Authors: Tom Bower
In mid-June 1998, home secretary Jack Straw was told about a rise in the number of asylum-seekers arriving in Britain. Labour’s mood music, said Tim Walker, the head of the Immigration and Nationality Department (IND), had removed the deterrent legislation erected by Straw’s predecessor Michael Howard. The guarantee of welfare benefits was encouraging the increase. Most asylum-seekers were under threat from either criminals or warlords rather than governments, or else were economic migrants lying about their persecution and nationality. Despite that dishonesty, the government’s liberal policy was persuading more judges to rule against deportation, impervious to the consequences of their decisions. Asylum and immigration, Walker continued, would become important issues.
Straw raised the issue with Blair. ‘Isn’t immigration the sort of issue which can blow up in our face?’ he asked.
‘Immigration won’t be an issue,’ replied Blair. ‘Immigration is good for Britain.’ The
Daily Mail
and
Daily Express
, he continued, were ‘not concerned’, so it was not an issue.
‘Tony’s not interested,’ Straw told Walker.
In fact, Straw himself agreed with Blair, and was untroubled by increasing immigration. In 1997, he had told his officials that only 10,000 foreigners would take advantage of the abolition of the primary purpose rule. Instead, over 150,000 immigrants would arrive during 1998. Straw’s mistake was compounded by the unpredicted steep increase in applications for asylum.
Tim Flesher, a senior member of the IND, explored Straw’s intentions in his first conversation with the minister. ‘We need to send a message about our attitudes,’ suggested Flesher. ‘Should we welcome legal immigrants and encourage them with the promise of British citizenship? And should we be tough on the rest? There are no rules to distinguish between a good and a bad Kosovan.’
In a separate conversation, Walker told Straw, ‘Under the rules, we can exclude only the extreme cases at the margins.’
‘Well, do your best,’ Straw replied to both.
‘It’s defeatist but also realistic,’ thought Walker, who offered another condition to keep the numbers down. ‘Why don’t we stipulate that immigrants must speak English before we grant them British nationality? To make British nationality a prize?’
‘No,’ replied Straw.
The minister’s response was confusing. In private, he showed no alarm about the statistics, yet in public he wanted to show that he was not an easy touch. He told the Commons he favoured strong controls, especially at the borders. Then he added, ‘We mustn’t be soft but we must be fairer.’ Neither side was satisfied with his confusing answer. Indeed, some Labour supporters criticised his intention to deter bogus asylum-seekers as authoritarian.
His true position depended on the new law planned for 1999. Straw summoned Michael Eland, a Home Office official responsible for policy, telling him, ‘I want to make the application process for asylum faster.’ Eland was told to prepare laws to establish the National Asylum Support Service, which would help migrants live in Britain. That measure did not strike Eland as tough towards immigrants. Straw’s proposals, he judged, would actually help bogus applicants. IND officials returned to Straw and asked for guidance.
‘We must not let immigration get out of control,’ Straw told Tim Flesher. ‘But we don’t want to stop immigration, just control the flow.’
‘That is no solution to the problems of immigration,’ replied Flesher.
Straw was deaf to such warnings. Immigration, he countered, would
no longer be a problem. He was more interested in crime, and delegated immigration to Mike O’Brien, a junior minister and lawyer.
Since arriving at the Home Office in May 1997, O’Brien had become ‘appalled’. During his first visit to Croydon, the headquarters of the IND, he discovered that the staff were demoralised, negative and overwhelmed by a two-year backlog of applications for asylum. One official greeted Labour’s victory as ‘the relief of Mafeking … The Home Office mandarins were not competent,’ O’Brien decided. Yet the new rules introduced by Straw had increased the number of legal challenges available to asylum-seekers over the decisions made by IND officials.
The gloom had been compounded by the dismissal of a thousand officials, with another thousand due to join them. The departures had been planned four years earlier, after the Home Office and Treasury had approved the computerisation of immigration procedures. Siemens had been contracted by the Home Office to replace the IND’s archaic paper files with a seamless electronic process. The cost, according to the Treasury, would be paid for by sharply reducing the number of civil servants. The computers were due to come into operation in late 1998 and, as the redundancies began, the remaining personnel began moving to a new building.
