MARGARET Thatcher privately voiced grave concerns about the numbers of immigrants arriving in Britain 30 years ago, confidential Cabinet papers reveal today.
In a foretaste of the current controversies over border controls, the former Tory Prime Minister insisted that “too many” people were being let into the country.
Mrs Thatcher expressed anger that many newcomers got council houses at the expense of “white citizens”.
And she even suggested liberal proponents of more immigration should be invited to provide accommodation in their home.
Her forthright views on race and immigration, expressed to senior Cabinet colleagues in her first year in Downing Street, are revealed in documents released under the 30-year rule from the National Archives at Kew, west London.
Her demands for strict limits on immigration were rejected by her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw.
But her views will today be seen as prescient given the intense debate over the policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism pursued by Labour.
Indeed contemporary critics of Labour’s border controls are almost certain to regret that her warnings were not more seriously heeded.
Mrs Thatcher, the “Iron Lady”, raised her concerns at the height of the influx of so-called “boat people” from South East Asia at the end of the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands were fleeing to the West from brutal communist rulers in Vietnam.
Whitehall minutes of a meeting in July 1979 between Mrs Thatcher and her two senior colleagues paint a vivid picture of conditions in refugee camps Lord Carrington had visited in Hong Kong.
