In this Notebook in the May issue we revealed that Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of the private equity business in the UK ( the experts in asset stripping) has been one of Gordon Brown’s most trusted informal advisers over the past decade. Now that Brown is installed in No.10, Sir Ronald becomes one of the most senior members of his inner circle of advisers.

The Sunday Telegraph, 12.08.07 reported that Brown’s has appointed Jon Mendelsohn as his director of general election resources. Interestingly, in view of Brown’s straight-laced image, apart from previous lobbying work on behalf of Ladbrokes the bookmakers, Mr Mendelsohn once represented a colourful business woman, known one time as the ‘porn princess’, who made a fortune from sex chatlines and online gambling.

The Prime Minister’s most controversial recruit is Mark Malloch-Brown, now Lord Malloch-Brown. Although only a junior minister at the Foreign Office he has had a role as a major global statesman and international guru. Apart from stints with a Washington political consultancy and the World Bank, he has spent most of his career working for the United Nations, hence his view that Britain should hand over its seat at the UN Security Council to the EU, of which he admits to being “a huge fan”. He has just vacated his tenancy of a five-acre property in New York State, owned by his close friend George Soros, the Hungarian-born hedge fund billionaire.

Then we have the cabinet minister Ed Balls, a long term acolyte of Gordon Brown. He used taxpayers’ money to attend this year’s meeting in Canada of the shadowy Bilderberg Group when he was Economic Secretary to the Treasury. The mysterious Bilderberg Group always meets in secret and journalists are not permitted to cover its meetings. No reports of what it discusses are ever published.

What an interesting collection of advisers now surrounds our Prime Minister.

It has long been my view that as ‘diversity’and ‘divisive’ have the same root prefix it is surprising that nobody seems to have wondered why, particularly those who speak glowingly of the alleged advantages of ‘diversity’. But it seems that times are a changing, when we see such bastions of liberal thinking as America’s International Herald Tribune 05.08.07 publish an extensive report on a new study that concluded that “greater diversity equals more misery” and that it is indeed ‘divisive’. The study was based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America and compiled by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, a liberal academic himself.

It found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbours trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. It found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

The Herald Tribune article said that the study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, “the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts”.

It is interesting to note that Putnam had spent most of his academic life pushing diversity and was so shocked by the results of the study that he spent two years trying to see where it had “gone wrong” before publishing it. The most he could say to ease his liberal conscious was to challenge the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the “contact” theory and the “conflict” theory. Under the contact theory, he says, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord. It is the latter that his study really revealed, although, according to the article, he was searching for every reason to deny it.

Most of us in the BNP can produce enough evidence to show that diversity in a community confirms the conflict theory.

As each day passes it becomes clear that Gordon Brown has fully accepted the 50 point plus sell-out of British Interests in our membership of the EU enacted by Blair at his final appearance at the June Brussels summit.

Not only has he made it clear that he is not supporting the referendum that Blair, therefore the Labour Party, promised us, but at the time of writing he has not denied the story coming from Brussels that the EU wants Britain to give up its seat in its present form at the United Nations to be the voice of the EU, and no longer speak just for Britain. David Miliband, Brown’s new Foreign Secretary, either intentionally or un intentionally, let the cat out of the bag when he stated in the Commons that the new EU treaty involved a larger transfer of power from member states to Brussels than the Mastricht Treaty which set the EU on course towards the single European currency.

The Lib-Dems are, of course, fully supportive of the UK’s submergence within a single European state. The Tories, true to form, are rather ambiguous in that lip service is given to calling for the referendum that was promised, while the Cameroon is letting it be known that his anti-EU MPs will no longer be allowed to speak out in the party name. Apart from the BNP and the diminished voice of UKIP, the opposition is now coming from all the main Unions who are saying that we must put the EU treaty to the vote.

Paul Kenny, GMB general secretary, said the Labour Party’s promise to hold a vote should not be abandoned. He also claimed that because British workers would not be covered by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the treaty would do more for big business than working people. He added: “A reform treaty on the constitution without the Charter of Fundamental Rights is for a business Europe and the GMB did not sign up for this.” Meanwhile, Brown seems to be saying nothing in particular during his contacts so far with EU spokesmen.

It shows that he is either out of his depth in the EU summitry game, or he never really was the protector of our national sovereignty that he pretended he was in earlier days.