Remember how one was always being told that without immigration, this country would be floundering? That it would be nothing? That our unique economic dynamism was due to the unparelleled economic benefits which came with the historically unprecedented levels of immigration of the past ten years?

We don't hear that mantra anymore. We are in the deepest recession of any Western country, so it would be silly to draw attention to it, perhaps. Besides, an all-party Parliamentary committee concluded last year that the economic benefits were, when measured against the costs, marginal. This conclusion only confirmed what a report by Sir Andrew Green's Migrationwatch had already found.

So what was the point of it then? The apparent motives behind the policy are gradually seeping out. Last year Andrew Neather, a former Labour speechwriter, wrote in the Standard that 'it didn’t just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year ...was to open up the UK to mass migration’ which was meant to 'rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.' 

Neather described a Government policy document which he had helped to write in 2000. He said that ‘drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was paranoia about it reaching the media’. The paper eventually surfaced as a purely technical product of the research department of the Home Office but earlier drafts that he saw ‘included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.

Migrationwatch has obtained an earlier draft of that policy paper, circulated in October 2000. As Andrew Green wrote this week: 'It had already been censored but it was to be neutered still further. In the executive summary, six of eight references to ‘social’ objectives were cut from the version later published...What could have been meant by social policy in the context of immigration, especially as it was dressed up as combating social exclusion? This must surely have been code for increasing the numbers substantially, as Mr Neather revealed. If not, why all the secrecy?...Why the censorship that has now been laid bare? Reading between the lines of these documents it is clear that political advisers in Number 10, its joint authors, were preparing a blueprint for mass immigration with both economic and social objectives.'

This is dynamite: a deliberate attempt, not put before the electorate, to change the very identity of the country. It is of huge historical significance; when expenses scandals and the like have been forgotten, we will be living with the results of it.  Yet astonishingly, little is being made of it. Other than a perfunctory response to the original Neather piece, losts in the mists of time already, there has been no major Tory comment on any of this.

I have always believed that multiculturalists and supporters of mass immigration were, at best, naive idealists holding to a 60s notion of the brotherhood of man, and at worst, motivated by a deep distaste for the whole idea of the nation, and British identity in particular. They held a set of attitudes which hugely influenced the drift of national life and the cultural atmosphere. Would even such people have imagined there was a deliberate policy to back them up?