How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration
The following article, on Mass Immigration, its history and importance, was published in the Mail on Sunday on 31st March:WAS this Britain? Every group of people I passed was speaking Russian.
The shops were full of black bread, pickled cucumbers and vodka, the faces were Slavic.
The advertisements in the windows were in the Cyrillic script I had come to know so well when I lived, many years before, in Moscow.
Yet here I was in the shadow of a lovely English Gothic church tower, half-way to dear old Skegness, surrounded by fields of English turnips, leeks and sugar beet, under an English heaven.
This was Boston, Lincolnshire, which I had first seen three decades ago as a somnolent, slightly shabby market town where a kindly traffic warden had found me a parking space, saying: 'We can always find room for a foreigner.'
In those days, a visitor from London was about as foreign as it got in Boston.
Now they were talking Portuguese in the pubs, Polish in the cafes, Latvian and Estonian on the buses.
If I had fallen into the river and called out 'Help!', I couldn't even have been sure that anyone would have understood.
Somehow this transformation was more of a shock, more disturbing and perplexing, than any of the other migration-driven changes I had seen.
And that tended to be the attitude of the older residents - not anger, hatred or hostility, we are not like that - but bafflement that such a huge thing could have erupted into their peaceful lives, without anyone warning or asking them.
We had all got used to London being different, long ago.
The former mill towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, with their huge new mosques and veiled women, were a place apart.
But Lincolnshire?
If it could come here, into Deep England, then it would come to everywhere.
It really is not much good the Prime Minister turning round now and saying to the people of Boston 'this must stop'.
Even if anyone believed he can or will do anything (and his various schemes are as firmly based as Theresa May's promises to get rid of Abu Qatada), the event has happened.
The greatest mass migration in our history has taken place.
The newcomers are lawfully here.
They have the jobs, live in the houses, use the NHS.
Their children are in the schools.
Come to that, they are paying tax.
Our leaders only had to go to Boston, any time in the past five years, and they would have known.
But all our leading politicians were afraid of knowing the truth.
If they knew, they would at least have to pretend to act.
And the truth was, they liked things as they were.
And it was at least partly my own fault.
When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.
It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.
Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people - usually in the poorest parts of Britain - who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly 'vibrant communities'.
If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.
Revolutionary students didn't come from such 'vibrant' areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).
We might live in 'vibrant' places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.
But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients - not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.
When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as 'racists'.
What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?
To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as 'racist'.
And it also meant cheap servants for the rich new middle-class, for the first time since 1939, as well as cheap restaurants and - later on - cheap builders and plumbers working off the books.
It wasn't our wages that were depressed, or our work that was priced out of the market. Immigrants didn't do the sort of jobs we did.
They were no threat to us.
The only threat might have come from the aggrieved British people, but we could always stifle their protests by suggesting that they were modern-day fascists.
I have learned since what a spiteful, self-righteous, snobbish and arrogant person I was (and most of my revolutionary comrades were, too).
I have seen places that I knew and felt at home in, changed completely in a few short years.
I have imagined what it might be like to have grown old while stranded in shabby, narrow streets where my neighbours spoke a different language and I gradually found myself becoming a lonely, shaky voiced stranger in a world I once knew, but which no longer knew me.
I have felt deeply, hopelessly sorry that I did and said nothing in defence of those whose lives were turned upside down, without their ever being asked, and who were warned very clearly that, if they complained, they would be despised outcasts.
And I have spent a great deal of time in the parts of Britain where the revolutionary unintelligentsia don't go.
Such people seldom, if ever, visit their own country.
Their orbits are in fashionable London zones, and holiday destinations.
They are better acquainted with the Apennines of Italy than with the Pennines of their own country.
But, unlike me, most of the Sixties generation still hold the views I used to hold and - with the recent, honourable exception of David Goodhart, the Left-wing journalist turned Think Tank boss who recognises he was wrong - they will not change.
The worst part of this is the deep, deep hypocrisy of it.
Even back in my Trotskyist days I had begun to notice that many of the migrants from Asia were in fact not our allies.
