What they are frightened of is that people will think that Labour is indifferent to such an invasion. As a consequence, people will not vote Labour.The reasoning of the Conservative Europhiles is similar. It has nothing to do with the possible imperilment of our supposedly good record in race relations over recent years, which was what the Prime Minister implausibly claimed on Tuesday It has everything to do with the fear of losing votes. It is all rather disgusting.This accounts for the virulence of ministerial responses to the resignation of the estimable Mr Charles Wardle. Why, the fellow was not even still at the Home Office, where he had been as a junior minister He was simply being a Meddlesome Mattie. There had been nothing like it – though ministers did not draw this parallel – since the late Ian Gow resigned as Minister of Housing in 1985 in protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement.To make matters worse, Mr Wardle was and is right. As Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs of the immigration agreement which she negotiated at Luxembourg in December 1985, before the passing of the Single European Act 1986: “Neither the Commission, nor the Council nor the European Court would in the long run be prepared to uphold what had been agreed in this statement any more than they would honour the limits on majority voting set out in the treaty itself.” Mr Kenneth Baker wrote to the same effect in his own memoirs.

As Aneurin Bevan once said, why read the crystal when you can read the book?. LAST Sunday, in a long article in this newspaper, Raphael Samuel “condemned the snobs who sneer at the heritage industry” The named snob was me. The article was, it turned out, a nervously-diluted extract from a chapter in Raphael Samuel’s new book, Theatres of Memory The original is a good deal ruder. It attacks “The Heritage Baiters” – not only me but the writers Patrick Wright (author of On Living in an Old Country) and Robert Hewison (The Heritage Industry) – for voicing “a chorus of disdain”.
In the article, I am accused only of an litist attitude to the masses, because I wrote that some heritage displays “vulgarised” history.

In the book, Samuel goes on to convict me of “literary snobbery, an apparent belief that the only true knowledge is that which is to be found in books”. He complains that I pose as a “moral aristocrat” who thinks that common people cannot be trusted with pictures and pageants; an intellectual PE instructor who wants the public to grapple actively for their instruction, rather than absorb it passively through spectacle.Journalists dish it out, and they ought to be able to take it. My excuse for picking up this challenge is that the heritage argument – not a simple one – really matters. I admit to outrage when the most bookish of my acquaintances says that I am the one who believes that nothing is true unless it has been printed.