LABOUR'S LIES HAVE BROUGHT THE UK TO RUIN

LABOUR'S rhetoric on immigration is a colossal exercise in deceit.

Ministers are fond of talking tough, endlessly boastingof “crackdowns” and “robust new rules” on entry. The greater the levels of mass migration, the deeper we sink into economic misery.

But in reality they have presided over the wilful collapse of our borders and the destruction of our british identity.

Our once well-ordered, cohesive nation has been turned into an overcrowded land full of disparate cultures. As the influx of foreigners continues at an unprecedented rate, many britons increasingly feel like aliens in their own country.

Labour’s spectacular dishonesty on this issue has been highlighted again by a series of announcements from the Home secretary alan Johnson. a former postman, Johnson likes to think of himself as Labour’s “man of the people”, all amiable grins and cheeky wisecracks. But in truth he is just another hypocritical socialist politician bent on the destruction of our british heritage.

His barrage of policy changes, launched with fanfare today, is as bogus as the immigrant marriage racket that his party has encouraged.

He declares that more stringent tests will be set for the award of british citizenship, this from the head of a Home
office which has dished out British passports like confetti in recent years.

On present trends, thanks to Labour’s deliberate laxness, more than 200,000 migrants will become British citizens this year.

One of Johnson’s supposed new requirements will be that applicants for citizenship will have to prove their patriotic credentials. On that basis, all of the current Cabinet would fail, such is the level of their treachery.

Over the past 12 years, the Government has been engaged in a vicious cultural war against the concept of British patriotism. Labour’s obsession with diversity means that our civic institutions have traduced our history, smashed our traditions and treated our instinctive national pride as a dangerous form of racism.

With the same duplicity, Johnson declares that, in the spirit of “fair play”, migrants will be stopped from queue-jumping for state housing.

If Labour really meant this, it would be an admission that the whole social housing system is biased in favour of migrants, something that british taxpayers have known for years though the Government has always tried to deny it. but Johnson’s announcement is just more empty words.

The Government has no intention of implementing such a policy, not least because of the Human rights act of 1998, that charter for spongers and anti-british campaigners, and Harriet Harman’s new Equality legislation, which makes it compulsory for public authorities to practise overt discrimination in favour of ethnic minorities.

The same is true of Johnson’s promise to end the use of marriage as a means to gaining settlement in britain and access to welfare. this is a practice particularly common among families from India, Pakistan and nigeria, where oppressed, bullied wives are used to milk the benefits.

What is sickening about Johnson’s announcement is that his Labour party cynically abolished in 1997 the Primary Purpose rule, which stopped immigrants using marriage as a means of obtaining british residency.

Labour presented the rule’s abolition as a triumph for compassion and justice but in practice it has opened the floodgates for migration from asia and africa, as well as imposing a huge new burden on social security.

But Labour did not care, for thereal reason behind this move was to boost the party’s votes in its seats in the Midlands and the north by importing large numbers of ethnic minority electors.

There is a fascinating passage in the published diary of Chris Mullin, the former Labour Minister, in which he writes,
“We’ve barely touched the rackets that surround arranged marriages. The trouble is that we are terrified of the huge cry of ‘racism’ that would go up the moment anyone breathed a word. There is the added difficulty that at least 20 Labour seats depend on asian votes.”

That comment says it all. Political expediency allied to multi-cultural dogma means that Labour will never do anything to halt the tidal wave of immigration.

Under Brown and Johnson our border controls will remain feeble and our welfare system a honeypot for migrants.

Only last weekend it emerged that an illegal immigrant had managed to smuggle himself into britain in a coach full of border agency officials returning from Calais. The incident was a perfect metaphor for the shambles of frontier controls under Labour.

But Labour’s stance on immigration can now be seen as a gigantic lie. We were told that a mass influx of foreigners, currently running at over 500,000 a year, would be the engine of economic prosperity.

The opposite is true. The greater the levels of mass migration, the deeper we sink into economic misery.

