How Islam has killed multiculturalism

Rod Liddle says that Blair’s great U-turn on immigration has placed the Labour party to the right of Ray Honeyford — the man once vilified as a racist

Do you have a core of Britishness within you? Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is anxious for us all to have one, even if we are not quite sure what it is. Trevor reckons he has one, at any rate. Perhaps it was implanted along with his OBE back in 1999.

His attachment to this notional thing, a core of Britishness, is nonetheless excellent news — and also a little surprising. Because Trevor’s enormous quango, the Commission for Racial Equality, has spent the last 30 years arguing that there is no such thing at all. The CRE was never hugely keen on the idea that we might all of us, white and black and brown, share a common set of values and beliefs; it smacked of — what was the phrase? — cultural imperialism.