UK border controls in chaos

New data obtained by the Sunday Telegraph from the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act shows that thousands of illegal immigrants are disappearing through the UK’s inadequate border control system every year.

Particular weak points in the system include the Eurostar train service from Lille, and UK ports handling coach loads of visitors.

During the past year, the newly released official figures confirm that 3,527 immigrants absconded after failing border checks: of these only 846 were later found.  This of course means that almost 2,700 illegal immigrants remained at large even after having once been caught!

The above figures clearly do not include those illegal immigrants who managed to slip through the net without being caught at all, nor does it include asylum seekers, bogus or otherwise.

With the system in such chaos, the UK’s borders remain vulnerable to potential terrorists, though in any case such cases are usually recruited from within ‘British’ ethnic minority groups.

While large ethnic minorities remain in Britain’s towns and cities, illegal immigrants will easily find a pool of similar types among whom to hide, and with whom to find work.  A multi-ethnic Britain is inevitably a haven for illegal immigrants, including terrorists.

Biggest ever rise in UK population

The first results of last’s years UK Census prove that our population during the past decade saw the biggest jump in recorded history.  The surge is largely due to the immigration boom, in what was already an overcrowded country.  Another factor is the high birth rate among non-European immigrant groups.

England and Wales saw a 7.1% rise in population, from 52.4 million in 2001 to 56.1 million in 2011.  Needless to say these figures do not include unknown numbers of illegal immigrants.  Population density in London is now 5,200 per square kilometre – ranking alongside Madrid and Athens as the most densely populated cities in Europe.

Moreover in the next fifteen years, official projections show that two thirds of the next population increase will come from immigrants: an extra 5 million people, equivalent to the combined populations of Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bradford, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol.

No 2011 statistics have yet been published about racial or religious matters.  Click here for the latest official UK Census updates.

Oxford study reveals Labour’s immigration surge

A new study by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory shows that the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown presided over an immigration boom greater than any other major country except Italy.  (There’s an obvious reason for Italy being the first port of call, as it geographically closest to North Africa and the Balkans – but by the same logic the United Kingdom ought to be the very last port of call!)

In 1993 there were 3.8 million foreign-born people in the U.K., which was 7% of our population.  By 2010 this had risen to almost 7 million, an astonishing 12% of the population.

In other words there was a 22% rise in our migrant population, way ahead of neighbouring countries such as France, who experienced only a 3.4% rise.

The England First Party asks why successive U.K. governments have allowed this immigration surge?  English voters simply cannot trust the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians who have transformed our country without considering the views of the indigenous population.

Click here to read the Oxford report on the immigration boom.

Immigration scandal continues

It was one of the worst scandals of the New Labour years: in 2006 Charles Clarke was sacked as Home Secretary after admitting that more than 1,000 foreign criminals in British jails had been released at the end of their prison sentences rather than being assessed for deportation.

Yet now in 2012 – two years into the Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition that promised to remedy these New Labour abuses – we find that this scandal has not been remedied.

The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has today reported that of these 1,013 immigrant criminals, only 397 have been removed from our shores.  57 have proved impossible to trace and – most shocking of all – the remaining 559 have been allowed to remain in this country, either indefinitely or while their cases continue to be looked into!

The problem goes well beyond these thousand or so criminals from 2006.  Of more recent cases, only around two thirds of foreign prisoners released in 2011 have been deported, and there are another 2,670 dating back more than two years who have not yet been removed because they are still appealing. Around 120,000 immigration cases, according to the committee, have been written off because those involved can no longer be traced.  The asylum backlog still contains a further 20,000 unresolved cases.

As the parliamentary committee’s chairman concludes: “The reputation of the Home Office, and by extension, the UK Government, is being tarnished by the inability of the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to fulfil its basic functions. The foreign national prisoner issue and the asylum backlog were scandals which first broke in 2006, six years ago. UKBA appears unable to focus on its key task of tracking and removing illegal immigrants, overstayers or bogus students from the country.”

The England First Party would make a more fundamental criticism: the entire immigration racket should have been terminated long ago.  Our country has become a soft touch for any crook or scrounger who manages to cross the border.

Crossing the Rubicon: Peter Rushton speaks to the John Tyndall Memorial Meeting 2011

On 8th October 2011 Peter Rushton, assistant editor of Heritage and Destiny, chaired the sixth John Tyndall Memorial Meeting in Preston, Lancashire, and gave the following address.

John Tyndall led the nationalist movement from obscurity to the forefront of British politics, but he knew that anyone involved in our cause must experience the depths of crisis as well as the heights of achievement.

As National Front chairman, as founder of the British National Party and as editor of Spearhead for more than forty years, he knew both triumph and disaster – and for the six years between Nick Griffin’s takeover of the BNP in 1999 and his own death in 2005, John Tyndall consistently argued that those who were increasingly sceptical of Griffin’s leadership should remain within the BNP and fight to recapture it.