Our public services are buckling under the strain of over-crowding, our welfare system has become hopelessly unaffordable.

The idea that all migrants come here to work hard is just a myth. In fact migrants are far more likely than British people to be unemployed, in receipt of benefits or housed in state-funded accommodation.

Meanwhile our society is now beset by extremism, barbaric violence, ethnic tensions and superstition. But for Labour, this is not a badge of shame. continues here

An excellent article but will anybody listen?

Black Welshman aims to take the fight to the BNP

In the first in a series of interviews with up and coming young Labour candidates, Paul Owen speaks to Vaughan Gething, the man aiming to be the Welsh assembly's first black politician about the BNP, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama

Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National party, was speaking to Channel 4 News last month when he made a statement that infuriated Vaughan Gething.

"There is no such thing as a black Welshman," the BNP MEP for north-west England said. "You can have a black Briton; you can't have a black Welshman. Welsh is about people who lived in Wales since the end of the last ice age."

Gething, who is hoping to be the first black person elected to the Welsh assembly, says: "On that basis, most white people wouldn't qualify.

"It's quite clear that Nick Griffin just doesn't accept that black British people or black Welsh people are entitled to call themselves proper, full citizens of the Gething was born in Zambia in 1974 to a black Zambian mother and a white Welsh father

country.

"And every time he tries to define what an ethnic Briton is, it's all bollocks. Because the definition he's searching for is really about saying 'white people who speak English'.

"There have been black Welsh people for centuries. Cardiff, in particular, has had centuries' worth of the port and people being brought there to work and settling there and being accepted as part of the community. All of my memories are from the UK. This really is my country."

Gething was born in Zambia in 1974 to a black Zambian mother and a white Welsh father, a vet who had moved there to work.

In his speech to the Welsh TUC conference last month, he described his father as "a white Welsh economic migrant".

Brought up in rural Dorset from the age of two, Gething was educated in Aberystwyth and Cardiff, and went on to become a solicitor, the first black president of the Welsh NUS and the first black president of the Welsh TUC.

Now he has been selected as the Labour candidate for the Welsh assembly seat of Cardiff South and Penarth, a mixed constituency in class and ethnic terms that seems fairly safe for Labour, although he will have to wait until 2011 to contest the seat.

Gething's first memory of Britain was his father "throwing me on to a tube train because I was convinced that this thing that came along and swallowed all the people up with sliding doors was a monster, and it was eating people".Griffin annoys him. "He says he wants to be treated as a legitimate politician in a legitimate party. Well, no other legitimate politician would be able to come up with something so wacky, and so quite obviously bollocks, and be able to get away with it.

"The interviewer would tear him to pieces, or the comment from the media source would say: 'This is all rubbish; he's lost the plot.'

"And yet Nick Griffin's able to say it, and there are very few media outlets that are prepared to say: 'He's saying this and it's rubbish. The man's an idiot.' "

He says he believes "not all the media are clear on how they should handle Nick Griffin".

"I'm very clear that you've got to take them [the BNP] on and beat them," he adds. "You can't pretend the arguments aren't there, because they won seats. Lots of people voted for them. You can't beat them by pretending that they're not there."

Gething's first memory of Britain was his father "throwing me on to a tube train because I was convinced that this thing that came along and swallowed all the people up with sliding doors was a monster, and it was eating people".

In Dorset, he and his three brothers and one sister found that being black was a rarity. "There really weren't a lot of black families in Dorset, and there still aren't now, not in west Dorset," he says.

"In primary school we were the only black kids, then at secondary school we were always at least half of the black children in the school."

But the sporty, "quite bright" Gethings did not experience much "direct and overt" racism, and Gething feels they would have been picked on more if they were "different" in other ways. What does he mean by different? "Kids got picked on for all sorts of reasons – if you were ordinary or unusual in ways that weren't praiseworthy then you could get picked on."

He joined the Labour party at the age of 17 to help out with the 1992 election, the result of which – a fourth term for the Conservatives – was "obviously disappointing".

