BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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situation was unsustainable’, a senior adviser to Blair says: ‘We were just
getting slaughtered on asylum. It wasn’t unusual for there to be an asylum
story on the front page of a tabloid every day of the week.’ Asylum became
one of the top ten delivery priorities for the PM’s Delivery Unit and a constant focus of his stock-takes and briefings. Looking back, Blunkett says: ‘I
think one of the things that over the ten years affected Tony most of all was
the idea that the government should be seen to be powerless; that issues
such as this were out of our hands, that there was nothing we could do,
and would therefore be dubbed inadequate or incompetent.’
Wholly unconvinced by arguments from lawyers and officials that
more radical measures – including large-scale detention – were not feasible, Blair consistently challenged the Home Office to do more. Blunkett’s
adviser Nick Pearce, who was present at many such meetings, compares
Blair’s style to throwing a ball into the distance, leaving officials and
advisers to scurry over and bring it back to a sensible place, only to have
him throw it again: ‘he would continually push as far as you could go on
an issue, get 20% of what he wanted, then push again and get another
20% and just keep doing it’.14
Blair stunned the Home Office by announcing on Newsnight in
February 2003 that asylum applications would be halved within a year.
While numbers were beginning to fall, this was wildly ambitious. Blunkett
was not confident it could be achieved and recalls ‘gentle words’ with Blair;
his biographer intimates that the conversation was more heated.15 Blunkett
nevertheless characteristically used the Prime Minister’s commitment to
13 Fiona Mactaggart MP, interviewed by the author on 22 March 2007, from which other
quotes in this chapter are also taken.
14 Nick Pearce, Special Adviser to the Home Secretary 2001–4, interviewed by the author on
16 March 2007, from which other quotes in this chapter are also taken.
15 Stephen Pollard, David Blunkett (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005), p. 278.
lever cooperation from other departments. Blair, having used this tactic
successfully to galvanise action, did so again in 2004, promising to reach
the ‘tipping-point’ – a greater number of removals of failed asylum-seekers
than new applicants each month – and then insisted on tougher measures
in the Asylum Bill of that year to achieve it. ‘The tipping-point was a good
rhetorical device’, Mactaggart argues. ‘Nobody was getting around to
deporting them – it made the system get around to it and that did help
change people’s views.’
Blair’s role was also pivotal in silencing opposition from other departments – from Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine on curtailing asylum appeals,
the Foreign Office on extending visa controls and sceptical cabinet colleagues on ID cards. A senior adviser confirms: ‘The advantage of having
the PM involved was that you could bring around the table departments
which had not been that cooperative on some of the things the Home
Office wanted to do. That made a big difference.’
Dispersal
The 1999 Act had also provided for the dispersal of asylum-seekers away
from the south-east and the National Asylum Support System (NASS)
was set up in 2000 to manage it – an ambitious scheme to create a welfare
and accommodation system for a transient, diverse population with
significant needs. Highly centralised, with little buy-in from local authorities and hence reliant on private landlords, and dispersing asylumseekers to areas where local residents themselves experienced multiple
disadvantage, the system was beset with difficulties from the start. The
Home Office had no previous relationship with local authorities, no
experience of housing provision, and no infrastructure to organise the
transport of people at short notice. Pearce says: ‘The whole thing was
mad – a Thomas Cook model: give them a voucher and put them on a
bus.’ The consequence was asylum-seekers arriving in local communities
with scant preparation for the services they would need nor the reaction
of their neighbours.
Blunkett sought to replace dispersal with a system of accommodation
centres, removing asylum-seekers from local housing, education and
health provision, an idea earlier rejected by Straw following violent
attacks on such centres in Germany. Strong opposition from Brown on
cost grounds, a rare example of Treasury opposition on migration
matters, and public resistance in areas designated for the new centres, relegated the idea to a pilot scheme.
Success?
A cursory look at asylum figures would suggest that the government
achieved its overriding objective: the number of applications fell sharply
after 2002 to 49,000 the following year, the beginning of a steady decline
to 23,500 in 2006. The backlog was, by 2006, no longer significant.
(Removal figures remained more stubborn, never coming close to the
number told they had no right to stay.)
It is an open question, however, to what extent the control or deterrent
measures led to the fall in applications, relative to the impact of events
beyond the government’s control in the conflict zones from which the
majority of asylum-seekers came. Insiders and critics are in a level of
agreement that the imposition of visa controls contributed to falling
numbers from countries such as Zimbabwe where there was no improvement in the conditions causing people to flee; but the end of the war in
former Yugoslavia and the peace process in Sri Lanka, for instance, also
contributed.
