London "Secretly Opened" UK Borders to Bulgarian Crime Gangs

Labour's “open door” immigration policy knowingly risked allowing dangerous people to settle in Britain unchecked.

This is revealed by documents of the Home Office, seen by The Sunday Times, which also mention Bulgarian organized criminal groups.

 “The Whitehall correspondence, which was illegally withheld by the Home Office for four years, shows how ministers were told by the country’s most senior immigration official that his staff were to be “encouraged to take risks” when granting visas, work permits and extended residency to hundreds of thousands of new migrants, the Sunday Times reported.

The documents help to explain the huge rise in the flow of migrants into Britain as the Home Office rushed to clear a backlog of 45,000 cases.

Officials agreed to fast-track 337,000 applications with minimal checks. This led to a rapid rise in immigration. In 1999, 170,000 visas were granted; by 2002, this had risen to 300,000.

As officials were being ordered to take risks, several potentially dangerous people entered the UK. In late 2001, more than 20 Taliban, who had fled from Afghanistan after their defeat by American and British forces, were allowed to stay in the UK.

A key figure in the scandal was Sir Bill Jeffrey, who was the director-general of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Britain’s most senior immigration official. He is now at the centre of controversy as the senior civil servant in charge of the Ministry of Defence.

The other key figure was Beverley Hughes, then minister of state for citizenship and immigration. She was later forced to resign after it emerged she had misled MPs about whether she had been warned that Romanian and Bulgarian crime gangs might want to exploit the UK’s decision to open its borders to those seeking work from eastern Europe.

The newspaper cites an article from two weeks ago where Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, wrote that Labour had allowed immigration to rocket in order to turn Britain “truly multicultural” and “to rub the right’s noses in diversity”.

The heart of his claim was that uncontrolled mass immigration had been a deliberate, covert policy to change the country’s demographics, the Sunday Times comments.

But Labour’s core vote, the white working class, were drawn to the BNP at the resulting pressure on jobs, homes and schools, it adds.