The position of British nationalism today requires a reassessment of that position.

We now face the most serious crisis in the history of our movement.  On Monday night the BBC will broadcast allegations of fraud against the BNP chairman Nick Griffin and his cronies. I have no doubt that those allegations will be fully documented, with evidence provided from people who until recently were Mr Griffin’s closest associates.

But none of this changes the underlying political realities. None of this changes the more serious crisis, which is the one facing our people and our nation – in fact facing all European peoples and nations.  None of this changes the potential for a nationalist party capable of presenting a credible face to the voters of England.

For the first time since 1066 our country’s population growth is mainly due to immigration, with a disastrous impact on schools, on the chronic shortage of affordable housing, and on the National Health Service.

The political establishment has never consulted the English people about this radical transformation of our country: a transformation that has been accelerated because just as foreigners have been arriving, increasing numbers of indigenous Britons have been leaving.

Let’s dispose of the nonsense that this is all perfectly normal, that England is some sort of mongrel nation built up through immigration.  The truth is that our population grew steadily up to about 1750, and very rapidly after 1750, without any mass immigration – until after the Second World War.

Our population in 1541 was about 2.7 million, which grew during the relative peace and stability of the Elizabethan age to about 4 million by 1600.

Over the next century and a half our population grew quite slowly to about 5.7 million by 1750.  Interestingly it is assumed by demographic historians that this 1750 figure was probably lower than the total English population in 1300, when there were probably more than six million inhabitants of England.

The total British population was reduced by about 30% by the Black Death in the mid-14th century, so by the 1380s was only about 3 million.

It was the Agrarian Revolution followed by the Industrial Revolution that led to a population boom, so that by the early 1840s the English population was around 15 million: more than double its previous record and more than five times the population a century earlier!

One of the earliest official historians of postwar immigration, J.A. Tannahill, pointed out, in words that should be repeated to every lying apologist for multiracialism:

“Britain is not by tradition a country of immigration.  In fact, between 1815 and 1914, she not only quadrupled her population without resorting to large-scale foreign immigration, but also despatched over 20 million people to destinations beyond Europe, at first largely to the USA and later in ever increasing proportion to the developing countries of the Commonwealth.”

One of the few major influxes of immigrants before modern times were the so-called Huguenots,  Protestant refugess from France and Flanders arriving in two waves at the end of the 16th and 17th centuries.  But in total even these Huguenots numbered perhaps 40,000 or 50,000.  (This was far larger than for example the Jewish immigrant population, which as late as 1750 probably numbered only about 5,000.)

We hear a lot about the economic benefits of immigration, but the Huguenots were one of the very few examples where this is true, bringing with them not only capital assets but skills in weaving, hat making and watch making.  There were about another 40,000 immigrants from France as a result of the Terror in the 1780s and 1790s after the French Revolution.  Strangely enough it was this wave of immigration, causing concern that some revolutionary spies might be smuggled in among the immigrants, that led to the first ever English laws regulating immigration.  Until the 1790s this was never thought necessary, because the numbers of immigrants were so small.  Far from our country being a creation of waves of immigration, immigrants were such an insignificant factor that no one bothered to formulate regulations!

Until the late 1940s the overwhelming majority of immigrants in England were Irish immigrants.  A few thousand black immigrants arrived as a result of the slave trade, but hardly any interbred with the indigenous English population.

If you read the Sherlock Holmes stories you will occasionally find reference to another type of immigrant who could be found in Victorian England – the so-called “Lascars” who usually lived in dockland areas such as Limehouse, having arrived as crew members of British ships trading with the Far East.  A few female Asian immigrants were known as “ayahs”, nannies for East India company officials, or later officers of the British Raj.

Yet as Dr Roger Bullard of Manchester University has estimated:

“Until the beginning of the 20th century the South Asian presence in Britain remained minute.  At any given time it would have included no more than a few hundred Ayahs and Lascars, [and] a rather smaller number of students seeking professional qualifications, whilst the number of princes and other aristocrats – most of whom only made the briefest of visits – could probably have been counted on the fingers of one hand.”

You can imagine why ­– given this historical context of very low immigration – Englishmen were very concerned by the tidal wave of Jewish immigration at the end of the 19th century.  About 150,000 Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe settled in Britain between 1880 and 1914, the majority in a fifteen year period between 1891 and 1906.

Just as the French Revolutionary immigration in the 1790s had led to a brief period of immigration control, it was this Jewish immigration that led to the basis for modern immigration laws, the Aliens Act of 1905.  It wasn’t a matter of “anti-semitism”, more a question of the scale of this Jewish immigration being way beyond anything our country had previously experienced.  We were not a nation of immigrants.

Even in the period between the two world wars, and even accounting for the number of colonial troops who stayed in England after 1918, immigration was a very minor factor in English life.  Only about 6,000 to 7,000 immigrants from the Indian sub-continent settled in Britain during the whole period from 1918 to 1939.

