Broken Vows

Tom Bower

London: Faber & Faber, 2016

Few political indiscretions in Britain have had the effect of the Andrew Neather leak of six years ago. The former speech writer for Tony Blair recalled a speech on immigration he had worked on and wrote:

Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. 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was intended—even if this wasn’t its main purpose—to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.

The effects of this slip still reverberate today. Only now as we look back only eighteen years can we really discern the outline of something that had long been suspected—that there was a hostile secret agenda to impose multiculturalism on Britain and to transform the country beyond recognition.

More evidence for this has been gathered in a new book by journalist Tom Bower titled Broken Vows. Bower has interviewed 200 members of Blair’s administrations including the civil servants closest to immigration decision making. The sheer scale of the deception takes the breath away. Blair is said to have told ministers and officials: “Don’t mention the advantages of immigration in public because they won’t even want that.”

But the real significance of this book is not that there are any explosive documents or indiscretions but that it has been written at all. For in the nineteen years since Blair came to power the entire issue has been submerged under a blanket of silence. The media has done its best to look the other way and has shied away from analyzing the roots of a mass immigration policy imposed on a totally unwilling population. Like family incest, Blair’s secret mass immigration policy is the establishment’s guilty secret.

The story begins in 1996 with the previous Conservative administration that was forced to act over growing public anger that only five per cent of asylum seeker immigrants were legitimate. So the Conservatives passed an Immigration Act which tightened the rules and created penalties for employers who employed unrecognized asylum seekers. This had an almost immediate effect and the number of applicants fell from 43,000 to 29,000 in 1996 and was to eventually to drop to below 20,000.

When Tony Blair’s Labour Party came to power in May, 1997, it seemed that a priority was to dismantle as much of the previous year’s immigration act as fast as possible, and as discreetly as possible. The new Home Secretary Jack Straw, insisted all asylum applicants were fleeing oppression and to say otherwise was “racist.” His most energetic parliamentary supporter was a Labour MP colleague called Gerald Kaufman.

One of the first things Straw did was to abolish a rule in which he had a special interest. Many of his Pakistani constituents from his Bolton constituency claimed they wanted to fly in prospective brides from their homeland.

Until 1997, the “primary purpose rule” imposed a requirement that the applicant should show “that the marriage was not entered into primarily to obtain admission to the United Kingdom.” This was a major ground for refusing applications and dismissing appeals. Almost immediately, the new Home Secretary abolished the rule and cases of immigration for marriage purposes almost immediately shot up.

In vain, civil servants pointed out that these arranged families were largely immigration scams. Muslim families had a vested interest in getting their daughters married to someone in Britain—so that the entire extended family could follow on. Straw was just not interested in the arguments against this, and so began a flood of non-English speaking illiterates. In 1997 Jack Straw told officials that only 10,000 foreigners would take advantage of the removal of the primary purpose rule. In fact over 150,000 arrived in 1998. (By the end of Labour’s reign more than 550,000 arrivals were arriving annually from Asia, Africa and the Americas and even more from the rest of the EU.)

The centerpiece of Labour’s legislation during this period was the passing of the Human Rights Act of 1998 which was to make it immeasurably more difficult to remove asylum seekers.

Labour’s new laws created a vast “gravy train” for lawyers. Asylum seekers were rehearsed to conceal the circumstances of their origins. The chaos might have been a headache for immigration officers but it was a bonanza for the legal profession because all their bills were paid by the taxpayer. This booming human rights industry was epitomized by the law firm of Matrix Chambers launched by Tony Blair’s QC wife Cherie Booth.

Eventually Blair and Straw were to ensure that, unlike in other countries, asylum applicants would qualify for the full range of benefits including welfare, free health care, and subsidized housing, thus ensuring that Britain become a honeypot for immigrants. Bower notes that in one year 350,000 asylum seekers were repackaged as economic migrants to avoid public outrage. The government secretly gave the go-ahead for 150,000 work permits, the author added, and most of the recipients, including the unskilled, went on to become UK citizens.

