A former Conservative party leader in Britain Friday revived his controversial idea of a 'cricket test' to gauge Asian loyalty, claiming the London bombings would have been "less likely" if his idea had been acted upon rather than dismissed as racist.

Norman Tebbit had come in for strong and widespread criticism in 1990 for suggesting that Asian immigrants did not show primary loyalty to Britain.

Tebbit had said: "A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?"

Tebbit was attacked by race groups and Labour politicians at the time, who said Britain's multicultural society meant people from different ethnic backgrounds could live peacefully with each other and that ethnic minorities, in any case, did not need a special loyalty stamp.

Although the 'cricket test' became a hot race issue at the time, Tebbit's retirement from active politics and the election of the Labour Party to power in 1997 has seen a sea change in public attitudes.

Now, thousands of Britain-based Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean cricket fans routinely and openly support visiting foreign teams in cricket matches against England, filling stadium seats and generating revenues for the game.

Their presence across England - particularly of Indian supporters in their prominent blue team T-shirts - and vocal support for their 'teams from back home' hardly raises an eyebrow in Britain these days.

But Tebbit revived his theory in an interview published Friday, saying the July 7 suicide bombings in London in which at least 52 people were killed could have been avoided if immigrants had been integrated into mainstream British culture.

"I do think had my comments been acted on those attacks would have been less likely," he said in an interview with the website ePolitix.com, which features British politics.

"What I was saying about the so-called cricket test is that it was a test of whether a community has integrated.

"If a community was looking back at where it had come from instead of looking forward with the people to whom they had come to then there is going to be a problem sooner or later," Tebbit added.

Tebbit criticised multiculturalism - the concept that many ethnic groups can live together with their separate cultural identities - saying: "I've been opposing the concept of a multicultural society for 10 years or more and that's because a multicultural society is an impossibility.

"A society is defined by its culture. It is not defined by its race, it is not a matter of skin colour or ethnicity, it is a matter of culture.

"If you have two cultures in one society then you have two societies. If you have two societies in the same place then you are going to have problems, like the kind we saw on July 7, sooner or later."

Tebbit also criticised Islam, saying "the Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years."