“New Labour has turned tolerant Britain into a powder keg of racial and religious mistrust through their misguided and ill-thought-out policy of multiculturalism.

“Multiculturalism is meant to celebrate difference but I don’t see much to celebrate in today’s Britain. What I actually see is clowns like Sir Ian Blair pussyfooting around the sensibilities of a minority while the rest of us have been silenced for fear of being called racist.

“Since the 7/7 bombings, this Government has bent over backwards to win support from the Muslim community. Thousands have been spent on Muslim roadshows, laws against forced marriage have been dropped and prominent so-called community leaders have been knighted and promoted.

“And what has been the result of all this eggshell-treading? An increased level of victimhood, demonstrations and outrage at the slightest criticism of the Muslim religion and culture. Well, enough is enough.

“Forget lifting veils, Labour should remove the kid gloves and treat Muslims the same as every other British citizen. And it’s not just me saying this. Even the Church of England, in a leaked report, is saying the Government has shown preference to Muslims and has contributed to the divisions in modern Britain.”

Jon Gaunt in The Sun, 10 October 2006

The Church of England has launched an astonishing attack on the Government’s drive to turn Britain into a multi-faith society.

It claims that divisions between communities have been deepened by the Government’s “schizophrenic” approach to tackling multiculturalism. While trying to encourage interfaith relations, it has actually given “privileged attention” to the Islamic faith and Muslim communities.

Written by Guy Wilkinson, the interfaith adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, the paper says that the Church of England has been sidelined. Instead, “preferential” treatment has been afforded to the Muslim community despite the fact that it makes up only three per cent of the population. Britain remains overwhelmingly a Christian country at heart and moves to label it as a multi-faith society suggest a hidden agenda, it says.

The report lists a number of moves made by the Government since the London bombings in July last year to win favour with Muslim communities. These include “using public funds” to fly Muslim scholars to Britain, shelving legislation on forced marriage and encouraging financial arrangements to comply with Islamic requirements. These efforts have undermined its interfaith agenda and produced no “noticeable positive impact on community cohesion”, the Church document says.

“Indeed, one might argue that disaffection and separation is now greater than ever, with Muslim communities withdrawing further into a sense of victimhood, and other faith communities seriously concerned that the Government has given signals that appear to encourage the notion of a privileged relationship with sections of the Muslim community.”

Sunday Telegraph, 8 October 2006

Mad Mel enthusiastically welcomes the news: “This is a seismic reversal, in a Church that for decades has been on its inter-faith knees before multiculturalism and abandoned the defence of Britain’s Christian identity.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 8 October 2006

David Cameron today vowed to break up Muslim ghettos in Britain’s cities. In the most frank comments on the issue by a major party leader, he used his keynote party conference speech to say Britain had made an error by allowing ghettos to develop.

“It worries me that we have allowed communities to grow up which live ‘parallel lives’,” he said in an extract of today’s speech obtained in advance by the Evening Standard. “Communities where people from different backgrounds never meet, never talk, never go into each others’ homes,” said the Tory leader.

He said migrants should learn English because contact between people would overcome differences and “the most basic contact comes from talking to each other”. Mr Cameron said that children should be taught “the core components of British identity – our history, our language, our institutions”.

He went on: “We need to have contact. In many of our towns and cities, we have allowed ghettoes to develop. Whole neighbourhoods cut off from the rest of society. Immigrant families who only ever meet people with the same country of origin. We need to find ways to avoid this.”

Evening Standard, 4 October 2006

Significant that, of all the issues dealt with in Cameron’s speech, this is the one the Standard has seized on and advertised with a banner headline.