While the Tories have been crumbling, the Labour Party have also been falling to pieces. The sudden panic among some East London Labour MPs about the BNP is a sign of how bad things have got. They hope that, by shouting loudly about it now, they can prevent or reduce a swing to Nick Griffin's nasty party in the May local elections. The tragedy is that it is thanks to the irresponsibility and dishonesty of both Labour and Tories that the revolting BNP now seems likely to make gains in many areas where they would once have been dismissed with scorn.
Once people have got used to voting for a disreputable and sinister party like this, who knows where it might end? Other European countries - notably France and Germany - now face the growth of similar unpleasant forces in their midst - and in Germany the taxpayer is compelled to subsidise these people under the sort of 'state funding'. We too are now being asked to adopt.
I note that the BNP's Press Officer, who likes to be called Dr Phill Edwards but apparently has another name in private, has been complaining about me. He called me "That *****y Hitchens" in a recent interview with my old friend Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail. He accused me of snobbery towards the BNP, and of more or less agreeing with them while denouncing them.
Permit me to rebut this. I have spent a long time talking to BNP people, including their leader, Nick Griffin. I think they have no serious policies to deal with the problems they pretend they will solve. I think they are rather dim, limited types, who have been handed undue prominence by the refusal of the major parties even to discuss the issue of mass immigration.
By shouting down the many thoughtful and civilised people who have tried to raise this issue in a responsible way, the liberal elite have left the field clear for real bigots and real Nazis to make political hay. Yet again, their actions have had the opposite consequences to the ones they intended. Will they ever learn?
As for the accusations of snobbery, my great grandfather was a farm labourer who left the land in hungry times, to help build Portsmouth dockyard. His children grew up in one of the toughest, bleakest parts of that city, in an era of hardship unimaginable to us. Yet my grandfather managed to become a headmaster and my father a naval officer. I am no snob. I know where I come from and am proud of it. My contempt for the BNP arises from a straightforward dislike for its unBritish, anti-Christian origins, among Hitler-worshippers, closet Nazis, men of violence, swivel-eyed Judophobes and racial bigots.
Knowing full well how decent British people feel about such things, the BNP has spent much of the last ten years seeking to conceal its real nature behind a new front of smooth, New Labour-type PR. I know that a lot of people have been fooled by this, and I know why. It is because the respectable parties have lied, and lied and lied about immigration, and smeared anyone who has challenged them with outrageous charges of bigotry.
And people are so sick of them and their lies, and so sick of being called ‘racists’ when they are not, that when they see the BNP called the same rude names that they have been called, they think the BNP must be on their side. Sadly for them, the BNP is on nobody's side but its own. It seeks power on their votes but heaven forbid it should ever get any power. It is not fit to run a toy train set, let alone a town hall or a country.
Why has this happened? How did we get into this fix? Mass immigration has suited governments of left and right for many years, not just in Britain but in North America and continental Europe as well. Why? It creates a semi-legal underclass of people who will work for low wages and avoid the strict minimum wage, health and safety and other regulations which have been imposed on employers by governments paying debts to trade union supporters or obeying EU regulations.
It also solves a problem, which would otherwise paralyse society. Once you have a welfare state which pays large numbers of people generously to do nothing, and which educates many of them so badly that no employer will want them, how can you persuade anyone to do the jobs at the bottom, which are both unpleasant and very badly-paid, but which require diligence and initiative even so?
Migrants - who quite reasonably want to better themselves - are encouraged to come to industrialised countries where the low wages seem generous to them. They are used to hard work and do it willingly and well. In the short term, they keep the industries going. In the short term, they are glad of the miserable wages, which are generous in comparison to what they would get in their home countries.
But in the long term, no effort is made to integrate them. They are treated as faceless numbers by both employers and politicians. In fact, it is in the interests of many politicians to keep them in defined areas and to court them as an ethnic block vote. Not that anyone ever openly says this. It just seems to happen again and again. And it is in the interests of others - who loathe our society in general - to use the presence of migrants as an excuse for introducing multicultural education and broadcasting, which sustain and deepen the divisions between migrants and the indigenous people.