(About another 60,000 Jews arrived as refugees from national socialism during the 1930s, plus another 10,000 during the War.)

As is obvious, the scale of immigration post-war dwarfs anything previously seen in our history – which is not surprising because the British Nationality Act in 1948 explicitly granted the right of entry to 800 million subjects of the British Empire worldwide.  Madness, you might think – or was it wickedness?

Even in those days it was known perfectly well that a sane immigration policy would have to be a racially conscious policy.

In 1949 the Royal Commission on Population determined:

“Immigrants on a large scale into a fully established society like ours could only be welcomed without reserve if the immigrants were of good human stock and were not prevented by their religion or race from intermarrying with the local population and becoming merged with it.”

Four years earlier, immediately after the end of the war in 1945, the Fabian Society, closely linked to the Labour Party, had issued a pamphlet Population and the People, which said that:
“From the population point of view we need to encourage potential parents of healthy stock to settle in the British Isles, and to discourage those whom we already have from leaving.  …Men and women of European stock, between the ages of 20 and 30, are the immigrants best suited to assist population policy.”

The Fabian pamphlet added that immigrants should be chosen carefully to “ensure they were assimilable and could adapt to the British way of life.  …The utmost care should, of course, be taken to admit only those physically and mentally sound, and free from criminal records, who will introduce a sound stock into the country.  The eugenics of immigration cannot be overstressed.”

In 1948 – two days after the arrival of the infamous immigrant ship Empire Windrush, eleven Labour MPs wrote to their leader, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, warning:

“An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.”

As we have a former Bradford city councillor with us today, I should mention that two of those Labour MPs who spoke out against immigration in those early days were from his city: Frank McLeavy, later Lord McLeavy, MP for Bradford East, 1945-66; and Meredith Titterington, Bradford South, 1945-49, former Lord Mayor of Bradford.

[This website will later have a special section to honour those Labour MPs of yesteryear who spoke for England in opposing mass immigration.]

Since those days, the element within the Labour Party that truly aimed to fight for the white working class has steadily diminished, even as the truth of their warning that immigration would lead to “discord and unhappiness among all concerned” has been demonstrated time and again (most recently with the riots a few weeks ago).  Nationalist parties have become the true representatives of white workers.  While in many ways very different men with different outlooks, Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell and John Tyndall spoke for Englishmen and English interests that the Labour Party (and of course the Conservatives and Liberals) have abandoned.

So it is with a heavy heart that nationalists must face the fact that we ourselves have been betrayed by the leadership of our largest nationalist party.  In Ancient Rome provincial governors had to disarm themselves before crossing the River Rubicon and re-entering Roman territory.  To march across the Rubicon with your army was to challenge the leadership of the Roman Republic and was treason, punishable by death.

In 49 BC Julius Caesar deliberately defied his leaders by taking his army across that river, and still today we speak of “crossing the Rubicon” as an irreversible step when we boldly choose to confront destiny.

On Monday night we will cross the Rubicon.  Whether we like it or not, events will carry all serious nationalist activists across the Rubicon and force us to face facts too long ignored.

The leadership of the British National Party will be exposed for criminal fraud, which tragically cannot avoid staining every member of that party, regardless of their personal honesty and decency in the vast majority of cases – everyone who represents that party at any level will be tainted.

Many people have had to wrestle with a conflict of loyalty, and most especially with the knowledge that breaking away from the BNP, exposing the division of our movement to public view, trying to build a new movement out of the wreckage of the old, would be a titanic endeavour.

After Monday all such conflicts, all such strategic calculations will be settled.  It will simply no longer be possible to argue that somehow the BNP leadership can be persuaded to see sense, somehow our difficulties can be patched up.

All personal and factional divisions pale into insignficance next to the overriding division of our movement:
on one side a tiny gang of crooks and embezzlers;
on the other the vast majority of decent and committed patriots.

In St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he writes:
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Let us as nationalists find the courage to put away childish things and confront reality.

We will not succeed in building a new post-Griffin movement by pursuing narrow factional agendas.  It seems to me unquestionable that none of the alternative parties currently operating will be big enough to take on this task alone.

I therefore call on the leading activists in British nationalism to make a complete and irrevocable break from Nick Griffin and his party.  To make the tough choice to cut loose from the BNP before its corrupt leadership drags down even more good nationalists.

Precisely because our national crisis and our racial crisis has moved on to an even more acute stage, the challenge is in some ways even greater than that faced by John Tyndall during the creation of the National Front and the British National Party.  But the potential prize is greater too, as so many of our people are permanently disillusioned with Lib, Lab and Con.

We have absolutely no chance of capturing the loyalty of those disillusioned voters while our own movement is mired in corruption.

Yet if we can find the courage to cut out that cancer, our recovery can be rapid and our future can be bright.

Labour tries to recapture English workers

Bury South MP Ivan Lewis is the latest Labour spokesman to try to rediscover Labour’s links with English working class voters.  Mr Lewis is “shadow culture secretary” in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, and his outspoken comments come in a new volume of essays The Purple Book, published this week in advance of Labour’s conference at Liverpool at the end of September.