What attracted him to Labour? "I made my mind up fairly quickly that I wasn't going to be a Tory voter, and I was actually impressed by what [the then Labour leader Neil] Kinnock had to say, and in particular the language about social justice and inequality. I believed in what the party was saying, and I made a choice."

Social justice is a theme Gething returns to again and again during the interview, saying at one point: "If you don't believe in that then why be in the Labour party?"

When I ask him about Barack Obama's recent speech to the NAACP, in which the US president, among other things, called on African-American parents to take more responsibility for the welfare of their children, Gething gives an unashamed defence of the activist state.

"In all the solutions for communities facing disadvantage, you can always say the wider community has responsibility, but equally people within those communities still have some responsibility themselves.

"But for people on the centre left, I still think it is about: 'How do you actually expect to enable those people? What is the role for communities? What is the role for the state? And how can you be positively and proactively achieving a situation where that disadvantage disappears?

"For me, that's one of the big differences between us and the right – the right take this view that the state shouldn't be involved and I take the view that it could and should. Not just it could and it should but it's our responsibility to do that."

Recalling his time as the president of the Welsh NUS, he says it was "odd" being a Labour student fighting against the Labour government's decision to introduce student tuition fees. "I wasn't at all convinced that the system that had been introduced was the right thing," he adds.

He argues now for some form of graduate tax rather than fees. "Fees with a proper grant structure I can understand and see working, but I do think the real problem is the disincentive for people who don't traditionally go to university and how you ensure they get to university in the first place and then survive through university.

"If you look at access rates, they haven't changed as much as any of us in the Labour party would want."

His work for Thompsons solicitors, where he specialises in employment law, has "reinforced a lot of the values and beliefs I came in with", he says.

As the Welsh TUC president, he worked to improve relations with the Welsh assembly, "to be a bit more professional about it and make sure we overtly got more out of the relationship".

TUC Wales was founded in 1974. Why did it take until last year for it to appoint a black leader? "That wasn't because nobody else was good enough," says Gething. "It's about recognising that things have changed. Our movement has now changed and is now better – though not perfect – at recognising where talent exists."

He takes a similar tack when he talks about the assembly, which currently has one Asian member out of 60, although since the non-white population of Wales is only 2.12%, this is roughly proportional.

"I get really annoyed about the business about whether you're a token or not; it should be about whether you're good enough or not," he says. "The thing that frustrates me is that I think there've been plenty of people that have been good enough in the past but haven't got on ...

"When I go out on the doorstep ... I want them to vote for me because they believe in me as a candidate and because I'll support our party. It shouldn't be about: 'You should feel sorry for me' ... I'm more than capable of doing this job."

By 2007, he had become a partner at Thompsons. Why did he decide to go into politics full-time?

"I'd been saying: 'We need more representatives, better quality representatives, and people like you need to be involved' ... and it gets to a point where after telling other people they should do it you need to think about, well, should I or shouldn't I?

"Also it was about if I want to do this, and I want to do politics properly and represent people, then to be able to commit to it, and to be able to give all of your attention is something I would like to do. To be blunt, I do think I've got something to offer."

Being one of 60 assembly members would give him more of an opportunity to effect change than being one of 646 MPs at Westminster, he argues. Plus, "the more you know about the place where you live, the more keen you are with your political ideas to see them implemented in the place where you live ... I don't want to tart myself round various constituencies saying: 'I want to be an MP; will you have me?' This is my home seat. It's where I've lived for over a decade and it's the constituency I'd like to represent."

He is uncharacteristically succinct when asked for his views on Gordon Brown – "I still think that Gordon is the right person to lead the party and to lead the government ... if you changed prime minister you've got to have another election, and I don't quite understand how that's in the Labour party's interest or the country's interest" – and he spends much more time detailing his criticisms of David Cameron.

