Authors: Tom Bower
On 11 September, Roche delivered her speech to ‘a gathering of the converted’ in a hall owned by the British Bankers’ Association. Boys-Smith was in the front row. Other than the invited guests and members of the left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research, few were aware of Roche’s speech. No backlash materialised. ‘Well done, Barbara,’ Blair told her soon after. Although he would not read Portes’s report nor attend its presentation in Downing Street, his office did approve its publication in 2001. Blair had embraced a fundamental change in Britain’s immigration policy.
Few white Britons were ever aware of Roche’s speech, but after hearing about her sentiments on the grapevine, migrants in Britain certainly grasped its importance. Successful asylum-seekers told their friends and family across the world about the new mood music, and that Britain provided benefits and state housing unavailable in other European countries. Few in Whitehall understood the implications. Since the
advocates of increased migration denied that migrants would put pressure on any services, there was no discussion among civil servants about providing additional homes, schools or hospitals. ‘It was a policy, not a plan,’ said Roche. Shortly after, she was moved from the Home Office. According to Blunkett and Clarke, she was ‘muddled’ and ‘incompetent’, but her legacy was regularly broadcast by television news.
Hundreds of migrants camped in squalor in Sangatte, outside Calais, were trying to smuggle themselves onto lorries heading for Britain. News reports showed them jumping from trucks in Kent, punching the air in victory. The broadcast media blandly sympathised with the victims, reflecting Blair’s pride in his ‘diversity agenda’. That year’s Race Relations Act imposed on local authorities a duty to promote racial equality and, at the request of Muslim pressure groups, criminalised discrimination on the grounds of religion. Some Muslims interpreted the new edict as Blair’s approval of Sharia law, arranged marriages, polygamy and even female genital mutilation. Since Blair never convened an interdepartmental discussion to consider Muslims’ apparent preference for living apart from their fellow citizens, the government’s silence encouraged some Muslims to deduce that multiculturalism placed no expectations on them to integrate into British society.
Stephen Boys-Smith welcomed that tolerance. The torrent of asylum-seekers arriving in Britain, he noted, never provoked a summons from Straw with the reprimand, ‘I’ve had a roasting from No. 10 about this.’ He assumed that, unlike the media, Blair was uninterested in the increasing numbers, or else approved their arrival. Both conclusions were accurate. Although Blair feared that negative media reports might endanger his re-election, he did not order Whitehall to stop the 350,000-plus foreigners arriving every year. On the contrary, he criticised Straw for failing to provide adequate care. To improve the migrants’ conditions, he summoned a meeting with Straw and Brown to implement Derry Irvine’s proposal that asylum-seekers should be given sufficient welfare benefits and housing. The Treasury, he ordered, should allocate money for all asylum-seekers to be properly treated.
Brown remained silent. Afterwards, a Treasury official telephoned Irvine’s office. Brown, he announced, had vetoed any allocation of additional money. Blair did not challenge his chancellor.
News about the new liberalism – or, as Blair called it, ‘the change agenda’ – combined with welfare benefits in particular attracted Somalis who had settled in other EU countries. Although there was no historic or cultural link between Somalia and Britain, over 200,000 began to cross the Channel. Initially, most applied to settle in Britain on humanitarian grounds rather than as asylum-seekers. Since most were untrained and unemployable and would be dependent on welfare, the Home Office could have refused them, but Boys-Smith directed that they be granted ‘exceptional leave to remain’.
They were not the only ones. On 9 February 2000, Blair was told that over a hundred Afghans had arrived at Stansted airport aboard a hijacked aircraft. Most were seeking asylum. ‘If I hear from the Home Office that their applications will be processed like any other,’ said Blair, ‘I’ll go out onto Horse Guards and scream.’ The Afghans, he said, should be sent home ‘within hours’. His orders were ignored. Britain’s judges, explained Straw, would prevent their immediate return to their homeland. ‘It’s the civil servants,’ said Blair, convinced that Straw had once again been manipulated by Whitehall. Six years later, a judge would grant the nine hijackers asylum, in protection of their human rights. Although they were criminals without any connection to Britain, the nine men had by then received £10 million in welfare benefits and legal aid. The judge would insist that he was applying the law. Blair always overestimated Parliament’s control over the judiciary.
