There is something a little pitiful watching Gordon Brown tell the country how worried he is about immigration, and how it must not be a taboo issue. Like watching a paralytic drunk explaining in slurred tones how he will never touch another drop, and all the while you can smell the paint-stripper on his breath.

There is no issue — with the possible exception of Iraq — on which Labour has been more deceitful to the public at large, or has more egregiously betrayed its core working-class support. The only reason Brown is addressing the issue now is that we are six months away from an election and he fears that the troglodyte BNP thickoes will chew away great big gobfuls of angry working-class voters across a diagonal swathe of supposedly Labour country, from the white-flight satellite towns of Essex to the old mill towns of east Lancashire.

It is little more than lip service from the prime minister and, worse, unaccompanied by even the vaguest admission that his government has let its people down.

We know from the Labour backbencher Chris Mullin’s diaries that ministers would not address the issue of immigration because they were terrified of being called racist: so they did nothing. More recently, the former home office adviser Andrew Neather suggested that the Labour government threw open the doors to vast numbers of immigrants precisely in order to create a truly multicultural Britain, whether or not the British public wanted such a thing (every opinion poll suggests that they did not).

Labour ministers insist that the previous Conservative government was lax on immigration, too — but that is a specious argument. In 2006 nearly 600,000 immigrants entered Britain, more than 10 times the number who arrived in the last year of John Major’s government; the scale of difference has been beyond reasonable comparison. We should be clear: immigration is primarily Labour’s mess, and it was a deliberate policy.

Even now the argument will be queered by the usual platitudinous drivel; that while addressing this important issue we must all nonetheless embrace the vibrancy of multicultural diversity. The people who always preface their answers with this sort of statement tend not to have lost their jobs to cut-price plumbers, electricians, fruit pickers and so on.

You cannot have it both ways: Brown wishes to capture the votes of the white working class by talking about immigration but not actually doing anything about it. They in turn resent, rightly or wrongly, the fact that their communities have been changed beyond recognition; that street crime figures are up exponentially; that it’s harder to acquire social housing; and that they are priced out of jobs. This is unpalatable to many, but it is how a lot of people feel.

It would be far more honest of the government if it said: tough luck, Labour voters — we want a cheaper unskilled and semi-skilled workforce and we have no moral or intellectual objection to your towns and cities being transformed by huge numbers of people who may not share your cultural values. That, after all, has been the policy of the government for the past 12 years, even if it is one it has not dared to articulate but has instead pursued by a sort of cack-handed stealth.

Nor, aside from the carefully nuanced rhetoric, is there very much in the prime minister’s speech which offers a solution to the problem. For example, he wishes councils to look more kindly on social housing applications from long-term local residents — but of course the councils are statutorily required to offer housing first to the homeless and an awful lot of immigrants are, de facto, homeless when they arrive.

None of this is the fault of the recent immigrants themselves, of course, who are behaving much as we would all behave in similar circumstances; and in the main, I don’t believe those working-class voters blame the immigrants either.

They know who to blame — and crocodile tears shed a few months before polling day tend to confirm, rather than dissipate, that blame.

Sandwell council is very annoyed at the bad publicity it has received for having fined a young mum £75 for feeding ducks in the local park. Vanessa Kelly had been with her toddler Harry throwing bread to the ducks when she was issued with an on-the-spot-fine by some officious warden. Kelly is refusing to pay. On the council’s website there is a lengthy complaint about the irresponsible behaviour of the press in covering this case without adequately representing the council’s point of view. So let me help.

The council would like it to be known that Kelly and her son were some distance outside the “designated wildfowl feeding area”. Further, councillor Mahboob Hussain would like to emphasise that the council has done “a lot of educational work” in trying to get the important duck issue across to people, and he adds that the main problem is not in fact ducks, but geese. People living near the park, he insists, “feel intimidated by large numbers of geese”. There we are — you see, there are always two sides to a story, aren’t there?

In a recent report by the Audit Commission, incidentally, Sandwell council was ranked one of the four worst authorities in England.

Pudsey – my drunken shame

Shocking news from the BBC where it has been revealed that 37 of its useless middle managers earn more than the useless prime minister and that Pudsey Bear’s eye injury was treated in a private hospital at the license-payers’ expense. Publication of the BBC figures also reveals that the wool-stuffed charity icon claimed £16,537 for a party in Spearmint Rhino to mark the end of Children in Need, during which he made “inappropriate and unwelcome advances” to the presenter Konnie Huq and ended up brawling in the toilets with an allegedly “well-lubricated” Igglepiggle from In the Night Garden. “Pudsey will not be paying any of the money back,” his agent said yesterday. “He could earn much more in the private sector, when he gets out of rehab. This has been blown up out of all proportion.”

Silent nights in as carols sent out

It’s what Jesus would have wanted. Carol singers in part of Lancashire have been told to clear off. The police, local council and Neighbourhood Watch groups have produced printed cards to be placed in the window of 10,000 homes reading: “Sorry, no carol singers. I won’t open my door to you.” Lovely. The cards were designed by the Safer Chorley and South Ribble Partnership, presumably under the auspices of councillor King Herod.

If residents don’t want to be disturbed from their rain-sodden Lancastrian misery, couldn’t they have made some cards themselves? My guess is that a total of eight residents are offended when singers knock at the door. That’s enough for the Safer Chorley crowd to spring into action and make themselves feel important. So, altogether now:

“God, rest ye merry gentlemen, and please don’t think us prigs, But stop ringing my front doorbell or I’ll dob you to the pigs.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has made an uplifting address in which he described the future of the Church of England as being “chaotic and uncertain”. No kidding, beardo. And whose fault is that, then? Thomas Cranmer’s? When asked what future lay in store for the Anglican brethren, Rowan replied with a succinct: “God knows.” I’m not sure if he meant this in the manner of “I haven’t a bleedin’ clue and nor has anyone else” or was it “God knows, but He has decided not to tell me, in case I put a spanner in the works”? I accept that we shouldn’t go back to burning Catholics, and mortification, but a little more religious certitude wouldn’t go amiss, old chap.

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