'BRITAIN is sleepwalking into New Orleans-style racial segregation with Muslim and black ghettos dividing cities".

That is not a rant by a thug from the British National Party or a lurid prediction from some "right wing" backwoodsman. It is a quote from a speech to be made by Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality.

The CRE is a government-sponsored political pressure group with the most impeccable politically-correct credentials. If even the chairman of the CRE can see we are doing nothing to promote racial integration, then why have governments - Conservative and Labour - done nothing over the decades to put things right?

The answer is because all governments since the 1970s have promoted the policy of multiculturalism. To ordinary, normal folk in the street who don't much think about government policies week in and week out - and why should they? - multiculturalism sounds friendly and benign. It conjures up neighbourly notions of live-and-let-live. It paints pictures of cheerful, efficient, obliging Indian newsagents and curry takeaways. All those colourful clothes that brighten up dull neighbourhoods. Or people think of the exuberance of street carnivals like the one that happens every year in Notting Hill. The image of multiculturalism is of all the races celebrating their national culture and characteristics in a singing and dancing rainbow nation.

What we actually see is racial segregation. This has been seen as necessary after recent racial troubles in towns and cities such as Oldham and Bradford. A form of separate development, really apartheid by any other name, is seen as the only way to prevent bloodshed on the streets. And the chairman of the CRE is right to say that we are sleepwalking towards a society of ghettos and no-go areas.

This has not happened by some dreadful accident. It is a direct result of deliberate government policy at least since the influx of East African Asians in the 1970s. These industrious, cheerful people - mainly middle class Hindus - were very keen to become full members of British society. I know. I was a schoolteacher at the time in Bolton and we welcomed thousands of these immigrants to the town. Schoolteachers and town councillors had a hell of a time with extreme left-wing politicians who wanted to exploit the immigration to create political instability. These were Trotskyists and members on the left of the Labour Party. I know just what happened because they attacked an evening class I was running to help integrate the Asians into the local community.

Now the attitude and intention of those political rabble-rousers has become government policy. Multiculturalism has promoted separate development and the ghettos that Mr Phillips has warned us about. Multiculturalism might work - just about - if the immigrant people are broadly in sympathy with the values of the host nation. It worked with Jews and Irish Catholics in the 19th century and with eastern Europeans in the 20th. But now we have among us members of a culture who hate and despise our way of life and want to see it overthrown.

This is not sustainable. The rational solution is to ask members of this alien culture to integrate and become agreeable citizens of one nation called Britain. Anything else will lead to disaster. Mr Phillips should have ended his remarks with a question, "Is political correctness going to drive us to civil war?"

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.