalled by the immigration shambles, both because they value what is being lost and because they fear the inevitable backlash.

The British National Party is making alarming progress. That’s the real fascism, Mr Blunkett – and it is your policy, not the work of assiduous journalists, which is now raising that horrific spectre once again.

Posted by admin at December 4, 2002