Tebbit: 'Cricket test' could have stopped bombings

Former Conservative chairman Lord Tebbit has said that if his 'cricket test' comments had been acted upon, the London bombings would have been "less likely".

In 1990, while an MP, Tebbit suggested Britain's ethnic minorities should support the England cricket team rather than the team of the country their family originated from.

Now he says that if more had been done to integrate immigrants into mainstream British culture, as he was suggesting, the environment that created the British-born suicide bombers behind the July 7 attacks could have been avoided.

"I do think had my comments been acted on those attacks would have been less likely," he said in an interview with ePolitix.com,

"What I was saying about the so-called cricket test is that it was a test of whether a community has integrated.

"If a community was looking back at where it had come from instead of looking forward with the people to whom they had come to then there is going to be a problem sooner or later."

Multiculturalism

Lord Tebbit also condemned multiculturalism for undermining British society and said London was "sinking into the same abyss that Londonderry and Belfast sank".

He said: "I've been opposing the concept of a multicultural society for 10 years or more and that's because a multicultural society is an impossibility.

"A society is defined by its culture. It is not defined by its race, it is not a matter of skin colour or ethnicity, it is a matter of culture.

"If you have two cultures in one society then you have two societies. If you have two societies in the same place then you are going to have problems, like the kind we saw on July 7, sooner or later."

The Conservative peer also criticised Islam, saying "the Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years".

Leadership

Lord Tebbit also told this website he backed moves to give MPs the right to elect the Tory leader, but said local party associations should have other powers returned to them.

"The reforms introduced by Archie Norman and William Hague, in one of the few silly things that William has ever done, changed that balance," he said.

"It brought control over the associations to the chairman of the party, it gave him powers over the candidates and created a national Conservative Party that had never before existed.

"As a sop the national membership was given the right to elect the leader of the party. I think both those things were wrong.

"I think it's best that the MPs elect their leader and the associations have their sovereignty. I don't think you can get away with the MPs having the power to elect the leader without giving the associations their sovereignty back."