Straw even extended the list of countries whose citizens could be considered for asylum status to include states like Nigeria which, while not pleasant, was not at war or in an emergency. Any concern about bogus claimants were waved aside as racism. Straw even removed an English language requirement for nationalization.

The immigration laws were relaxed yet again in 1999. Straw’s Home Office instructed that in cases where asylum seekers had “lost” their documents to conceal their origins, they were invariably to be given the benefit of the doubt. When a court case decided that even failed asylum seekers could not be denied housing welfare and free health care, the civil servants fully expected the government would fight the ruling. Instead Straw decided to let it go.

In 2004 Britain lifted restrictions on immigrants coming from Eastern Europe and again there was a huge influx. The government predicted only 13,000 would come and in fact the final intake was well over a million. And this was when other EU countries were exercising their option not to take such immigrants for five years!

But at a time when billions of pounds were being diverted into the public sector, the civil servants in charge of immigration were being mysteriously starved of resources and seeing their numbers sharply cut. Thousands of immigration officer’s posts were removed over this period.

In Tony Blair’s autobiography he claimed that his government was the victim of unforeseen events,[1] but as Tom Bower makes clear, it was a deliberate policy of maximizing immigration. Blair’s interest was solely limited to public perception and how it might affect the next election—not the asylum seeker influx itself.

With the Home Secretary Jack Straw it was also a blatantly two-faced approach. In private Straw showed no concern about the rocketing numbers, but for media consumption and before the House of Commons he said he favored strong controls.

As the arrivals were dispersed to housing estates across the country, the local communities protested that blocks of flats and even streets had become foreign territory. In 2001 race riots exploded between Whites and Pakistanis on the streets of Oldham and the police clamped down hard on White resistance while the BBC played down the cause of White complaints.

Then Blair announced that more students would be allowed into Britain. Civil service warnings that that this would lead to a flood of bogus students and sham language schools were again brushed away. More students, he said, would be good for Britain’s economy.

There were cosmetic controls against bogus marriages, and lorry drivers caught a tiny number of illegal immigrants, but it was all part of a campaign of spin. These generated lots of headlines in local newspapers, but were miniscule compared to the huge floods of asylum seekers arriving through conventional routes.

What interested Tony Blair more was presentation. So, to give the new policy a veneer of respectability, he had drafted in a Jewish academic called Jonathan Portes to produce a report justifying the policy. In the report, Portes emphasized the economic benefits of migration unreservedly. Migrants, he wrote, were not a burden on the public purse but increased the government’s income through taxation.

Although his report was published in 2001, Portes left out the huge flood that had begun when Labour began to dismantle controls. Quite brazenly, he wrote that most migrants were White—omitting the 510,000 immigrants who arrived from the Indian subcontinent during the first three years of Blair’s government.

In the same manner, Portes downplayed the adverse consequences of immigration. Bower writes:

He asserted that ‘in theory’ there was ‘no evidence’ that migrants would ‘increase pressure on housing transport…and health services’. On the contrary he praised migrant children for bringing ‘greater diversity into UK schools’ and assured Blair that migrants had not caused any overcrowding in London—which was true in 1997. “There is little evidence” he wrote, “that native workers are harmed”. He added, ‘Migrants will have no effect on the job prospects of natives.’ Nine years later, a report by the Migration Advisory Committee found that twenty three British workers had been displaced for every hundred born foreign-born workers employed in the country.

Portes brushed aside any damaging consequences to British life by not mentioning the reluctance of the growing Muslim and Hindu communities to integrate.

Nevertheless, the Portes report was excellent material for an important speech to the City of London in which the government’s radical new direction would be signaled. It would be made by the new Junior Immigration Minister Barbara Roche; an early draft of the Portes document was shown to her to help her with her speech.

As the guardian of Britain’s border security, Blair chose as Lunior Immigration Minister a woman who seemed to retain an acute sense of her own Jewishness while having a great enthusiasm for eradicating White British identity.