Two months later, he became rattled by one of Philip Gould’s regular reports. The previous September, Gould had predicted the demise of the Conservative Party. Now, the pollster reported that asylum had become his focus groups’ prime issue in the local elections. In the polls, there was a 14.9 per cent swing from Labour. ‘The Tories are using asylum to run the race card,’ said Straw, blaming the previous Tory government for the embarrassment he now faced. Although he spoke confidently
to his senior officials about ‘keeping the lid on asylum-seekers’, Home Office officials knew that for the fourth year running their department was battling with a chaotic backlog of applications.
Straw’s assurances about reversing the tide were no longer convincing. Asylum, Blair finally conceded, was ‘going to be really difficult for us’. His response was to describe the crisis as ‘a Tory mess’, with Labour deflecting the blame by ‘hitting the Tories hard on opportunism and hypocrisy’. The Tory rebuttal, he knew, would not be believed. Although the Conservatives’ ammunition was compelling, the combination of the electorate’s star-struck wonder of Blair, Labour’s election machine and Tory leader William Hague – not least his folly of wearing a baseball hat at a theme park, making him look foolish – undermined Tory credibility. Nevertheless, at his Boxing Day party for his confidants at Chequers, Blair fretted that Straw was failing to defuse the threat of the Tories taking their votes.
The home secretary was flummoxed. After four years, he was grappling for a reply to Hague’s attack that, if re-elected, Labour would turn Britain into a ‘foreign land’. The Tories proposed that Britain should be ‘a safe haven, not a soft touch’. All bogus asylum-seekers, said Hague, should be sent back to France immediately or incarcerated in new detention centres. Britain had only one such facility, which could hold just 400 people and had cost £8 million to construct. To build new centres for 40,000 people would cost billions. Blair accused Hague of being ‘opportunistic’ and left it to the media to unravel the Tory plan.
To Blair’s distress, Straw’s silence was followed by Robin Cook extolling the virtues of more migration and multiculturalism. The British, he said, were a gathering of countless different races whose national dish was no longer fish and chips but chicken tikka masala. ‘RC had definitely got us into the wrong place on race,’ noted Campbell after Blair complained about ‘a catastrophic intervention’. Labour, the prime minister directed, needed to acknowledge that there were ‘genuine concerns’. Brown again disagreed. Any mention of immigration or asylum-seekers, he repeated, ‘would fuel rather than calm public anxiety’.
As they continued to wade through uncertain territory, Blair and Brown were caught out by the eruption of race riots in Oldham. In anticipation of Labour’s uncontrolled immigration being blamed for the riots, Blair blasted the Tories for waging a cultural, racist war. To prove his own anti-racist credentials, Straw volunteered to praise asylum-seekers and immigrants for their contribution to British life. Blair vetoed the idea. Straw, he had decided, would be replaced after the election by Blunkett, whom, he felt, he could trust to navigate through the contradictions. Unlimited immigration was acceptable, but the number of asylum-seekers needed to be either curtailed or relabelled. And that had to be done before the election.
Ever since Blair had returned from his summer holiday in Italy, Charles Clarke noticed, ‘he was frightened about losing the election’. In four areas – education, crime, health and transport – he wanted ammunition to announce ‘successes’.
Education did give Blair headlines. Thanks to Labour’s numeracy and literacy hours, Michael Barber told him, the results of the key stage two tests for primary schoolchildren in 1999 and 2000 showed a ‘big leap’. The rises of 5 per cent in reading and 10 per cent in maths were beyond even Barber’s dreams.
