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David Blunkett with representatives of ethnic minorities... insensitive utterances.

THESE ARE still early days for Mr. David Blunkett at the Home Office but he has already acquired the reputation as the most right-wing of the Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair's Ministers - an ``intolerant, illiberal home secretary'', as one newspaper described him.

This week, even as he was having a rough time at the hands of an odd combination of civil libertarians and the House of Lords for his ``authoritarian'' anti-terrorism bill, he invited the wrath of the ethnic minorities for suggesting that if they wanted to live in Britain they had better start behaving like fellow Britons.

Multiculturalism could not be allowed to be turned into a licence for a free-wheeling alien social behaviour, he pronounced in a newspaper interview making it clear that ``we don't tolerate the intolerable under the guise of cultural difference''.

There was more in the same vein as he hammered home the point that the ethnic minorities were expected to conform to British social values, or as what he described as ``norms of acceptability''. ``We have norms of acceptability and those who come into our home - for that is what it is - should accept those norms,'' he said in remarks which immigrants angrily denounced as ``patronising'' and ``insulting''.

They accused him of giving the ``green light'' to racist elements, forever looking for a pretext, and said his remarks smacked of the Tory leader Lord (Norman) Tebbit's infamous cricket ``loyalty'' test.

Some of the harshest criticism came from his own party colleagues, mainly Muslim MPs, councillors and activists. ``I can visualise the (racist) British National Party putting up election literature at the next local elections quoting words from Mr. Blunkett,'' said Mr. Riaz Ahmed, Labour Party's Deputy Mayor of Oldham, alluding to the BNP's role in the race riots which shook Oldham and several other predominantly immigrant towns of north England this summer.

The Independent, whose sister edition The Independent on Sunday had carried the controversial interview, was scathing. It said Mr. Blunkett's remarks, two days before the release of official reports on last summer's race riots, suggested that ``his desire to appeal to the baser instincts of the floating voter is not limited to the fight against terrorism''.

More than what he said, the ``tone'' he adopted was what angered minority groups, including many liberals who found it unnecessarily combative and patronising.

Ms. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a leading liberal commentator and writer whose views have been attacked in the past by fundamentalist ethnic voices, said while there needed to be a debate on the politics of racial separation which had made integration so difficult this was not the way to do it. ``But you, sir, have opened an extraordinarily important debate in a crude and ill-informed manner,'' she wrote, a day after the row erupted.

An Asian Tory peer, Lady (Shiela) Flather, agreed with the broad thrust of Mr. Blunkett's argument for greater social integration but was surprised by his language, coming as it did from a Labour Home Secretary. A Tory Home Secretary would have been pilloried for saying what he did so bluntly, she thought.

One woman Labour MP, Ms. Oona King, feared that his comments would feed ``Islamophobia''. ``My biggest concern about David Blunkett's remarks is that they could give succour to people who I know David would have no wish to help,'' she said while several leading black leaders accused the Home Secretary of ``diverting'' attention from the ``real'' issues behind the racial tension and the Government's failure to tackle them.

But Mr. Blunkett maintained that all he did was open up a debate on some of the complex issues which had been swept under the carpet for too long.

A spokesman was quoted as saying that it was not right to have ``self-imposed censorship'' on grounds of political correctness.

Significantly, an official report on race relations identified the ``lack of honest and robust debate'' as a major factor behind the communication gap between immigrant communities and their ``hosts'' resulting in misunderstanding, suspicion and tension. It said people tended to ``tiptoe around the sensitive issues of race, religion and culture''.

The report, commissioned by the Home Office after the race riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford this summer, echoed Mr. Blunkett almost literally in expressing concern over certain social practices among the ethnic minorities, a lack of grasp of the English language among many of them, and their failure to integrate with the rest of British society. Self-segregation, it said, had reached a point where many communities led ``parallel lives''.

A Pakistani youth told the authors of the report: ``When I leave this meeting with you, I will go home and not see another white face until I come back next week.'' Equally revealing was the deposition of a white witness who said he had never met anyone who did not live in his neighbourhood.

For all the fury that his comments have provoked, the fact is that much of what Mr. Blunkett said is fundamentally true but he spoilt his case by sounding more like the devil's advocate than a sympathetic interlocutor.

And, infuriatingly, he seemed to lay all the blame on those who, in fact, see themselves as the victims of a racially discriminatory system - a system run by Mr. Blunkett and his friends.

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