Roche, a staunch enthusiast for all things LGBT, is the daughter of a Polish-Russian Ashkenazi father and Sephardic Spanish-Portugese mother. She told The Independent “My being Jewish informs me totally, informs my politics. I understand the otherness of ethnic groups.” In 1994 she had been one of the many Jewish MPs who had backed an extreme anti-White measure to increase sentences for crimes where race was deemed to be an aggravating factor.

In her first days as a Minister Roche openly criticized immigration staff for being White males. She “wanted to see black faces” at the Immigration Directorate’s headquarters. She thought the department’s attitude to race was “toxic,” and she wanted asylum seekers to receive the same welfare benefits and housing as the native British. A civil servant said she made it clear that she didn’t see her job as controlling entry to Britain but wanted more immigrants to come.

Her attitude was summed up in her first conversation with an immigration civil servant. Roche said “I think that the asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in Britain. Removal takes too long and it’s emotional.”

Roche had one significant ally among the civil servants in the form of an academic and migration industry insider Sarah Spencer. This academic had spent her entire working life in the cause of multiculturalism and egalitarianism. A former deputy chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, she had a fanatical belief that immigration and multiculturalism brought nothing but good for society. “I was saying the kind of things they wanted to hear,” recalled Spencer. Bower writes of this ideological clique’s worldview: “British cities, they agreed, should enjoy large non-European communities.”

She [Spencer] was one of the Labour progressives who ‘disdained white Britain’s glorification of British identity and history. British society could be transformed, they hoped, by relaxing the Home Office’s immigration controls. Roche offered Spencer the chance to realise that ambition.

This would be easy because government policy was half-baked, and the priority was a determination not to draw attention to what was happening. So there were no specialist immigration advisors to the Prime Minister or Cabinet committees on immigration. It was all done under the table.

This feigned disinterestedness was embodied in the attitude of Tony Blair himself. He pretended to be not much interested in the issue one way or another, and, although he would say that failed asylum seekers should be deported, he left it up to his ministers. Immigration was not a personal priority. It was purely an issue of presentation. That gave Roche the green light to do what she wanted. Mass immigration came about in a fit of apparent absent mindedness. Instead Blair was more interested in the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry.

As noted, an early draft of Portes’ own migration paper was given to Roche to help her write her speech. In drafting her speech Roche asked speech writer Andrew Neather for a gloss. It was this that led to such a big story more than a decade later.

But what was not discussed at the time was that the Portes policy paper had contained other another interesting clause which was not removed. For instance, it gave as justification for admitting asylum seekers, Britain’s record towards Jews fleeing Hitler’s Nazi regime.

We may pride ourselves in retrospect towards our hospitality in welcoming Jewish refugees at the turn of the century and during the Nazi era — in fact the actual record was mixed at best — and positively shameful in some respects.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the lead author of these words was Jewish, as was the person delivering the speech, Barbara Roche. Even her boss Straw was half Jewish. So was a Jewish desire to extract ethnic retribution an explicit driver of Tony Blair’s mass immigration policy? Everyone has been too polite to point out the conflict of interests.

The Portes document “Migration : An Economic and Social Analysis” was a half-baked concoction of spin and speculation that was almost transparently risible.[2] It would become the most important document in modern British history and the cornerstone of the unspoken policy of White dispossession. Portes predicted that the number entering Britain in 2004 would be a maximum of 170,000. In fact at least 500,000 entered.

Roche’s speech was approved by 10 Downing Street, and on December 11, 2000 Roche delivered her speech to an enthusiastic gathering of the British Bankers Association. The publication of this monumentally important policy was not reported, and there was no backlash. Roche and Portes had carried out a fundamental shift in Britain’s immigration policy that would transform the country out of recognition. And it was all done behind the back of the British people.

While few White Britons heard about the speech, immigration lawyers immediately grasped its importance. Asylum seekers told their relatives around the world that Britain now provided housing and benefits denied to immigrants in other countries.

Since the advocates of mass immigration denied that immigrants would put pressure on services, there was no discussion amongst civil servants about providing additional homes, schools or hospitals.

Shortly thereafter Roche was removed from the Home Office for being “muddled” and “incompetent.”

