Halfway up a holly tree beside one of Britain’s most famous streets, there’s a black plastic bag stuffed with muddy blankets and a bundle of grubby clothes.

It belongs to an unidentified Romanian beggar and right now he’s hard at work.

By the time he returns to settle down for the night on a swathe of grass that divides each side of Park Lane, he will probably have found a Western Union office to wire the day’s takings back home – it would be unwise to sleep with a stash of cash in your pockets.

Today, almost certainly, he will be back on London’s streets. So too will others among the 20 or 30 who have once more made Park Lane their home.

Restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians working in Britain will be lifted on January 1, raising fears of a further influx.

Although Westminster Council evicted the Park Lane beggars months ago from their makeshift campsites and squalid shelters, paying for many to go home, they are here again. And they’re very much back in business.

Yesterday clutches of beggars wandered among Christmas shoppers in nearby Oxford Street or sat around Marble Arch playing cards for money after police and council officials went through the morning ritual of telling them to move on.

The farthest most went after dispersing was a few hundred yards. Some took up residence on Hyde Park benches or lingered around several of London’s most expensive hotels, where rich tourists press currency into the hands of top- hatted doormen.

With takings from begging reportedly topping £100 a day, it’s a toss-up over who gets the better deal.

Now, after repeated complaints that shoppers and tourists are being intimidated – in at least one case by being marched to a cashpoint and forced to withdraw cash – local councillors are calling for a change in the law to combat what they see as a growing national problem.

Some fear proposals to replace ASBOs (antisocial behaviour orders) with IPNAs (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance) will critically weaken local authority powers to tackle aggressive begging and to deal effectively with troublesome travellers.

None of that much bothered a gaggle of off-duty beggars yesterday in the shadow of Marble Arch, betting on a game of dice as they sat around a woollen blanket on the cold stone ground.

One woman was counting a heap of about 70 or 80 pound coins and hid some banknotes under the blanket as we approached.

Some of the group had been here in the summer, got sent home in the crackdown last July – and had now returned for potentially rich pickings at Christmas.

It’s an immigration merry-go-round which, at present, no-one seems to be able to stop.

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Stepping up to a cashpoint, the bespectacled Parisian initially has no idea he is being watched.

Within a few seconds however, a Roma girl who has watched his every move begins to try and take his money.

She is supported by at least two other men – one creating a distraction on the other side of the man, and another sitting on the floor begging as he keeps an eye out for police.

Unseen in this set of pictures, which were taken last week, are other members of a gang who prey on the crowds and confusion of the French capital.

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Due to official dogma, this area is rapidly turning into a cauldron of suspicion and squalor. A never-ending influx of Roma people from eastern Europe is fuelling combustible tensions with local residents, many of whom are immigrants from Asia. As complaints about feckless, intimidating behaviour by the Roma intensify, the air is now thick with warnings about ethnic conflict.

The sense of deepening social chaos in Page Hall was vividly illustrated last week by this paper’s reports of two attempts by Roma immigrants to make money from the sale of babies. In one, Colin Barton, the owner of a chip shop, said that he was approached by a teenager who offered him a new-born child for £250. It is almost unbelievable that this could happen in 21st-century Britain but such depraved conduct is part of the world created by the ideology of multiculturalism, where the values of traditional civilisation are constantly undermined.

Page Hall’s descent into social breakdown is just a foretaste of what will happen across Britain next year as the final restrictions on migrants from eastern Europe are removed. From January, 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians will gain the right to settle here, bringing a large number of Roma to our shores.

Already there are estimated to be 200,000 Roma people living here but that number will be dwarfed once all border controls are lifted. “In January the only thing left will be the goat,” says one Roma father of seven, warning that his entire village plans to come to England.

This wave of mass immigration from two of Europe’s most impoverished countries will be a disaster for Britain, hastening the collapse in national identity, wrecking social cohesion and imposing an intolerable strain on civic infrastructure.

Welfare bills will soar, not least because many migrants are adept at exploiting the laxity of our benefits. Even now a third of all sellers of the Big Issue fundraising magazine are Romanian, since such a role allows them to claim self-employed status and thereby gain access to social security. Incredibly, over the past five years there have been 27,000 arrests out of an estimated population of 87,000 Romanians living in London.

This act of institutionalised self-destruction has been foisted on us by a treacherous political class that selfrighteously preens itself over its devotion to multiculturalism and open borders. The imposition of mass immigration over recent decades has been accompanied by a barrage of official propaganda extolling the joys of diversity and portraying all opposition to this creed as racist bigotry.

But the spin machine cannot maintain the illusion of success.

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Anyone who relies on the BBC for news will probably be unaware that earlier this week a well-known politician uttered some of the most extraordinary remarks about immigration that have been made by a national figure in living memory.

But the politician who warned that ‘tensions’ between local people and Roma migrants could escalate into rioting unless action is taken was not from the far-Right, Ukip or even the Tory Party. No, these comments were made by David Blunkett, a former Labour Home Secretary and a very moderate man.

Ironically, in view of the fact that the BBC in London has virtually ignored the story, Mr Blunkett had originally confided his fears to BBC Sheffield, the city where he is an MP. He called on the Roma community in the Page Hall area of Sheffield to change aspects of their ‘behaviour’, such as congregating on the streets on summer evenings and dumping litter. These activities, he said, are ‘aggravating’ local people.

Mr Blunkett told BBC Sheffield: ‘We have got to be tough and robust in saying to people: “You are not living in a down-trodden village or woodland,” — because many of them don’t live in areas where there are toilets or refuse collection facilities.’

According to the former Home Secretary, the cultural gulf between the host community in Sheffield and the Roma one is far greater than that between white Britons and Pakistani immigrants.

And he derided official figures that suggest there are fewer than 50,000 Roma in England — citing a recent Salford University study which estimates that there are more than 200,000. The Government, he said, is ‘burying their head in the sand’.

If a Right-wing politician or newspaper had spoken in such terms, there would have been uproar, and opprobrium from many on the Left. Yet there has been silence. As a Labour MP, Mr Blunkett is allowed — just — to say things which a person on the Right would not be.

After all, given the murder of perhaps 200,000 Roma by the Nazis (the figure is contested), and their history as a persecuted people, any politician who suggests that they should do more to conform to local customs risks some pretty serious criticism.

But despite his evocative language, I am sure Mr Blunkett is in no sense a racist, and that he accurately describes the situation in the Page Hall area of Sheffield. Unlike many MPs, he is close to his constituents and their fears. He senses trouble and wants the Government to wake up before it is too late.

The irony is that Mr Blunkett is himself as responsible as anyone for the large number of Roma and other immigrants who have come from Eastern Europe in recent years. He was Home Secretary in 2004 when the Labour Government lifted controls on Eastern European migrants — one of the very few countries in the EU to do so.

At the time, Whitehall officials estimated that between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants would come to Britain every year. The total over nearly a decade was more than one  million. These included many Roma from Slovakia, who now make up a large number of the Roma population in Britain.

Jack Straw — Mr Blunkett’s predecessor as Labour Home Secretary — has just admitted that it was a ‘spectacular mistake’ for Britain to throw open its doors in this way when most other European Union countries reserved their right to retain controls for a further seven years.

In other words, Mr Straw accepts, as Mr Blunkett appears also to do, that too many migrants — significantly more than half of them Poles — came here too quickly. Of course, many of them have made an enormous, sometimes indispensable, contribution to British life, but there have also been tensions of the sort Mr Blunkett so graphically describes.

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