The sound you hear is of screeching brakes and the smell is burning rubber. Not since Starsky and Hutch sped off into the sunset has there been such a profusion of spectacular handbrake turns. One by the one the nostrums of New Labour are being ground into the Tarmac in a Gaderene stampede for the moral high ground. Whether it's Muslim women in veils or sex education in schools, ministers are throwing the gears into reverse. Reading the papers these days is like being a witness at one long show trial as Left-wing politicians line up to recant just about everything they've ever believed in.

Richard Littlejohn

At the weekend, race relations minister Phil Woolas actually called for the sacking of a Muslim classroom assistant who insisted on covering her face in school.

It's the sort of remark which only a couple of weeks ago would have had Scotland Yard's diversity squad smashing down Mr Woolas's front door and carting him off to the cells on a 'hate crime' rap.

Yet it's entirely consistent with the Government's about-turn on multiculturalism in the past few weeks. It was Jack Straw, the honourable member for Bangalore East, who kicked off the debate about the veil.
This was a man who had previously missed no opportunity to jet off to the Indian sub-continent for a photo opportunity in a headscarf intended to ingratiate himself with his Muslim constituents.
I can remember him, when Foreign Secretary, being asked on television if some deal or other was in the offing in Brussels. "Inshallah [if Allah wills it]," he replied.

Meanwhile Peter Hain, the Cuprinol Kid - once the very incarnation of right-on, overgrown student politics - has described as 'loopy' the refusal of British Airways to let a devout Christian female employee to wear a cross, even though Sikhs can wear turbans and Muslims are allowed scarves.
The Government has also woken up to the dangers of Islamic societies in higher education being used to foment radicalism, something of which Melanie Phillips has been warning for donkey's years while being dismissed as a Zionist madwoman.

If John Reid moves any further to the Right, he'll have to start turning up at the Home Office in a peaked cap, blackshirt and jodhpurs, clicking his calf-length boots and cracking his riding crop.
(Mind you, in Reid's case the spiritual leap from Communism to Fascism is but one short step.)
On the morality front, we've had the Pensions Minister observing that maybe a stable marriage is the best way to bring up children and a report on sex education calling for the notion of restraint to be taught at long last.
This is straight from the Daily Mail song sheet, but until recently was considered heresy.
I first noticed this peculiar trend back in August, when I returned from a week's holiday to discover Polly Toynbee, the Guardian's high priestess of bien-pensant cant, declaring that perhaps unfettered, uncontrolled immigration wasn't such a good idea after all.

In the space of a few days, the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that the justice system was skewed in favour of criminals and that the legal establishment should stop patronising the public in general and victims in particular.
This was followed by the head of the Health and Safety Commission admitting that all this risk-assessment business had got a bit out of hand, just as the skies were darkened by a squadron of flying pigs banking steeply to the right.

You could have found any of these opinions in this column and this newspaper at any time over the past decade. But the Mail is routinely vilified and, for my trouble, I find myself smeared as a beyond-the-pale, BNP recruiting sergeant.
So should we celebrate this startling change of heart on the part of New Labour and the Guardianistas?
Not so fast. I suppose if any of this were sincere it might be an occasion for a couple of large ones. But I suspect that it's just so much opportunist expediency.
These are, after all, the very people who got us into this mess in the first place. When some of us said that multi-culturalism was a disastrous doctrine, which meant always having to say you were sorry, we were called 'racist'. Now even the head of the Commission for Racial Equality agrees.

Only five years ago, the CRE was trying to force newspaper editors and political leaders to sign an 'anti-racism' declaration. In an outrageously offensive 'when did you stop beating your wife?' campaign, the clear implication was that those who refused to sign the document were officially 'racist'. The same politicians who are now scratching their heads over the evils of multi-culturalism and the rise of Islamic extremism are those who for the past 20 years have ruthlessly pursued a 'diversity' agenda, encouraging cultural apartheid, elevating foreign religions and practices - however odious - and treating Christians as pariahs. I can't recall the Cuprinol Kid ever denouncing Labour councils tearing down Christmas trees and banning hot cross buns as 'loopy' even though that was the clear policy of his own party. Perhaps I might be able to summon a smidgen of respect for Jack Straw if, instead of grumbling about the veil, his craven government conjured up the courage to prosecute Islamist maniacs preaching death on the streets of our cities.

That Race Card Again! John Tyndall comments on the (2001) election fiasco It all started when the mischievous Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) approached the leaders of the political parties and asked them jointly to sign a declaration that they would not "exploit" the race issue during the election. What all of these leaders should have done was tell the CRE to "get stuffed" However, we could hardly expect Labour or the Liberal Democrats to do this. We might - just might - in saner times have hoped that the Tory leader would have done. But Willie Hague just was not up to it. He signed too.

What we're seeing is a bunch of cheap headlines and 'eye-catching' initiatives because Labour is rattled
and worried about losing the next election. So while Call Me Dave pitches his tent on the pink pastures of the mythical 'centre ground', Labour embarks on a cynical populist path designed explicitly to appeal to Middle Britain.

Are we going to see a dismantling of the burgeoning 'diversity' industry, or a genuine revival of morality in sex education, or Budget measures to reinforce the traditional family?
Of course not. The Guardianistas who run all our institutions from the police to the adoption agencies aren't going to make themselves redundant.

Under the radar, the relentless assault will advance apace, the ratchet will be wrenched back still further and that squadron of flying pigs will come crashing back to earth with a very nasty thump before being run over by an illegal immigrant in a hoodie executing a handbrake turn in a stolen car.