In working class towns where there were racial tensions, it was a policy of breathtaking recklessness. And the media, led by the BBC, were turning a blind eye.

[Sarah] Spencer admitted later ‘There was no policy for integration. We just believe the communities would integrate.’ Her assumption that the British would unquestioningly accept hundreds of thousands of migrants was underpinned by the BBC’s general categorisation of critics of immigration as racist, which had censored a public debate thus concealing any problems. Accordingly, Portes’s assurance that the number of migrants entering Britain could be ‘totally controlled’ appeared incontrovertible.

But this was the point when thousands camped out in Sangatte near Calais and began trying to smuggle themselves into Britain. News reports showed them jumping from trucks in Kent and punching the air in victory. The broadcast media blandly sympathized with the victims, reflecting pride in Blair’s diversity agenda.

Civil servants noted that the torrent of asylum seekers never provoked a rebuke from politicians. Tony Blair, while paranoid about the electorate turning on him over immigration, did not order a policy reversal. Instead, a meeting agreed to ensure that asylum seekers were provided with welfare benefits and housing.

News about the new welfare entitlements attracted 200,000 Somalis. Not only did they have no historic links to Britain, but they were unemployable and very anti-social. Again there was a discreet political directive that they be granted “exceptional leave to remain.”

When 100 Afghans had arrived in Britain on a hijacked aircraft, a pack of immigration lawyers embarked on a long legal battle to get them asylum status. Despite initial protestations from politicians, it was clear they were being defended by civil servants and judges like Lord Harry Woolf who were fiercely resisting any attempt to speed up the process.[3] Six years later a judge would grant the nine actual hijackers asylum but only after they—and their lawyers—had received £10 million of free legal aid, free health care, subsidized housing and welfare.

With an election on the horizon Labour was digging in and not going to give one inch despite the Conservative’s pressing on the immigration issue. At this point, the media, led by the BBC, were deployed to saturation-bomb the Conservatives with accusations that they were racist. Jack Straw praised asylum seekers for their contributions to British life.

Beyond endlessly repeating the mantra that immigration was good for the economy and good for the British people, it seems there was no substantive discussion at all. The numbers keep shooting upwards and all they could do was discuss how to “manage public perception.” Blair’s government bewailed the “swamping” of schools and hospitals. Tens of thousands of cases were allowed through in secret, unannounced “back door” amnesties.

Barbara Roche has thrived. She is the co-founder of a lobbying organization called Migration Matters which receives funding from the City of London.

Her pride and joy is the new National Museum of Migration in Liverpool. In the manner of all globalist bureaucrats she has gone from job to job.

At the Cabinet Office and the ODPM, Barbara was the Minister for Women and Equalities and responsible for the Social Exclusion and Neighbourhood Renewal Units. She has extensive European experience—chairing the EU Telecoms Council and representing the UK on the EU’s Home Affairs Ministerial Council.

She has also, presumably, earned the eternal gratitude of her own Jewish community for her part in making British society safer, if not for the natives, then for the Jews.

Nearly two decades on and the legacy of Tony Blair’s policy is plain to see.

The headlines are full of child grooming gangs in Muslim dominated towns, Trojan Horse schools and home grown Jihadis. A massive encampment of refugees sits at Calais only a few miles from the Straits of Dover.

Broken Vows is only the first tentative glimpse into those crucial events. A real media insider, Tom Bower, who is of Jewish extraction, seems to have been able to get interviews with key civil service players. Probably because he is the only one who, so far, has even asked.

[1] Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Arrow, 2011).

[2] Jonathan Portes (Team Leader), “Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis,” UK Government Home Office Economics and Resource Analysis Unit and the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit (November, 2000).

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/61131/migrationreportnov2000.pdf

[3] See Francis Carr Begbie, “Beneath the mask of the Human Rights Industry: Prominent British Jewish Advocate Increases in Refugees,” The Occidental Observer (October 21, 2015).

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/10/beneath-the-mask-of-the-human-rights-industry-prominent-british-jews-advocate-increases-in-refugees/