Those on the Right concerned about Britain's high level of immigration would be well advised to read Anthony Browne's excellent little book Do We Need Mass Immigration? (Civitas, £6.00). This is a compact and well-written discussion of the whole issue, and many readers will, of course, already be familiar with the fallacious arguments of the ‘Britain-needs-them’ brigade.

What is significant is that for the first time a mainstream national journalist refers, in the title of the first chapter, to the downright dishonesty that plagues the whole subject. Browne says that he knows he will be accused of ‘racism’ and that others will point out the joys of ‘diversity’ (try telling that to the Afghans or Iraqis!).

Browne raised the most important question in his introduction: "Why would one of the world's most densely crowded islands with a naturally growing population... suffering already from overstretched public services, road congestion and a housing crisis so severe that the Government has to impose high-density housing on communities, and which has a total of four million out of work* - why should (we) need immigration at such levels that it quadruples the rate of population growth... to fill a city the size of Cambridge every eight months?" Why indeed?

Browne refutes every single pro-immigration argument with facts and figures: We don't have a rapidly ageing population. We don't have labour shortages in any category, skilled or unskilled. Unskilled immigration doesn't boost GDP per-capita, and actually lowers economic growth because immigrants receive more in benefits than they pay back in taxes. Immigration is no more ‘enriching’ for the British than it would be for any other people in the world.

Politicians evading the truth

What is interesting is Browne's attack on the media élites and how the politicians are prepared to lie about the issue in a way they would not dare to do about any other serious public policy matter. "Immigration is more characterised by distortion, denial and hostility to debate than any other public issue," he writes.

One oft-repeated argument that "Europe cannot survive without immigration" is shown to be utter nonsense. Browne says the consensus on this subject is ‘startling’. Immigration myths are trotted out merely to justify existing immigration that has already taken place, most of it illegal and without authorisation. He says that most talk on the subject is about ‘combating racism’, as if promoting immigration, rather than stopping it, will somehow help to do this. In fact, this argument was first put forward in 1994 in Peter Brimelow's book Alien Nation (about immigration into America). He implied that so rooted was ‘racism’ assumed to be in America that the élites thought that people's ‘racism’ could only be eliminated by literally submerging them massively into other cultures - by, in a sense, swamping them with immigrants.

What is alarming is the way that huge areas of social policy become nonsensical when blatant lies are told about immigration, and our intellectual life is beginning to suffer. In the end we become a totalitarian society or a third-world country that fiddles around with figures and data and other people's arguments, or uses blatant propaganda to wriggle out of any uncomfortable facts. The levels of skills needed in Britain, housing forecasts, demography, environmentalism, crime, legal aid budgets, and many other factors are becoming joke subjects: no one takes them seriously any more because they know that the experts can't speak the truth any more. Many experts on various social subjects have become silenced, to put it bluntly. They are made to speak gobbledegook. The need to build more housing in the South East of England is because, apparently "more people want to live alone," and has nothing to do with immigration - when it has everything to do with it. Journalism itself, already massively dumbed down, becomes seriously tainted in the same way it was in the old Soviet Union. Browne points to a top Labour economist writing for the national press about the way unskilled people are losing out to unskilled immigrants, but was promptly accused of ‘racism’ by other journalists.

History rewritten

Further, many arguments about unemployment and ‘downsizing’ we used to read about in the early 1990s have had to be reversed by those same journalists. "Immigration reared its head, and suddenly it is mass labour shortages that are the biggest problem." In other words, George Orwell fashion, history is being rewritten to fit the thesis that everyone must now support.

There is an unholy alliance between big business, which likes cheap labour, ethnic lobbies which want to increase the size of their communities, and universities which want to bring over more fee-paying students, not forgetting the massive immigration industry, including the crooked lawyers and the people-traffickers, which this journal has often referred to in past issues.

My main criticism of Browne, as with many others who look just at the bald statistics, is the failure to mention the historical absurdity of it all. Nor does he refer to the criminal nature of what is happening. Not enough criticism is levelled at the Government's Race Relations Act of 1976, which was so revolutionary in its impact that it made all other revolutions - whether religious or political - in other countries and at other times in history pale into insignificance. No other nation in the world has deliberately disconnected ethnicity from nationhood in the way the British have. No other nation has deliberately shot itself in the foot like this. You can't imagine the Japanese saying to everyone: "You don't have to be Japanese to be Japanese any more."

Anyone can become 'British'

Anyone, it seems, can become ‘British’ just by living here, surrounded by an architectural and cultural heritage they did not create and with which they have no connection. That, of course, is why they come, and come in vast uncontrolled numbers. It's almost a form of looting. This land and its treasures are here for the taking, because no one is bothering to protect them any more. Britain is being looted in the same way as the Baghdad Museum was looted right under the eyes of the Americans.

Islamic suicide bombers are described as ‘Britons’ just because they have British passports. In a sense, they have stolen the passports, or are using fakes. Not having any scruples about national legitimacy, they don't have any scruples about killing other people. Let's hope the thing doesn't spread!

And because ‘becoming British’ is so easy to do, many of them have gone slightly barmy in the process. Ethnic minorities think they can become ‘British’ in some kind of political sense. The bizarre racist upshot is that an ethnic Nigerian, who presents the Radio 5 programme Up All Night, told his studio guests: "The longer I stay here the more British I feel," as if somehow ethnicity (a tribal identity based on ancestry) can rub off from one person to another. Somehow, by his being surrounded by white people in a white-built studio, it makes him white as well!

Fortunately, the real Anglo-Celts know who they are, and this explains why they don't take immigration as seriously as many readers of this journal do. I have never heard anyone - professional, journalist, working class, whoever use the expression ‘multi-cultural society’ because it simply doesn't make sense. And I have never heard any Briton say they know the difference between Urdu or Hindu - or, come to that, recognise any other Asian language they hear in Britain.

Let me give you another example that explains a lot about what people really think. One bloke in the pub leaned over and pointedly said to me the other day: "Why do you worry about it, Tone? All these ...s you keep going on about. They're nothing to do with us, are they?"

This sums it up perfectly.

The address of Civitas: The Mezzanine, 39 York Road, London, SEI 7NQ. Tel: 020-7401-5470. Fax: 020-7401-5471. ISBN 1-903386233.