"David Cameron will be a proper rightwing prime minister," he says. "He wouldn't be, you know, Mr Cuddly Fluffy. All the talk about the age of austerity, well, you know, there are some big dividing lines between them and us, as there always will be. We're in different parties for very good reasons."

In terms of presentation, the Tory leader is "quite good", Gething adds, but "in terms of what the policy detail is, there isn't an awful lot ... and I think that's a deliberate choice, not to have policy issues to be attacked and shot at".

"Cameron's properly from the right wing of the Conservative party and he would be a rightwing prime minister who I think would want to undo lots of progress that we have made and that we could and should be proud of," he says.

"That's a clear message that we have to get across to voters, as well as to our own core supporters."

Recalling again the run-up to the 1992 election, which the polls wrongly suggested Labour would win, Gething notes: "We're months away from a general election ... Most people vote about how they feel about their economic future, stability, jobs, the economy ... I don't accept that Cameron's sealed the deal with the electorate and they've decided: 'We all definitely want him.'"

But he accepts there are issues the government has to address about "Gordon's performance and the government's performance, to actually try and have a coherent narrative of where we've come from, where we're going, about what the Labour values mean in government, and how we expect to continue to try and make the country a fairer place, as well as a more prosperous place, in the future."

Asked to list his political heroes, Gething mentions Kinnock ("a big part of the reason why I joined the party"), Nelson Mandela ("a role model, not just for black people") and John Smith, Kinnock's successor, who died in 1994. continues here

I would ask you not to smirk whilst being indoctrinated, no really there are welsh negroes, there are also faeries dancing atop my head and unicorns cantering through my garden, will it ever stop this assault upon reason, this besiegement of truth. Is this the best they can do Vaughan Gething was born in Zambia, Zambia not Cardiff, although if truth be told, Cardiff has problems aplenty pertaining to enrichment, sometimes just sometimes, the machinations of our nation destroyers are laughable, quite, quite laughable.

Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead

I expect the Labour conference this week will be very like a funeral I once attended, in ice-cold rain, under black skies, in the shadow of a Victorian prison, where the heavy clay soil was so wet that the grave had to be held open with steel props in case it closed up with a gigantic squelch before the final prayers were over.

In short, it will be so gloomy that it will almost be funny.

Like the world banking system, Labour has gone belly up and can survive only if it is rescued by outsiders and entirely rebuilt.

What’s more, this is the second time this has happened to the decrepit party in two decades.

Two years ago, it seemed invincible and it was the Tories who were a despised and failed brand.

Now it’s indefensible and the Tories have mysteriously become, if not popular, then bearable. What happened? Why the sudden, violent swing?

The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, their traditional voters taken for granted.

Every so often, by a mysterious process, one of them is declared electable and the other is declared unelectable.

And we, the voters, do as we are told. By whom? For what purpose?

Labour really died around 1983, in the years of Michael Foot.

It was then invaded by young men and women, sometimes smirking, sometimes scowling, bleeping with the latest electronic devices and attired in costly suits, accompanied by spivs with suitcases of bank notes.

It was like watching a stately, traditional company being taken over by asset-strippers.

Its older inhabitants underwent a callous process of humiliation and scorn, while its honoured brand-name was turned to other uses by people who had never much liked it anyway.

Now that’s over. What began in the age of the bleeper has ended in the age of the BlackBerry.

The costly suits and the dodgy donors have migrated, for the moment, to the Tory Party. Who knows where they will go next? Back to Labour? Or somewhere else?

Funnily enough, those Tories who have much of a memory will remember their party’s similar death.

They will recall Blackpool in the autumn of 2003 - unbelievably, only five years ago - when poor Iain Duncan Smith sat alone, much as Gordon Brown does now, listening to the whispers of a thousand plotters planning to get rid of him.

He knew, as Mr Brown does, that he was finished.

But, as the son of a Spitfire ace who had himself been raised in the military code, he saw no honourable way to go except to wait for his enemies to come and kill him. This they duly did.

The assassination of IDS was one of the strangest and most important moments in British politics.