Of course, the migrants are not numbers. They are people with hopes and fears and ambitions. They need places to live. They want to bring their families to join them. Their children grow up here and rightly consider themselves as British. They will not put up with the miserable jobs and wages their fathers accepted. They need schools and doctors. Encouraged to maintain their home cultures, they naturally begin to change the areas in which they settle, so as to be more like home for them - and incidentally less like home for those already there.
The elite see this as very adventurous and exotic. They do not have to bring up their children in districts where the schools are multilingual, or where the familiar landmarks of their own childhoods have disappeared. They view multiculturalism as exciting - a matter of restaurants, picturesque zones they can visit for an evening, or live in as young single people when they have few responsibilities. Then they can go back to the comfortable, unchanged places where they grew up.
It is different for those who live there all the time as families and have nowhere else to go. It is also different for those who believed that the welfare state set up after 1945 was for them, built on their contributions, who now see its benefits given generously to new arrivals. I believe a lot of bitterness has been caused by changes in the queuing system for council houses, which once kept established working-class communities together, but has now been adapted to meet the needs of new arrivals. Actually, if we are going to have mass immigration, it is hard to see how this could have been avoided.
The question is whether we should have had the mass immigration, and whether we should have any more.
The poor, not the well-off, have to pay the material price of immigration, which benefits big business by keeping wages low, and helps governments by providing a short-cut to economic growth. It is a tribute to the gentle tolerance of the British people that, by and large, this has happened without major conflict or friction. Both indigenous people and migrants, it seems to me, have made a huge and unsung effort, to cope with a difficult situation, which neither group chose.
Given time and stability, I think they could eventually settle down, and if the official policy of multiculturalism were abandoned, real integration would take place over the next century. But for that to happen the migration would have to slow down so that we could all get used to each other. Which would mean no more cheap labour, and serious welfare reform too.
The immigration we have had since 1950 is already far greater and more unsettling than anything we have experienced since the Norman Conquest. Fashionable claims that this is a 'nation of immigrants' are simply not true. Past migrations, of Huguenots or Jews, have never been on anything like the current scale.
Yet it does not stop or pause. It just seems to go on and on, and the expansion of the European Union to the East means that it is likely to become still more intense. Who can blame young people in search of a better future for coming here if they can? The real question is, is this policy wise for Britain? It may suit business. It may suit governments whose economic policies need endless growth. It may suit the rich who like the wider range of cuisine. It may suit those who have no long-term concern for this as a functioning, unselfish community. There is such a thing as society, but the thoughtless supporters of mass migration do not seem to think so.
How strange that the very people who misquote Margaret Thatcher to suggest that she thought there was no such thing as society behave exactly as if that is what they believed. For it goes on, largely undiscussed. It goes on despite countless fake ‘crackdowns’. Ministers do not even seem to know how extensive it is. They openly admit they do not know who is in this country, and then take this abject failure out on us by making us carry identity cards.
It is still dangerous for anyone in mainstream politics or journalism to criticise immigration. The liberals have screamed 'racist' at such critics so many times that almost nobody except actual racists is prepared to get involved.
Once again, the remorseless logic leads to the same conclusion. The Tory and Labour Parties are no longer, in their own jargon, 'fit for purpose'. They don't represent the country or its people, just selfish elites with short-term aims. And if we do not rapidly replace them with something better, then the dismal BNP will become a serious danger to the country. Vote 'None of the Above’. If enough people do this, then the way will be opened for the founding of decent new parties, neither bigoted nor politically correct; who will honestly address the problems of this country.
During all that time I haven't received a single e-mail from Princess Tony, who has begun bombarding liberal columnists with his views on this subject. Nor have I been attacked in speeches by Mr Charles Clarke, the Commissar for Internal Affairs and State Security (or 'Home Secretary' as he was called before we went metric).
