Tony Blair: "Our Nation's Future - multiculturalism and integration"

Tony Lair has been giving a speech on "Our Nation's Future - multiculturalism and integration". Click here for the full text. The BBC has a video of the speech. It is a long rambling affair, full of typicial Blairite meaningless generalities; but at the core of the speech is a set of six proposals (probably designed by a committee) intended to ensure an integrated society in the UK. Stripped of the verbiage, they reduce to:

• conditions for grants to religious groups;
• an end to forced marriages;
• the supremacy of UK law over sharia law;
• tighter control of visiting preachers;
• integration to be built into the national curriculum;
• English tests for immigrants.

I have no idea how many quangos or extra civil servants will be created to implement this vision, nor of how much those extra snouts in the taxpayers trough will cost. However, we can be sure that both figures will be substantial.

In the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Gimson nicely catches the vacuity of much of the speech.

Hopefully, Blair has hammered a few more nails into the coffin of multi-culturalism but I am not celebrating yet; left wing extremists are still a power in the Labour party. Once again, I note that those of us have been calling for such things for years are no longer extremist racists but mainstream Noo Labour. Very unsettling.