IDS did actually represent the force and mind of the Tory Party, bewildered and demoralised, after its wholly unjust 2001 defeat.

He became leader because none of the supposed ‘big beasts’ of Toryism liked Tory voters or party members, or shared their views.

And most of the medium-sized beasts preferred to go away and make some money, rather than have pails of lukewarm swill chucked over them by a media who were then wholly in the pocket of New Labour, just as they are now in David Cameron’s pocket.

What happened next is so fascinating that everyone missed its significance.

The Michael Howard palace revolution against IDS was a blatant takeover of a Right-wing party by the ‘Centre-Left’ establishment.

It was played out almost entirely on the airwaves and in the newspapers. MPs did what they were told by the media.

It was made easier because the ‘Centre-Left’ media have always inaccurately portrayed Mr Howard as being Right-wing.

He isn’t. He is actually a conventionally liberal career politician of the sort you find near the top of both big parties.

After IDS had been utterly destroyed, it was made plain to all Tory MPs (with the help of the media elite) that they had better not stand against Mr Howard for the leadership.

So nobody did. And he was ‘elected’ unopposed in a way that makes Vladimir Putin look like a fervent democrat.

Compare the absence of media fuss about this with the bitter media condemnation of Labour for installing Gordon Brown without a vote.

The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.

The ‘Centre-Left’ establishment, Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.

Mr Howard made it plain that his coronation was the end of anything remotely Right-wing.

He ruthlessly sacked two candidates, Danny Kruger in Sedgefield and Adrian Hilton in Slough, for making apparently Right-wing remarks that could be (and of course were) misrepresented in the ‘Centre-Left’ media.

Then he went a great deal further, and sacked Howard Flight, the serving MP for Arundel, for a similar offence.

Mr Howard almost certainly had no legal power to do this, but once again the ‘Centre-Left’ media decided it was not a scandal.

The imposition of the liberal careerist David Cameron on the Tory Party, once Michael Howard had finished being the establishment’s caretaker, was also achieved by the ‘Centre-Left’ media.

They adopted Mr Cameron as their candidate and propelled him to victory despite a very poor start to his campaign and an equally poor performance on live TV, later on, up against his more conservative rival, David Davis.

You’ll notice that it is the same people, that ‘Centre-Left’ combo of media types, who did a similar job on the Labour Party back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Interestingly, that revolution was much more about image than about reality.

The Tories have genuinely dropped most of their remaining conservative positions. continues here


Its interesting isn’t it, that a columnist for a mainstream newspaper recognises the obvious, this being, that democracy is dead, one wonders if it ever really existed, in my own case, I began questioning it quite some time ago. It took little time for me to realise, that debates in the house had very little bearing on my life, or indeed that of others, I realised that in essence voting was a waste of time, a sham, given that each party, were completely in the pockets of what Mr Hitchen’s refers to as, “Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits”.

Of course I had no way of knowing then, just how corrupt the system is, how stacked the game, Mr Hitchen’s harks back to Iain Duncan Smith’s defeat in 2003, where Iain Duncan Smith the “quiet man of politics”, “sat alone”, yet there had if I remember, been a comprehensive campaign to oust Mr Smith for most of his chairmanship. The owned media had used their considerable might to ruin Mr Smith’s reputation, questioning his qualifications, expense payments and such like.

All of this is, a tried and tested formula to get shot of leaders, whom the “permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits”, wish to replace. Now such events would be bad enough, if just occurring over five short years, yet I believe that such behaviours, have occurred before I was even born. It is no untruth to state, that politics has been and is a rigged game, in some ways the masses now know this, one could look at voting patterns going back many years and see a consistent fall, in those taking time to vote, in my own life, I now know more who do not vote than do.

Oh they try to cajole the electorate, bully them, seek to lower the age when individuals can vote, finally they lie, claiming that those “Tommie’s” who were slaughtered in the Second World War, fought so that we could have the freedom to vote. Of course, this is an evil lie, those “Tommie’s” fought because they had no choice, no option, if they refused to fight then they were ostracized, considered cowards, facing gaol and even court-martial and death, under such conditions did they have choice, I leave it to the reader to decide.