Barber credited his Standards and Effectiveness Unit for Labour’s ‘most conspicuous delivery success’. England’s eleven-year-olds had been placed ‘among the best in the world’ in an assessment survey of literacy and numeracy conducted by PISA, a respected OECD organisation. ‘In just over two years,’ Barber would write, ‘the face of primary education had been changed forever.’ With an acute sense of his place in history, Blair did not question Barber’s opinion that England’s primary schools had suddenly leapt in quality to rank third in the world. Labour could also take the same credit, said Barber, for PISA’s glowing report on England’s fifteen-year-olds, although the government had left secondary schools untouched so far. Insiders quipped half in jest that the triumph should satisfy Alastair Campbell’s lust for the newspaper headline ‘Sir Gets a Sir’. No one mentioned that Labour’s literacy hour was just one year old and the numeracy hour had not yet started.
Money, Blair believed, was curing his appalling inheritance from the Tories. No fewer than 424 failing schools, he told the public, were being closed down. In 2000, spending on education increased to £56.9 billion, 8.3 per cent more than the previous year. The figure in 2001 would be £62.4 billion, up 9.5 per cent in a year. Since the number of schoolchildren was falling and classes were getting smaller, the government could boast that spending per child would rise within the first parliament by 78 per cent. Pertinently, in 2001 Labour spent less on education as a percentage of GDP than John Major in 1995.
The good news provided Blair with a smokescreen to break an election pledge. He was again tinkering with structures. Two years after the 424 condemned schools had been reopened under Fresh Start, a rebranding programme, Estelle Morris, the junior education minister, told Blunkett that none of those schools was improving. To rescue them, Blair could have adopted Chris Woodhead’s proposal to dismiss failing teachers. Instead, he approved a Tory plan to hand the schools over to private sponsors and a board of governors, naming them ‘city academies’. He agreed to the same rebranding for failing comprehensives. They were to be recategorised with a designated speciality and given extra funds.
As usual, Blair’s espousal of structures, not standards, dissatisfied Woodhead. The chief inspector also criticised Blunkett as ‘a table-thumping bully’. The tension between them, Blair decided, had finally become too destructive. ‘It’s time for Woodhead to leave,’ he pronounced. Fortunately, revelations about Woodhead’s allegedly inappropriate relationship with a young woman some years previously had surfaced and would limit any political damage. So Woodhead left – a relief to Blair’s educationalists and causing no harm politically even when, three months later in the
Daily Telegraph
, the deposed chief criticised Blair for ‘not seeing anything through, especially the reforms’. Woodhead also blamed Blunkett for ‘wasting taxpayers’ money’ on endless initiatives that ‘encapsulated the worst of the discredited ideology with educational claptrap and wacky initiatives’. His worst moment, the
educationalist disclosed, was a serious discussion to rename teachers ‘learning professionals’. Blair’s defence was Barber’s statistics. They were Labour’s trump card.
Woodhead’s successor at Ofsted, appointed by Blunkett, was Mike Tomlinson, a former chemistry teacher who had been an inspector of schools for twelve years. Aligned to the left, Tomlinson agreed with Blunkett that Ofsted’s rigorous inspections of schools should be softened. His priority, he said, was no longer to focus solely on inspections but to work in partnership with teachers. ‘Inspections’, he told the schools, ‘will be done with you rather than to you.’
Blair remained displeased. The primary-school key stage tests, he knew, did not reflect improvements across the whole of education. He demanded ‘results’. Blunkett urged patience. ‘It was deeply frustrating that progress was so slow,’ he would admit. ‘We couldn’t accept in our heads that it would take so long.’ Only later did both men understand the cause of their disappointment. ‘We’d started out in 1997 with a real sense of momentum,’ Blunkett reflected, ‘but we weren’t ready for the next step. We’d thought of stage one but not thought of the next stage, of reinforcing primary and secondary schools.’
