Blair calls race summit amid election jitters

[JoFerret]

http://www.sundayherald.com/41031

Tony Blair has decided to place the almost-taboo subject of race in Britain at the top of his government’s agenda and ordered a “cross-government assault to tackle abuse of the immigration system”.
The Prime Minister has called a “race and immigration summit” for Tuesday, which will be attended by Home Secretary David Blunkett, senior Foreign Office ministers, ministers from the Department of Works and Pension, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith and senior representatives from the security services and top police involved in tackling organised crime.

The summit will also mark the official start of a major policy review of Britain’s post-war approach to multiculturalism. The head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, who is close to Blair, said yesterday that multiculturalism in Britain was “out of date” and encouraged “separateness”.

He said there was an urgent need to “assert a core of Britishness” because multiculturalism in the present political era “means the wrong thing”.

The summit’s aim is to ensure better cross-department arrangements on what Downing Street called “a complex and important issue of policy”.

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[rocktivity]

1. This is Blair's version of Bush's fetal rights bill

He's pulling the same cultural vs. issues bullsh**it. He was scammed into a phony war, he's thisclose to losing his job, and suddenly he notices that his nation might have racial problems? The Poodle has been reading Rove's playbook, all right.

:headbang:
rocknation

[Voltaire99]

2. Blairland for the Blairish.

Can the Poodle get more pathetic?

[tlcandie]

3. Round and round we go .. where it stops.. who knows?!

:shrug: Unbelieveable...every day something even more unbelieveable than the next!!

EDIT: And ever backwards I might add!

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. For the reason why this has come up now

(for US readers): the biggest political story in the UK in the past week has been the resignation of Bev Hughes, the immigration minister. This is because the "abuse of the immigration system" was ignored on purpose by the government, just so that the backlog of applications could be cut.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1185312,00.html
At 5pm last Monday her career began to unravel. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, revealed that he had received an email from James Cameron, a consular official based in Bucharest, saying that migrant workers from Romania were using falsified visa application forms to gain entry to Britain. Worse, it was suggested, immigration officials from the Home Office were turning a blind eye to the allegations to stop backlogs building up in visa department.
...
Kirsty Wark, the presenter, asked: 'Did you know that marked applications from Romania and Bulgaria were being green lit, even though their papers were forged and the Immigration Service were told that these papers were forged?'

Hughes replied: 'Of course not, of course not.'
...
In the Chief Whip's office they knew there was a problem. Although Hughes was unaware of the specific allegation that Home Office officials had turned a blind-eye to the forgeries, she had been made aware of the broader scam of forged visa applications. Bob Ainsworth, the deputy chief whip, had written to her about it a year ago.

And let's face it, no country wants fraudsters coming into it.

[AP]

9. In other words, the gov't was being too lenient -- allowing immigrants in.

But Little Englanders, as your last line suggests, really doesn't like that. So now they have to stir up some anti-immigrant storm and fire so they can't be cast as pro-immigration.

As the Clash say, 'immigration built this nation.'

I hope they talk the anti-immigrant talk, but don't walk the walk (as they've apparently been doing).

Good for Tony. Good for Labour.

Google this for me muriel (check my facts). I remember one of the first things Tony did was he stopped people who married immigrants from having to bring their love letters and photo albums down to the local immigration office to prove you're in love with the person whom you brought into the country.

I thought that old rule was a hideous invasion of privacy. When Labour changed that right away (while talking the big talk about cracking down on asylum claims), I thought, there's a government whose heart's in the right place, even if their rhetoric isn't.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that was a policy change by exiting Tories. (I don't think so.)

Could you check for me?

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Not exactly - the Foreign Office was saying

"don't let this person in - the supporting documents for his visa are forgeries", and the Home Office were saying "we don't care, there's a backlog of applicants, it's easier to let him in". The point is that someone who uses forged documents is undesirable. If they were honest, and it was government policy to encourage immigration, then they wouldn't. So either they're crooks, or Labour immigration policy is too tight.

