Immigration Minister Goes ‘Bononkers’ on the Today Programme

Civitas, 23 February 2010

Last October, Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter to several government ministers, claimed in a newspaper article that, in 2000, the present government deliberately sought to increase foreign immigration, partly out of a belief that it would have beneficial economic consequences, and partly to neutralise Conservative concerns about the adverse negative impact foreign immigration was having on social cohesion and national identity.

Although Neather did not spell out that second motive in any detail, what he seemed to be suggesting was that Labour hoped that, by so vastly increasing the number of foreign immigrants, the country would become so diverse that the Conservatives would be obliged to accept multiculturalism, a public policy whose implementation clearly favoured Labour’s natural constituency of public sector workers.

Despite the vast increase in foreign immigration that has taken place in the last decade, the present government has vociferously denied that it ever sought to increase foreign immigration, let alone that it was engaged in any conspiracy to promote diversity and multiculturalism by means of it.

At the heart of the issue as to whether there was such a conspiracy are revisions made to a draft of a policy document drawn up by the then Home Office Economics and Resource Analysis Unit and the Cabinet Office in 2000, and published in September 2001 under the title, Migration: an economic and social analysis.  Neather maintained that certain potentially very controversial elements and phrases in the draft were deliberately removed from the final published version to conceal Labour’s true intentions from the public.  As Neather put it:

‘Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite [immigration minister Barbara] Roche’s keenness to… be upfront [about the desirability of a loosening of immigration controls], there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what  increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote….

‘Ministers wouldn’t talk about it [immigration]… while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society. it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.’

Well, however shy government ministers might once have been to talk publicly about the issue of immigration, they are no longer reluctant to do so, now that it would appear recent increased foreign immigration has alienated so many core Labour voters and driven them into the arms of the BNP.

A Freedom of Information Act enquiry recently forced the government to publish an earlier draft of the 2001 report. This draft does indeed show that potentially embarrassing themes and phrases were excised from it. Above all, reference was deleted to any but alleged economic benefits of immigration.  Deleted was all mention of ‘the contribution of migration to the Government’s… social objectives’. [para 3 of the Executive Draft Summary].

Equally omitted from the final version was the assertion contained in the just published draft that: ‘Migrants’ impacts on congestion  and other externalities… may be important’. So was the denial to be found in the draft that migrants are ‘disproportionately involved in crime’, just possibly because they seemingly are.

Publication of the redacted report has re-awoken media interest in whether there was a government conspiracy ten years ago to increase foreign immigration into Britain.

The government persists in denying that there was and this morning on the Today programme immigration minister Phil Woolas went into bat on its behalf against his Conservative shadow, Chris Grayling.

It is worth listening to their four minute exchange, not least for the very misleading way in which the BBC presenter framed the debate. He claimed that the entire report had been suppressed, which it had not been, a claim that neither Woolas nor Grayling sought to challenge.

Most importantly, however, is the very implausible explanation Woolas gave of why the just published draft was amended in the manner in which it was. He stated:

‘The things that were taken out were taken out because the English was sloppy and the research document wasn’t accepted and the document was entirely redacted by officials.’

What is so bizarre about that statement is that the sentences and phrases deleted from the executive summary of the just published draft were not at all ungrammatical or any more badly written than the rest of the document. They were merely just potentially more revealing and therefore embarrassing for the government.

Woolas capped that claim by asserting of the report that: ‘if you read it, it shows the government didn’t do precisely what they were accused of at the time.’

This statement is less than entirely unambiguous. However, it is manifestly false, if by it Woolas had been intending to deny that the draft or the finally published report shows the government had not done what it is now being accused of having covertly sought to do — namely, to create mass foreign immigration. Their various immigration policies certainly did have that effect, whether or not that had been their intention, covert or overt.

As if to betray the fact that even Phil Woolas could not quite believe his own denial that this had been the government’s wish, he ended his interview by committing a parapraxis which any self-respecting Freudian analyst would have little difficulty in interpreting as a sign  that he truly believed otherwise. He said:

‘It is not true that there was an attempt to open the doors…. The Acts of Parliament [passed by Labour during the last decade] have been trying to control the global increase in immigration and what the Right are really worried about is that we’ve now done that, with the figures coming down, the new points-based system, the electronic borders; and the Right can’t stand the idea that Labour is on top of immigration, and that’s why they’re going bononkers just before the general election.’

‘Bononkers’, eh? That nonsense word seems to be a condensation of two others which are not nonsense: ‘Bonkers’ and ‘No’:

Could Woolas’ utterance be a tacit admission on his part that the Tories are not bonkers in having claimed that there was a Labour conspiracy to engineer mass immigration?

After all, what else is ‘bononkers’ but an instance of just that ‘sloppy English’ which, earlier in his interview, Woolas had suggested should rightly be disregarded. So, perhaps, we should disregard his denial of Conservative claims that there was a Labour conspiracy to increase foreign immigration, as we should his claim that Labour has now got immigration under control. For recent press reports continue to suggest very much the opposite.