The title indicates an attempt by leading figures in Tony Blair’s New Labour to come to terms with the so-called “Blue Labour” critique of Blairism.  “Blue Labour” was a set of ideas associated with the Jewish academic Maurice Glasman (now Lord Glasman) and Searchlight‘s favourite Labour MP Jon Cruddas.  Their central insight was that in the pursuit of middle class floating voters, combined with liberal politically correct obsessions, New Labour had jettisoned the traditional values of their movement and was no longer seen by white working class voters as representing their tribal interests.

Lord Glasman was condemned by some of his former allies when he gave an interview this summer calling for a Labour anti-immigration policy:
Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first. The people who live here are the highest priority. We’ve got to listen and be with them. They’re in the right place – it’s us who’s not.

Ivan Lewis echoes some of these concerns in his own essay, as leaked to The Guardian, while not daring to go as far as Glasman.  The Bury MP writes:
The party’s instincts to be internationalist, liberal and champions of multicultural societies jar with the growing sense of insecurity of citizens buffeted by rapid economic and social change. Mistrust about Labour’s instincts and values on identity is one of the reasons why voters have rejected social democratic parties all over Europe.

He adds that these voters felt alienated from:
a system which to some appeared to favour receiving benefits and choosing not to work and irresponsible bankers who caused the financial crisis but continued to receive excessive payoffs and bonuses while everyone else was paying the price of their recklessness. Others felt migration was changing the nature of their community and undermining Britain’s way of life.

After acknowledging the effect of immigration on Britain’s housing crisis, Lewis shows his real agenda.  Far from seeking to restore the type of country that White Englishmen would recognise as their own, Lewis still wishes to make the Labour Party even more ethnically diverse, criticising:
a Labour Party activist base that while becoming diverse still does not sufficiently look like Britain.

There is one form of diversity however that causes particular upset to Ivan Lewis, who before becoming an MP was chief executive of the Manchester Jewish Federation:
Labour and the previous Tory governments should have acted earlier to tackle radicalisation in some Muslim communities by adopting a zero tolerance approach to anyone including religious leaders who preached hate, and by refusing to legitimise organisations unwilling to condemn extremism or the use of violence.

Notice Mr Lewis’s careful language.  He isn’t just talking about anti-British terrorism, he is insisting that organisations must condemn “the use of violence”.  It’s a fair bet that he doesn’t want to condemn the violence of the Israeli government in their assault on Gaza, and certainly not condemn the six decades of Zionist violence that forged the piracy of Palestine.

No: it’s a safe bet that Mr Lewis aims to force British based organisations to condemn anti-Israeli violence, in other words to take sides with the Zionist state against the people of Palestine and Lebanon.  The abandoned English working class are hoping for decent housing, jobs and health services; a crackdown on crime; and the reversal of more than half a century of mass immigration.  But Mr Lewis pays lip service to these concerns, while pursuing quite another, utterly alien agenda.

Ethnic minorities to make up 20% of UK population by 2051

New projections published today by Leeds University show that ethnic minorities will make up a fifth of the UK’s population by 2051, rising from 8% in 2001.

The researchers also predict that ethnic minority populations will expand especially rapidly in previously white and affluent areas.

The proportion of the UK population classified as “white British” will shrink to 67.1%.

Presenting the report Prof. Philip Rees said that “overall we can look forward to being not only a more diverse nation, but one that is far more spatially integrated than at present.”

While keen to welcome diversity, the Leeds academic team’s contempt for English identity is evident from their inability to spell the Lancashire boroughs Darwen and Hyndburn.

Click here to download the full report.

Labour’s secret plan to lure immigrants was borderline treason – and plain stupid

Was this author was too scared to accuse the Cultural Marxists running New Labour of outright treason? The info obtained by Migration Watch in their Freedom of Information request proves, not just treason, but attempted genocide of whites within the British Isles. Racial nationalists have been vindicated.

Telegraph Blogs, 10 Feb 2010: Incredible. I am stunned. Back in October Andrew Neather, a former Labour party speechwriter, let the cat out the bag when he said that the Government had encouraged immigration “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. But while Neather quickly backtracked, documents now released under the Freedom of Information Act suggest that he was telling the truth. Rather than being the result only of incompetence or a short-term economic measure to reduce inflation, Labour’s policy of runaway immigration was a deliberate and cynical attempt to change the face of British society.

The document released yesterday suggested that Labour originally pursued a different direction. It was published under the title “Migration: an economic and social analysis” but the removal of significant extracts suggested that officials or ministers were nervous over references to “social objectives”.

The original paper called for the need of a new framework for thinking about migration policy but the concluding phrase — “if we are to maximise the contribution of migration to the Government’s economic and social objectives” — was edited out.