I have no idea what happened about marriages; I suggest you look it up yourself. I can provide this quote from the previous article for free:
He had also received leaked correspondence which revealed that the number of sham marriages, according to senior civil servants, could be as high as 15,000 a year, well above the official figure of 1,700.

[AP]

12. Nonetheless, I give the Home Office big ups for this.

DEPORTEES
by Woody Guthrie

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are filed in their creosote dumps
They're flying 'em back to the Mexico border
To take all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, farewell Roselita
Adios mes amigos, Jesus e Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees

My father's own father, he waded that river
They took all the money he made in his life
It's six hundred miles to the Mexico border
And they chased them like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves

The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
The great ball of fire it shook all our hills
Who are these dear friends who are falling like dry leaves?
Radio said, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can raise our good crops?
To fall like dry leaves and rot on out topsoil
And be known by no names except "deportees"

[Garion_55]

5. When can the british vote his ass out of there?

is there an election coming up soon?

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. The Prime Minister decides the date

any time between now and June 2006. The Labour Party can replace Blair as Prime Minister only if a majority of votes at the yearly (or specially called) party conference want to. The votes are cast by delegates from the party members and trade union members who pay an affliation fee to the party.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,916139,00.html

[AP]

7. I can't make heads or tails of this story.

The quotes in the top of the article are just words totally out of context. For all we know, they're saying that they're rejecting a post-war multicultuaralism that required non-white Brits to become British, and want a new multiculturalism that values 'separateness' -- meaning that you aren't required to change, or that the new idea of British identity doesn't depend on a traditional, white version of Britishness.

I looked at the CRE website to see what Trevor Phillips said on or just before March 31, to which the Glaswegians are referring, and on March 31st, Phillips said this: http://www.cre.gov.uk/media/nr_arch/2004/nr040331.html

It sounds like this is what they're responding too, which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with what the article implies they're responding too.

So, basically we have a half dozen words withou context, and a couple Glaswegians who are possibly angry at Phillips about something that only relates to those out of context words in the sense that they're in the ballpark of race.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. That's because you found the wrong story

The Herald was referring to Trevor Phillips' remarks yesterday, not March 31 (I don't know where you got that date from). This was in an interview in The Times (subscription only for overseas net users; BBC: Race chief wants integration push refers to it).
He says Muslim communities need “space and time”, but desperately want to be accepted as British. “Almost all of them don’t want to cling to things which are incompatible with that. Multiculturalism does not mean anybody can do anything they like in the name of their culture. In my community people should not smoke dope on the street because it is part of their culture. That is nonsense. It is against the law.”

But is not multiculturalism the whole point of the Commission he runs? Not any more. “The word is not useful, it means the wrong things.” Shall we kill it off? “Yes, let’s do that,” he replies. “Multiculturalism suggests separateness. We are in a different world from the Seventies.

“What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values — democracy rather than violence, the common currency of the English language, honouring the culture of these islands, like Shakespeare and Dickens.

“But I also think people should be allowed to be a bit different. It’s a good thing that people are different in Yorkshire than they are in Cornwall.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1061080,00.html

It's not just Glaswegians who are disgreeing with Phillips; the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Keith Vaz (Labour MP from Leicester), and the English Conservative Lord Taylor are all quoted. The Herald is a Glasgow newspaper, so it's not surprising they have a couple of quotes from there too.
This is the article from February (not March) where Phillips seemed to be more in favour of multiculturalism; in that he said:
The xenophobes should come clean. Their argument is not about immigration at all. They are liberal Powellites; what really bothers them is race and culture. If today's immigrants were white people from the old Commonwealth, Goodhart and his friends would say that they pose no threat because they share Anglo-Saxon values. They may not even object to Anglophile Indians - as long as they aren't Muslims.

[AP]

13. You are a wonderful resource.

Thanks for the legwork.

[goforit]

8. Hmmmm......How will the Brits respond?

Like Americans, Grab a beer and a remote and watch something else?

Like the Christian Right, follow him off the bridge?

Or plan for what needs to be done.

Remove his sorry ass.