WHO NEEDS BORAT to caricature funny foreigners from the East when we have Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality? Borat is wowing cinema audiences with tales of how his fellow Kazakhs still hate the Jews. Meanwhile, Mr Phillips told BBC viewers of anecdotal evidence that new Eastern European immigrants are coming to Britain “frankly with attitudes towards black people which date back to the 1950s. That is unacceptable.”

The slight difference is that Borat, the journalist-turned- film-star, is a joke created by Sacha Baron Cohen, whereas Mr Phillips, the journalist- turned-self-styled-referee of our race relations, is serious. Yet while Borat’s cracks about Kazakhs have caused a stir, Phillips’s remarks about Eastern Europeans being unacceptable racists are apparently acceptable. Nobody has accused him of inciting “Roman-Bulgaro-phobia”.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of politics today. In the past, left-wing people like me argued that tightening immigration controls was racial discrimination against the Third World. Now anti-racists like Mr Phillips talks of the possible dangers of more white immigration. Perhaps while customs check Eastern Europeans’ luggage, the thought police should search their minds for contraband political baggage.

John Reid, the Home Secretary, has announced employment quotas for immigrants from the new EU countries. Everybody knows this has nothing to do with economics, and that modern Britain has benefited from the coming and going of Polish and other workers.

It is a political stunt, and a pointless one at that; try to imagine the police imposing a £1,000 on-the-spot fine on some hapless Bulgarian for “labouring without a licence”.

But the prejudice underlying these token gestures should be, to use Mr Phillips’s word, as unacceptable as that which led a past Labour government to impose virginity tests for Asian brides (in the late 1970s, not the 1950s). Phillips’s veiled warning that Eastern Europeans could cause a “conflict of diversity” reveals what today’s elite think of the white working classes — as an ignorant ethnic pogrom waiting to happen.

Their attitude towards the white British working class is no different; see his suggestion that the sight of a veil could soon cause race riots.

Like Borat’s joke, the furore over Eastern Europeans is really about us rather than them. The way we look at immigrants reflects how we see ourselves. In a more self-confident moment, the British authorities would not be worrying about whether a few thousand hard-working Bulgars might tear apart the fabric of society.

Meanwhile, alongside the Muslim neighbours, my corner of northeast London is now home to Eastern Europeans from the Polish man with a van (and a hammer, screwdriver etc) whom my wife hired this week, to the Romanian deli round the corner. They may come from another country. But the likes of Reid and Phillips seem to be from a different planet.

• THE LIST of things allegedly caused by global warming now runs from A for asthma to Y for yellow fever (see numberwatch.co.uk). The science of climate change is a complex business. But the political discussion often seems to treat it as a simplistic moral parable, where man-made global warming takes the place of an angry God punishing us for our sins. Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, cautioned this week that unchecked climate change will bring down war, famine and terrorism on our heads unless we, er, tax cheap flights now. For some reason she failed to mention the plagues of frogs.

  But then, this was a very new Labour take on the Old Testament. Her dramatic conclusion was that “In short, a failing climate means more failed states”. A failing climate? Has the weather too now failed to meet the targets set for it by Whitehall? Surely the solution must be to send in the government inspectors. Let us act now to close down weather systems that fall below Mrs Beckett’s standards of climatological correctness.

• MANY THANKS to readers who pointed out that my criticisms of history teaching last week might have been slightly more convincing had my article not claimed that Britain abolished the slave trade in 1707 (it was 1807 of course). I can only say that my old grammar school did teach us history properly. What they did not teach me, however, was how to type.

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