Link to full article [external site]

Eurafrica and Eurabia: The plans for the EU to ‘expand beyond Europe’

David Miliband Speech on Europe-African and Europe-Middle Eastern Integration

European Parliament November 2007

The full text of Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s first major speech on the UK’s relationship with Europe, made at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.

 

I feel a strong sense of personal history in delivering this lecture today. My father was born in Brussels, my mother in Poland.

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My family history reflects the strife which divided the Continent and the values which later united it. This college reflects that history too. You have a sister college in Poland.

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The vision of your founder, Henri Brugmans, a hero of the Dutch resistance, was fired by memories of dark days listening to BBC reports of resistance struggle against fascism.

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And the people we honour this year, Anna Politkovskaya and Hrant Dink, were exemplars of our basic commitment to freedom of expression, a founding value of the EU. But my speech tonight is not about history. It is about the Europe that you, the students gathered here, will inherit in the future.

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President Sarkozy has suggested we need a Groupe des Sages to focus on the Europe of 2030. Today I want to enter that debate, not to engage in a piece of futurology, but to suggest how the EU can help to shape the world of 2030.

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My argument is this: The prospects and potential for human progress have never been greater. But our prosperity and security are under threat. Protectionism seeks to stave off globalisation rather than manage it. Religious extremists peddle hatred and division. Energy insecurity and climate change threaten to create a scramble for resources. And rogue states and failing states risk sparking conflicts, the damage of which will spill over into Europe.’

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These threats provide a new raison d’etre for the European Union. New because the unfinished business of internal reform to update our economic and social model is on its own not enough to engage with the big issues, nor the hopes and fears, of European citizens.

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For the EU because nation-states, for all their continuing strengths, are too small to deal on their own with these big problems, but global governance is too weak.

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So the EU can be a pioneer and a leader. Our single market and the standards we set for it, the attractions of membership, and the legitimacy, diversity and political clout of 27 member states are big advantages. The EU will never be a superpower, but could be a model power of regional cooperation.

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For success, the EU must be open to ideas, trade and people. It must build shared institutions and shared activities with its neighbours. It must be an Environmental Union as well as a European Union. And it must be able to deploy soft and hard power to promote democracy and tackle conflict beyond its borders.

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As Gordon Brown said on Monday there is no longer a distinction between ‘over there’ and ‘over here’.

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Let me begin with some reflections on Britain’s relationship with Europe.

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“We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation.”

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The churches, literature and language of the UK “all bear witness to the cultural riches we have drawn from Europe.”

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“Without the European legacy of political ideas we could not have achieved as much as we did.”

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“Our destiny is in Europe.”

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Those are not my words. They were delivered by Margaret Thatcher to this College in 1988 in her famous Bruges lecture.

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But despite these words, Mrs Thatcher’s speech was haunted by demons.

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A European superstate bringing in socialism by the back door. A country called Europe that stripped individual nations of their national identity. Utopian ideals and language that obstructed practical progress.

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These were the demons that led her some years later to conclude that far from being vital to Britain’s progress: “In my lifetime Europe has been the source of our problems, not the source of our solutions”.

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These demons still haunt some people. Thanks to Mrs Thatcher, “Bruges”, has become a rallying cry of Euro-scepticism.

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But I agree with my predecessor as Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd who said in 2005: “The myth that we are threatened with a European superstate is still nourished in the Conservative cul-de-sac.

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“Certainly there are Continental idealists who bitterly regret that it has faded away, but faded it has, as has been clear since Maastricht.”

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Open markets, subsidiarity, better regulation and enlargement are now far more part of the conventional vocabulary of European debate than a United States of Europe, centralised taxation or a common industrial policy.

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The truth is that the EU has enlarged, remodelled and opened up. It is not and is not going to become a superstate.

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But neither is it destined to become a superpower.

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An American academic has defined a superpower as “a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world…and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemon.”

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There is only one superpower in the world today – the United States. There may be others on the horizon, such as China and India, but the US has enormous economic, social, cultural and military strength. In terms of per capita income alone it will remain by far the dominant power for my lifetime.

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For Europeans, that should not be a source of dread: there is a great shared project for Europe and America, to embed our values and commitments in international rules and institutions.

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The EU is not and never will be a superpower. An EU of 27 nation states or more is never going to have the fleetness of foot or the fiscal base to dominate. In fact economically and demographically Europe will be less important in the world of 2050 that it was in the world of 1950.

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Our opportunity is different. The EU has the opportunity to be a model power.

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It can chart a course for regional cooperation between medium-sized and small countries.

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Through its common action, it can add value to national effort, and develop shared values amidst differences of nationality and religion.

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As a club that countries want to join, it can persuade countries to play by the rules, and set global standards. In the way it dispenses its responsibilities around the world, it can be a role model that others follow.

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This speech is intended to set out the basis of such progress.

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The EU has been defined for the past 50 years by a focus on internal change: by a Franco-German bargain over industry and agriculture, by the creation of a single market and the drive for basic shared social standards; by EMU. And the need to attend to internal policy problems remains.

