The Centre For Social Cohesion

So, there we have it, at last, a final admission by no less than the Labour Minister responsible for immigration, Liam Byrne, that the large-scale volume of net immigration his party has deliberately engineered with such machismo these last ten years has 'damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country’, to use the words employed by the Times yesterday in its account of what he has admitted.

Despite all the appalling details to have emerged in today's press about the truly dreadful ‘honour killing’ of Banaz Mahmod, given yesterday’s guilty verdict of her father and uncle for arranging her murder, the true and horrendous significance of one aspect of her case, to my mind, has yet to have be adequately noted or commented on.

It makes details of her murder even more chilling and disturbing, if that is possible, than those that have already emerged and been noted by the media.

Yesterday at the Old Bailey, three young men, Sodrul Islam, Delwar Hussain and Mamoon Hussain, were convicted of the attempted murder of a thirty-one year old fourth man, John Payne. The attempted murder took place in April 2006 on the Clichy estate in Stepney in London’s Tower Hamlets.

Boudicca. Ambrosius. Hereward the Wake.

What do these three British characters have in common?

According to legend, all three put up stiff, if doomed, fights against foreign aggressors – the Romans, Saxons and Normans respectively.

Yet none was of “native” British stock: Hereward was an Anglo-Saxon, Ambrosius a Roman, and even Boudicca’s Celtic ancestors had displaced the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge.

Their story is that of Britain: a nation of incomers, each wave resisting the next before finally mingling with it.

Now we’re at it again. The government has announced plans for a new citizenship test, which hopeful immigrants must overcome before becoming British.

2008 is European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. I bet you didn’t know that.

According to its own dedicated website, the purpose of the year is ‘to encourage all those living in Europe to explore the benefits of our rich cultural heritage and to learn from different cultural traditions’.

Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch has been arguing the point for ages. But it took a cross-party House of Lords Committee to join the chorus before what he has been banging on about all this time finally to make it to the front pages of the national press.