I remember some years back now, an old soldier approaching a far-left stall, of his own violation mind and stating quite openly that, “he wished Hitler would have won”, of course he was ridiculed, disparaged until he walked away. Yet this is not the only time I have heard such sentiments, which of course is understandable, they were promised a land fit for heroes and comprehensibly lied to, this is a land fit for nothing.

I have to say at this point that, “I would never fight for this country, never lay down my life for this flag and never let my children do the same either”, does this make me a coward, a weakling, an ignoble scoundrel. I was of a different mind years ago, I wore this countries flag with pride, I scooted, ran to the recruiting office, filled with pride and visions of serving my country, yet for an individual to serve their country, it must first serve them and most importantly it must be their country.

Can we really say this of this country now, does it serve its people, does it look after its own, does it advocate its people’s interests or does it pander to the invader, permit the parasite and shelter the criminal. Is it my country, “if you are white reading this”, is it your country, are minarets, synagogues, gurdwara’s and all the other strange and alien aspects now prevalent, part of your country, part of your heritage, is your flag worth anything if all can lay claim to it.

I say no, I say that this is a country dying, relying upon its great past, because it has nothing else to offer, and “Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits”, have ruined it all, destroyed so much. So that is why the indigenous peoples of this country, do not rush to the polling booths, that is why democracy is dead, because perhaps, it always has been and the lie is now found out.

If it were but five short years since they oppressed us, since they ruled us, since they denied the people a voice, then it would be no hard thing to remove them but it has been far, far longer than that, if we had the voice they claim we have, why non-white immigration, generations past didn’t want it and voiced their disapproval for it. If we had a voice, why has the death penalty never returned, because they claim to know better than us, we are mere children to them, thrown playthings, asked for an opinion, when the decision has of course, already been made. 14

Strike union threatens to stop £1.5m cheque for Labour

The head of Britain's biggest public-sector union has accused Labour of being "devoid of ideas of how it's going to win the next election" and has begun a review of its £1.5m-a-year contribution to party funds.


Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, spoke out as hundreds of thousands of council workers prepare for the start of a series of strikes in support of a pay claim. The two- day strike to be held tomorrow and Thursday is expected to be one of the largest mass walk-outs for decades.

His warning, in an interview with The Independent, will add to the political pressure on Gordon Brown later this month, when Labour's National Policy Forum meets in Warwick to consider items for the next general election manifesto. 

Union leaders want to include a promise to loosen up the laws regulating strikes and are intent to use their financial hold over Labour to increase their bargaining power.

About 490,000 of Unison's 1.4 million members contribute £3 a year each to the Labour Party through a special fund, providing nearly a tenth of Labour's annual income. The union also donates to constituency parties, but has begun a review of how it spends its political funds which, Mr Prentis says, will "leave no stone unturned".

"We have got the worst employment rights in Europe, probably in the industrialised western world," Mr Prentis said. "There are restrictions in place which mean it is very, very difficult to stay within the law and to represent members.

"It's not an issue of secondary picketing or an issue of going back to mass pickets. The issue is that you have a Government that believes in deregulating business and deregulating anything connected with how wealth is created for the few, and yet where we try to represent low-paid working people, we're surrounded with regulation that makes it virtually impossible."

Mr Prentis said it was not just money that is increasing union influence over party policy: it is because union leaders have a better sense than the party leadership about where they want to go.

"We have seen more and more within the party that it's devoid of ideas of how it's going to win the next election," he said. "I don't get the impression from our members that they believe the Labour Party is still understanding what they are going through. 

"The electorate want clear choices. They want to know what our party stands for, and what the Tory party stands for. They want clear red water between them. Fudges are not helping anyone."