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We should be immensely proud that in the post second world war period Europeans drove down levels of economic inequality and social injustice. That is the cause that brought me into politics.

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And the modernisation of our social and economic systems is essential to preserve those gains. That is why the UK is fully engaged in the current debates about policy reform in Europe.

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But that will no longer be enough. The defining challenges of the 21st century are global in scope, not national. We have spent a decade or more debating institutional reform; everyone who has participated is exhausted; and the rest of the European population are either bored or angry.

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The EU must now apply itself to managing the risks and maximising the benefits of the next wave of globalisation, both for its own citizens and around the world. This is where we need new thinking.

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The insecurities and threats of 2030 are clear. A Europe at war not within its borders, but struggling to cope with forces beyond its borders. Global capital, people and goods with whom it has not made peace.

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Religious extremism and division on its doorstep. Energy insecurity and climate change which threatens our security as well as our prosperity. Conflict and instability in regions where we have economic as well as moral interests.

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To avoid that future, we need to base our next generation Europe on four principles.

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My starting point is that a model power in the 21st century must be one that looks outwards. As Jose Manuel Barroso said, “…global Europe must be an open Europe”.

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So my first guiding principle is that we must keep ourselves open – open to trade, open to ideas and open to investment.

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This is not a foregone conclusion. Across Europe, it is tempting for producers to seek the shelter of tariffs, for environmentalists to yearn for a return to a (it has to be said) mythical world of self-sufficiency, for communities to fear unplanned migration.

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I understand the concerns. Openness creates risks and insecurities as well as opportunities. Our national welfare states must help people adjust to rapid economic and social change.

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This is tough. Migration is a big issue. And while Europe can be a magnet for the world’s best talent, it cannot be a tent for the world’s poorest people.

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Without some migration, an ageing and declining population will leave Europe facing economic stagnation and unsustainable social security bills.

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But integration of new communities is vital. We shall only tackle the root cause of migration – the poor economic prospects in neighbouring countries – if we continue to open up our markets.

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That is why, on economic and social grounds, the case against economic protectionism is overwhelming.

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Openness – to new investment, new products and new services – provides the competitive spur needed to raise our game. An open regulatory environment provides the basis for the highest value.

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If we hold back on open trade, we will only hold back the process of modernising our economies and raising productivity.

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We will force European consumers to pay higher prices. We will strengthen the hand of protectionist lobbies beyond our borders. We will deny millions of African farmers a lifeline out of poverty.

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If we have the courage to press for more free trade and investment, and act as a model power in going further and faster than other countries, we will enrich ourselves and the rest of the world.

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That is why we need to put European agriculture on a sustainable and modern footing: reduce tariffs, open up energy markets and complete the creation of a single market in services.

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This is not a race to the bottom. Europe is a model for reconciling economic dynamism with social justice. We must use the power of the single market to export these values.

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We have already seen how the single-market can pull up standards in the rest of the world. Thanks to the Reach Directive the chemicals in Chinese-made products have to comply with European standards.

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The size of our market means that European low carbon standards can become the global standard-setter.

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My second guiding principle is that we should use the power of shared institutions and shared activities to help overcome religious, regional, and cultural divides, especially with the Islamic world.

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There is, after all, a bleak scenario for 2030: a world more divided by religion, both between and within countries. Greater threats – both at home and abroad – from terrorists and rogue states. Growing hostility towards the West.

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Rejection of the global economic changes that many people believe has made us rich at their expense.

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The EU can help lead the search for an alternative. The EU itself represents a triumph of shared values.

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Now we need to find and express shared values across religious and not just national lines, so that Europe and its Muslim neighbours enjoy strong, unbreakable ties, and peace allows us to talk, debate, trade, build businesses, build communities and build friendships.

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We can do this only by creating shared institutions and engaging in shared activities that provide a living alternative to the narrative which says the West and the Islamic world are destined to clash.

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There are obvious immediate needs:

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* In Iraq, where we are moving forward together to bolster the forces of economic development and political reconciliation.

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* In the Middle East where the EU Action Plan needs to be a vital part of the road from Annapolis to a viable Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel.

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* And in Lebanon, where the EU has almost 8,000 thousand troops deployed to help preserve stability.

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But our top priority must be to keep our promises on enlargement. As Vaclav Havel said in December 2002, “the vision of becoming part of the EU was…the engine that drove the democratisation and transformation of” of Central and Eastern Europe.

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Enlargement is by far our most powerful tool for extending stability and prosperity.

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Countries that are already on the accession path – Turkey and the Western Balkans – must be given full membership as soon as they fully meet the criteria.

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And Turkey and all Cypriots need to play a constructive role in UN efforts to solve the Cyprus problem and unify the island on a bi-zonal and bi-communal basis.

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If we fail to keep our promises to Turkey, it will signal a deep and dangerous divide between East and West.

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Beyond that, we must keep the door open, retaining the incentive for change that the prospect of membership provides.