In the hiatus, Straw was under pressure from IND officials to clarify the government’s policy. Britain’s asylum laws, he was told, were constantly being broken by thousands of Albanians and Iraqis who were entering Britain by posing as Kosovan refugees, the latter being exposed because none could speak any language or dialect used in Kosovo. They were economic migrants, not asylum-seekers. The IND needed new guidelines.
The answer was the new immigration Act due in 1999. As an introduction, O’Brien wrote a White Paper called ‘Fairer, Faster, Firmer’. The government pledged to treat genuine asylum-seekers efficiently and fairly, and to keep the doors firmly closed to bogus applicants. Curiously, the White Paper’s arguments cited the 1997 immigration
statistics rather than the higher figures of 1998. O’Brien also stated that the largest number of migrants were white Britons returning from abroad. The uninformed reader would not know that immigration from the subcontinent was soaring, but the paper did propose a sting. To discourage bogus applicants, Straw and Walker had concocted a scheme during a train journey to Brussels: cash benefits would be replaced by vouchers that could be exchanged only for food, and not for cigarettes or alcohol. Their plan was opposed by some within the Home Office as too complicated, but Straw was insistent. ‘Gordon has agreed to pay, and Tony supports the idea,’ he told O’Brien.
Officials at the IND remained confused. Although Straw rejected the request by some Labour supporters to open the doors to migrants by removing all restrictions on entry, he was not closing them firmly. Fearing what Blair called ‘a hysterical reaction’ from Labour’s heartlands, Straw also refused to acknowledge in public that most asylum-seekers were just seeking a better standard of living. His mixed signals encouraged officials in Croydon to approve suspect applications rather than engage in what was becoming an endless appeals process involving a new breed of lawyer appearing before judges whose interpretation of human rights favoured bogus applicants.
‘We’ve got the worst of all worlds,’ said Flesher. ‘O’Brien is not a leader of deterrence.’ The Labour government spoke about more deportations but, since the Treasury refused to provide additional money, there were insufficient staff for the time-consuming operation. And at that moment, June 1999, the IND collapsed. The department was paralysed. Siemens revealed that its computer system was defective, but failed to cure its mistakes or offer an alternative.
‘All hell’s broken loose,’ lamented a hapless official. ‘We’ve jumped off the cliff and there is nowhere to land.’
‘It’s going pear-shaped,’ admitted another. ‘We’ve lost control.’
At a meeting with Straw, IND officials admitted the certain prospect of chaos. The overloaded old system had been dismantled and the best staff had long gone. After a further visit to Croydon, O’Brien reported
that the ‘pile of files is vast’ and, even worse, many folders could no longer be found.
Straw’s and O’Brien’s anger was diverted by their civil servants onto the Treasury. Home Office officials were paralysed by the Treasury’s original decision to place the financial risk and control of the system with Siemens. By surrendering control to an outside company, immigration into Britain was at the mercy of unhelpful Germans. While IND officials argued about blame and Croydon careered towards meltdown, deportations declined, delays in the application process increased the backlog and, as the news about the chaos spread, hundreds of thousands more migrants were attracted to Britain. Disappearing after arrival, they knew, would be easy. The solution, Straw was told, was to hire 5,000 new staff, a proposal that was rejected by Brown. ‘What more do you want to plug the loopholes?’ Straw asked Stephen Boys-Smith, the new head of the IND. Boys-Smith, a conscientious official, looked puzzled.
Days later, Richard Wilson moved to Downing Street as Cabinet secretary and was replaced by David Omand, a former director of GCHQ. Omand was soon declaring that immigration had become ‘a failure of policy. It’s a shifting landscape and we have an administration problem.’ The calamity, his fellow officials agreed, reflected an absence of ‘joined-up government’.
The statistics confirmed that the problem was accelerating. After the abolition of the primary purpose rule, immigration from non-EU countries had risen by 50,000 to 200,000. Applications for asylum had increased to 46,000. The Labour government, Tim Walker concluded, watching from his new job in Whitehall, was indeed seen as ‘a soft touch’. Blair’s lack of interest risked turning a bad situation into a crisis. The only amusing diversion was Alastair Campbell’s call to the head of the IND in the midst of the emergency. ‘Are there are any good-news stories’, he asked, ‘that we can use for the Sundays?’