Unison says they expect around 600,000 employees to join the strike, which would make it one of biggest disputes in Britain, in terms of the numbers involved, since the 1926 General Strike. But the employers, the Local Government Association, estimate the numbers will be closer to 325,000.

The strike will cause delays in collecting rubbish, and will disrupt schools at a time when children are getting ready for end-of-term concerts and other performances. As it escalates, there will be a risk of the kind of "horror stories" about uncollected rubbish or unburied bodies that marked the 1978 Winter of Discontent, which brought down the government.

"At this stage, we want to be very careful in the way in which vulnerable people could be affected by the action," said Mr Prentis. "Nobody wants a Winter of Discontent; nobody wants a Summer of Discontent.

"But at the same time, if our members are taking industrial action; if they're losing their pay; if they're being treated as badly as they are being treated, at some point they have to make a stand."

He insisted that the union had not deliberately timed this week's strike to disrupt the end of the school year. "The action is determined by legislation. We're all parents ourselves," he said. 

Unison has estimated that 580,000 of its members, and 50,000 members of the general union, Unite, will take part in the disruption, and that there will be pickets at virtually every local government premises in the country. More strikes, stretching over three or four days at a time, are expected to follow unless councils offer more money. 

The employers admit that schools, refuse collection, and adult social care will be affected.

Unison is demanding a pay increase of 6 per cent, or 50p an hour, whichever is greater. Some of its members, such as street cleaners, work full-time for less than £12,000 a year. Mr Prentis claims that councils can afford the increase without raising council tax because of efficiency savings. The employers have offered a 2.45 per cent pay rise, which the unions argue amounts to a pay cut when set against rising food and fuel prices.

Jan Parkinson, managing director of Local Government Employers, said: "Strikes will not change the fact that our last offer was our final offer. If the pay settlement is any higher, councils will be forced to make the unpalatable choice between cutting frontline services and laying off staff." continues here

We don't need any more immigrants, says senior Labour adviser

One of the Government's most senior advisers today warned of the risk of overcrowding in the South-East unless there is a reduction in immigration.

Lord Turner launched a scathing attack on claims by ministers and business chiefs that large-scale immigration can be justified on economic grounds.

He accused them of using such arguments, knowing they do not stack up, to justify an inevitable influx of newcomers and avoid a "racist backlash".

Former CBI director general Lord Turner, who headed up the Pension Commission set up by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor and is now chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, submitted his analysis to a Lords inquiry on immigration.

Advocating a stable population as more favourable to the wellbeing of people in Britain, he concludes: "The simple answer to the question 'Do we need more immigrants and babies?' is no."

He believes welfare issues, linked to a growing population, such as disappearing green spaces, housing shortages and transport congestion - all affecting the South-East - will have a significantly greater impact than the economic benefits of immigration.

But the peer is not in favour of a total clampdown on immigration, which he believes can be partially justified on moral grounds, mainly because it helps newcomers, especially asylum seekers.

He also supports EU membership for Turkey even if it led to an "undesirably high" immigration surge because he thinks this is outweighed by building closer ties with a moderate and secular state with a majority Islamic population.

Most pointedly, though, Lord Turner, a former chairman of the Low Pay Commission, tears into the economic arguments for immigration, which he believes could send the population spiralling to 75 million by 2050. Firstly, in his paper entitled "Do we need more immigrants and babies?î, he rejects claims that without immigrants Britain would face a shortage of workers as mostly "economically illiterate."

"If we had fewer immigrants, the average wage rate of an office cleaner might be a bit higher, and businesses would pay the extra charge, clean the office less frequently, or use more efficient vacuum cleaners, but we would not have some offices cleaned just as now and others not cleaned at all," he said.

While capitalists and skilled employees had benefited from immigration from eastern Europe, some unskilled workers had been disadvantaged with wages kept lower, and overall the benefit to the UK had been small, he argued......article conts (-)

It’s very brave of Lord Turner, unfortunately no one will listen and even should we halt immigration tomorrow, we would still face a considerable dilemma.