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Being part of Europe should be about abiding by the shared rules – the acquis – that embody our shared values by respecting our separate identities and traditions.

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Not all countries will be eligible for full membership, or show the will to join. So we should take the European Neighbourhood Policy a step further. We must state clearly that participation is not an alternative to membership, or a waiting room. And we must offer access to the full benefits of the single market.

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The first step would be the accession of neighbouring countries – especially Russia and the Ukraine – to the WTO. Then we must build on this with comprehensive free-trade agreements.

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The goal must be a multilateral free-trade zone around our periphery – a version of the European Free Trade Association that could gradually bring the countries of the Mahgreb, the Middle-East and Eastern-Europe in line with the single-market, not as an alternative to membership, but potentially as a step towards it.

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Finally, we need to create more shared activities to build shared values and bring us closer to our neighbours.

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ERASMUS student exchanges have been hugely successfully over the last twenty years in fostering a common understanding and common identity between European students.

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Some 150,000 students participate every year, taking the opportunity to absorb another culture and learn another language.

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Let us set the goal that by 2030 a third of our ERASMUS exchanges will be to countries beyond our borders, including those of the Middle-East and North Africa.

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My third guiding principle is that a model power should champion international law and human rights not just internally, but externally too. We need to live by our values and principles beyond our borders, not just within them.

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Peace and democracy has settled across our continent. To that extent, the EU has been an extraordinary success.

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But, as the wars in the Balkans showed, our record is not perfect. And our task will not be complete until the final piece in the Balkans jigsaw – Kosovo – is resolved.

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But in the future the main threats to our security will come from farther afield. From failed or fragile states, where law and order dissolve, where the economy stops, where arbitrary violence rules, and terrorists can operate at will. We can see the terrible effects in Darfur and Chad today.

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From rogue states, that defy and endanger the international community by breaking the common rules we have all agreed to abide by. And from non-state actors – like Al Qaeda – hell bent on destroying our way of life.

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Europe is well equipped to contribute a positive response to these threats. Like NATO, its members have shared values which can generate the political and military commitment for decisive action.

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But like the UN, its member states have the full spectrum of economic, development, legislative, political and military tools.

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We must begin by establishing a wider consensus on the rules governing the international system.

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We must use the legitimacy and political clout of 27 members to enshrine the principle of Responsibility to Protect at the heart of the international system.

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We must be prepared to uphold commitments made under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We must mobilize member states behind the establishment of an Arms Trade Treaty.

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We must also overcome the blockages to collaboration with NATO. We welcome the signs of increased willingness on the part of key partners to do so.

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First, European member states must improve their capabilities. It’s embarrassing that when European nations – with almost two million men and women under arms – are only able, at a stretch, to deploy around 100 thousand at any one time.

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EU countries have around 1,200 transport helicopters, yet only about 35 are deployed in Afghanistan. And EU member states haven’t provided any helicopters in Darfur despite the desperate need there.

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European nations need to identify the challenges we face; the capabilities we consequently need; then identify targets for national investment in equipment, research, development, and training necessary to make more of our armed forces; work together for efficiency; and back it up with political drive.

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A second thing we must do is to strengthen our ability to respond to crises in a more comprehensive way. Increasing our capacity to put peacekeepers into the field – whether on UN, EU or NATO missions – is a crucial part of cooperation.

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As the prime minister set out earlier this week, military forces should be deployed on peacekeeping duties with civilian crisis management experts as an integral part of the operation.

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There is limited value in securing a town if law and order breaks down as soon as the troops move on. There is limited gain in detaining terrorists and criminals if there is no courthouse to try them in or jailhouse to hold them in.

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Security without development will soon alienate local populations. Development without security is impossible. They are two sides of the same coin.

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Third, we must use our power and influence, not just to resolve conflict, but prevent it. We must show we are prepared to take a lead and fulfil our responsibilities.

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Javier Solana and George Robertson, working together for the EU and NATO, brought Macedonia back from the brink of civil war in 2001.

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Our military deployment to north-eastern Congo in helped plug a critical gap in the UN’s presence there in 2003. We have built on UN sanctions to increase pressure on countries like Iran and Sudan.

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And where the UN has been reluctant to act – as on Zimbabwe and Burma, where the regimes continue to oppress their people – we have introduced our own measures.

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My fourth guiding principle is that any model power in the 21st century must be a low carbon power, so the European Union must become an Environmental Union.

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More than any other area, the decisions we take on energy now will affect the world we inhabit in 2030.

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In the decisions made at the Spring Council last year, the EU showed its ambitions to be model power on climate change. By setting unilateral targets, with the offer to go further if others do, we are using our political clout to increase the pressure on others to act.

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By backing those targets with regulations and a carbon price, we are beginning to use our economic clout to transform product markets too. But to become an Environmental Union but we must go further.

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We must set ambitious, long term regulations to phase out carbon emissions in key areas, transform product markets through the standards we set, and gain economic advantage in environmental innovation.