After Christmas, the media turned against Labour. Reports described Kent council as being inundated by thousands of unexpected
asylum-seekers landing in Dover. As the arrivals were dispersed to abandoned housing estates across the country, the local communities in those areas protested that blocks of flats and even streets had become foreign territory.
Blair continued to show no interest in the problem. Instead, he announced the government’s relaxation of the conditions for those applying to enter Britain as students. More foreign students in Britain, he said, would boost the country’s income. In the speech being drafted for the party conference he did not disguise his sympathies. He would attack ‘the old prejudices where foreign means bad; where multiculturalism is not something to celebrate but a left-wing conspiracy to destroy their way of life’. He signalled that not only were more migrants welcome, but anyone who encouraged integration into the British way of life, with its implication of superiority, was a borderline racist. Those who warned about the danger of allowing political Islam to be nurtured in Britain’s mosques and schools were also labelled racist. For those who supported a multicultural Britain, patriotism was a form of racism. They interpreted any emotional connection to the British way of life as discrimination against those who did not share that sentiment.
Blair’s encouragement of foreign students surprised IND officials. If these proposals were implemented, Straw was told, bogus students would ‘attend’ sham language schools and remain in Britain after their visas had expired. In reply Straw faced both ways. Labour, he said, would open the door to students, immigrants and genuine asylum-seekers. At the same time, the 1999 Act showed his determination to stop illegal entry. Bogus marriages had been outlawed, lorry drivers smuggling migrants into Britain would be fined £2,000 per person and benefits for asylum-seekers would be reduced. His officials remained unconvinced. Without publicly admitting the fact, the government had strengthened the rights of asylum-seekers.
Previously, under the Tories a passport officer could deny entry to a suspected applicant and immediately order his or her departure from the country. Under the 1999 Act, Straw allowed applicants to appeal
and stay in Britain until their case was finally decided. Dedicated lawyers patrolling Heathrow promised their clients lengthy delays, while sympathetic judges, in the opinion of IND officials, increasingly interpreted the ‘facts’ to favour the asylum-seekers.
The courts rapidly became clogged, while bogus applicants were freed from overcrowded detention centres with the promise of welfare benefits and public housing. Iraqis, Iranians and Kosovans already resident in Britain encouraged their ‘families’ to join them. The news about the country’s new tolerance spread around the world, encouraging Kurds, Tamils, Sri Lankans and Cypriots to enter as tourists before applying for asylum. Migrants from the Balkans, Afghanistan and Somalia headed for Calais to jump on a lorry and be smuggled in. The police resisted any involvement, and Straw did not demand that Brown finance new detention facilities and more staff. Everyone looked the other way.
In early 1999, Home Office officials reported that people smugglers and lawyers were schooling applicants on what to tell immigration officers, and marriage rackets were flourishing. Over the course of the year, IND received tens of thousands of new applications from migrants who had destroyed their identity documents, making it impossible to know which country they could be deported to. By June 1999, the backlog of applications for asylum rose to 125,000, compared to 52,000 in 1997. The number of immigrants legally entering Britain rose to 360,000, although the government minimised the number by speaking only about a ‘net migration of 219,000’.
That autumn, the new Act was tested. Straw’s somersault from criticising Michael Howard’s bill in 1996 to enacting his own controls encouraged a media outcry. In reaction, No. 10 finally asked the Home Office for information, and Straw paid them a visit. ‘If Downing Street was irritated by the Home Office’s failure to produce the results Blair wanted,’ Omand noted, ‘a chain would be yanked, and the media reports from Campbell’s briefing signalled that Straw’s stock in Downing Street had fallen.’
Straw returned to his office from Downing Street visibly annoyed by Blair’s irritation over the fact that the number of asylum-seekers had not been sharply reduced. To his officials, he appeared surprised that the courts were embracing the sentiment of Labour’s new legislation. ‘What more do you want to stop this?’ he asked Boys-Smith. ‘Shall we rewrite the UN Charter?’ His forlorn question was mixed with anger at Downing Street. The machinery of government, he complained, was being frustrated by the innumerable specialist ‘units’ randomly established by Blair to implement his ideas, and by Blair’s arguments with Brown.