Michael Bichard agreed. After four hectic years, they had hit the buffers, with no new ideas. Millions of pounds had been poured into ‘process’ and, like the rest of Whitehall, the education department had fought ferociously over structures and relationships, but too little time had been spent discussing the quality of the service. ‘You can’t run the system with targets from Whitehall’, Bichard realised, ‘because you often set the wrong targets.’ The department had spent money on new buildings and on raising teachers’ salaries. They had spoken about schools being accountable for standards, but too little had been achieved.
Blunkett half agreed. Aware that he would go to the Home Office after the election, he regretted that Blair was irrevocably glued to targets and regular inspections. The prime minister, he thought, had been sucked into centralised intervention; after all, he had refused to abolish the LEAs’ supervision of education, and still spoke about the advantages
of collaboration and against the Tories’ promotion of competition and autonomy. Blunkett had moved on. ‘For the second stage,’ he realised, ‘we needed an exit policy.’ To ease the change of policy, embracing Tory ideas without admitting any mistakes, required deft management.
Unknown to his minister, Blair had arrived at a similar conclusion. Just as ‘choice’ had been introduced into the argument about the NHS, he had been converted to actually embrace ‘the parents’ right to choose’ from a range of schools. But he was nervous of publicly mentioning markets. That would confirm his critics’ suspicions that he was heading towards both private education and American-style payments for health care rather than continuing the NHS’s free treatment.
Influenced by his experience at the Oratory, Blair acknowledged that the destruction of grant-maintained schools had been a serious mistake. Good schools had been sacrificed to please ideologists. He decided to change course. He had been persuaded that 2,000 comprehensives (nearly half the total) should be converted from schools offering a general education to providing special courses in arts or science by 2005; and although 7,000 of the country’s 25,000 state schools were faith schools, he would create even more of them. At a Christian Socialist Movement conference, he preached the virtues of church schools as a pillar of the education system ‘valued by very many parents for their faith character, their moral emphasis and the high quality of education they generally provide’.
In 1997, a quarter of England’s primary schools (that is, 6,384) and one in twenty secondary schools (589) were run by Christian churches. The Church of England was urged to open another hundred secondary schools within five years. Blair’s enthusiasm was opposed by many Labour MPs. Faith schools, he was told, would inevitably lead to Muslim establishments with segregated classrooms teaching Islamic studies and embracing Muslim values. They would separate themselves from the community. The first two Muslim schools approved by Labour in January 1998 had been condemned by the Church Society as ‘a foot in the door’. Blair was unimpressed by the protests of what he
called ‘entrenched interests’ who wanted to return to old Labour rather than loosen the government’s monopoly and devolve. Schools have to stop treating all the children the same, he told Campbell. His spokesman went public, and immediately incited an argument by disparaging ‘bog-standard comprehensives’.
Blair’s attitude to education was hardening. ‘What gives me real edge’, he told an adviser, ‘is that I’m not as Labour as you lot.’ Thatcher, he was not afraid to admit, had been partly right. The solution was to mix the best of socialism with Thatcherism. There would be top-down directives to meet targets and, at the same time, he would introduce market mechanisms. Adding to that confused ideology, he now advocated changing structures. He made no pretence of being consistent. Prime ministers were allowed to change course, he felt.
Just before the election, there came another shift when Bichard was replaced by David Normington, a skilled Whitehall operator. In an early conversation with Blair, Normington sensed that the prime minister no longer believed in centralisation, and so Blunkett’s departure would remove a barrier. He was mistaken. Blair passionately believed in Whitehall’s control over local education by using targets. Blair also agreed with Andrew Adonis that the governance of schools should be decentralised, yet both men insisted on keeping centralised control over teachers. They did not trust school principals to dismiss bad teachers, nor did Blair want a battle with the unions about standards. To his senior civil servants, the position made little sense, but Barber, with limited interest in the ideological battle, said nothing. He believed that his new delivery unit – the epitome of centralisation – would solve all the problems.