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The priorities are clear. We must agree a timetable for reducing average vehicle emissions to 100g/km by 2020-2025 (compared with average EU emissions of 160 g/km), on the road towards a zero-emission vehicle standard across Europe.

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We must ensure that by 2015, we have 12 demonstration projects in Carbon Capture and Storage, and that by 2020, all new coal-fired power stations must be fitted with Carbon Capture and Storage.

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We should ensure the long term future of the EU ETS, to include more sectors of our economy, and to become the hub of a global carbon market which generates the incentives and the funding for the shift to low carbon power and transport not just in Europe but around the world.

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The third phase of the EU ETS provides an opportunity to scale up and reform the CDM – to move it from a focus on individual projects, to groups of projects or whole sectors. We have already agreed to extend the EU ETS to include aviation, but we must also consider the case for surface transport.

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And we should consider moving from individual countries setting their own allocation to harmonised allocations on the road to cap-setting done centrally. As the European Central Bank regulates money supply for the Eurozone, it is worth thinking whether the idea of a European Carbon Bank could in future set limits on the production of carbon across Europe.

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Discussions on the future of the EU budget must take account of this context.

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The current budget will be worth 860bn Euros over 7 years.

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The three tests for the future of the EU budget are clear: is it advancing national and European public interest? Is grant spending the right tool to achieve our objectives, or could regulation, or loan-finance, provide a better alternative? And is it demonstrating sound financial management?

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Over time, I believe that points to aligning the budget more closely with the external global challenges we face, in particular, a focus on climate change.

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Environmental security not food security is the challenge of the future.

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It is telling that those who are near us, want to join us. And that those who are far away, want to imitate us. The EU can claim major successes.

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The single market has created peace and prosperity out of a continent ravaged by war. Enlargement has transformed Central and Eastern Europe. European forces across the world are active in preventing and resolving conflict.

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These are real achievements. The common view is that they represent a triumph over institutional arrangements.

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But the constitutional debate shows that people don’t want major institutional upheaval. Unanimity is slow but it respects national identities.

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The commission is not directly elected but that is exactly why it avoids the temptation of national and political affiliation and offers a wider European perspective.

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The lesson, I think, is that in politics we tend to overestimate our ability to influence events in the short term, but we hugely underestimate our ability to shape our long term future.

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That is particularly true for the European Union.

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Across Europe, people are feeling a divergence between the freedom and control they have in their personal lives, and the sense of powerlessness they face against the great global challenges we face: from preventing conflict and terrorism to addressing climate change, energy insecurity, and religious extremism.

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They are confident about personal progress, but pessimistic about societal progress.

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Europe has the chance to help fill this void. There is a clear choice.

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Focus on internal not external challenges, institutions rather than ideals. Fail to combine hard and soft power, the disciplines and benefits of membership with the ability to make a difference beyond our borders. The result – the return of protectionism, energy insecurity, division with the Islamic world, and unmanaged migration from conflict.

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Or Europe can look global and become a model regional power.

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We can use the power of the EU – the size of our single market, our ability to set global standards, the negotiating clout of 27 members, the attractions of membership, the hard power of sanctions and troops, the power of Europe as an idea and a model – not to substitute for nation states but to do those things to provide security and prosperity for the next generation.

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We are pragmatic. We have missed some opportunities. But pragmatism and idealism should be partners. And the UK is determined to make them so.

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Spare us the balloon slogans about freedom, identity, democracy and security…

Excellent 2006 article by Frank Kimbal Johnson reposted recently on the Guarding the Old Flag blog.

BLOGOSPHERE, 28 Dec 2009: There are ‘mostly other directed’ and ‘mostly inner directed’ people, and any amount of research has shown that the latter are quite a small minority of the population at any given time. There is a kind of social magnetism which draws people into ‘going with the flow’, as in crowd behaviour at outdoor and indoor events. On such occasions personal perceptions and judgement are usually submerged in the collective response. Hence the old Spanish saying that shepherds may change, but sheep remain sheep. But however rugged one’s individuality, the fact is we are all social animals and therefore obliged to take some interest in the way our society is governed. Neglect of this responsibility leaves the field open to career politicians with the ingrained conceit that they know best what everybody else should be doing and what matters most in the world. They like to call this megalomania ‘leadership’, when all it usually amounts to is self-serving bossiness and exploitation of the gullible via largely complicit mass media.

So when you hear someone disclaiming any interest in politics, you are probably in the company of sheep. Such complacency is of course fostered by bland assurances that British democracy is designed to protect the public good and ensure our most cherished traditions and aspirations inform government policy. Added to which we have the opportunity to choose between main contenders for political office at approximately five-year intervals, thus giving us the kind of government most people want.

So much for the theory. What really happens is that, over the years, certain factions contrive to subordinate the public to an ‘Establishment’ deeply entrenched behind complex legalistic barricades, and with its own self-serving agenda and priorities.

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