Advisers themselves question whether welfare benefits were ever an
incentive for asylum-seekers to choose Britain (the academic evidence
suggested not)16 and hence whether their withdrawal had any impact
other than to leave many destitute. Blunkett himself thinks there are measures, such as the power to remove the British-born children of failed
asylum-seekers, on which he expended considerable political capital, but
‘hasn’t made any difference at all’. Nor is it known how many would-be
asylum-seekers, deterred by a slow system that provided neither work nor
adequate welfare support, chose not to apply but to work illegally instead
in a labour market with employers ready to overlook the immigration
status of those willing to do the job.
Measures to prevent asylum-seekers reaching the UK did, however,
breach the spirit if not the letter of the UK’s obligations under international law, including the fledgling Human Rights Act.17 How many of
those prevented from reaching the UK had a genuine need for protection
will never be known. Restrictions on benefits and the right to work were
severely criticised on humanitarian grounds and as counter-productive,
public resentment focusing on asylum-seekers’ dependence on the
taxpayer and visibility on street corners with nothing to do. The Joint
16 Vaughan Robinson and J. Segrott, Understanding the Decision Making of Asylum Seekers
(London: Home Office Research Study 243, 2002).
Culture in the United Kingdom’, Journal of Law and Society, 32(1), 2005: 131–47.
Committee on Human Rights concluded in 2006 that: ‘by refusing permission for asylum-seekers to work and operating a system of support
which results in widespread destitution, the treatment of asylumseekers in a number of cases reaches the Article 3 ECHR threshold of inhuman and degrading treatment’. . .[it] falls below the requirements
of the common law of humanity and international human rights law’. 18
Blunkett insists criticism of this kind considers only one side of the argument – the rights of individuals not the wider public good: ‘We were
dealing with individual rights of course but we were dealing with public
policy as well. You had to see the two in balance if you weren’t in the end
to destroy any kind of confidence in what a democratic government was
trying to do.’
Public hostility
In contrast to the expansion of labour migration, Labour’s asylum
reforms required primary legislation, ensuring a consistently high profile
for a contentious and divisive political debate. Blair and successive Home
Secretaries were convinced that maintaining a high profile for the tough
measures they were taking was the way to reassure the public that they
were bringing migration under control. Polling evidence shows this was
not successful. A window of opportunity in the first three years, when no
more than 10% rated immigration and race in the top three issues facing
Britain, was lost as it rose to 27% in 2001, and reached 39% as asylum
numbers and the media fever pitch reached their peak in 2002. By April
2007, as Blair prepared to announce his resignation, 36% of the public
rated immigration and race issues second only to crime. Eurobarometer
data confirmed that where immigration is separated from broader race
issues, concern remains as high: 40% of the UK public in 2006 rated
immigration the most important area of concern. Across the EU as a
whole, immigration came fourth.19
The reasons for this are not difficult to see. The public did not hear
messages direct from ministers but via the press, and the tabloids continued to headline anti-asylum-seeker stories on a regular basis, despite
18 Joint Committee on Human Rights, The Treatment of Asylum Seekers, Tenth Report of
Session 2006–2007, vol. I, Report and Formal Minutes, HL Paper 81-1, HC 60-1 (London:
TSO, 2007), p. 41.
19 Ipsos Mori, Political Monitor: Long Term Trends; Eurobarometer 66, Public Opinion in
the EU, Autumn 2006, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb66/eb66_uk_
exec.pdf.
falling numbers. Second, the rhetoric of new measures to tackle asylum,
emphasising abuse of the system, reinforced the perception of asylumseekers as a threat, not people in need of protection. Finally, the public
did not, as the government had anticipated, readily tell the difference
between an asylum-seeker, a migrant worker or an international student
in their neighbourhood. Pearce says,
With hindsight, we weren’t communicating in the way the public were
thinking. Locality has more impact than we realised – people talking to
their friends and neighbours – and there was a naivety in thinking they
would understand the different categories of migrant as we did. Even if
they heard the message, the effect of the tough rhetoric was to wind up
their concerns, not reassure them. We should have taken down the temperature and worked with local authorities and the local press to change attitudes. But the pressures at the time were immense.
Mactaggart agrees that the rhetoric was damaging: ‘It created a belief
that claiming asylum was an abusive act, against the community. The
rhetoric told them that they had something to worry about. It didn’t reassure people. And the way we treated asylum-seekers was also damaging.’
Don Flynn, director of the Migrants’ Rights Network, suggests that the
government’s style of politics provided a context in which latent anxieties
about migrants could be mobilised: ‘It assumed in 1997 that the electorate would always respond to immigration negatively, at a time when
public opinion was as sanguine on the issue as it had ever been. If Blair
had brought migration within his modernising rhetoric he could have led
a progressive current within public opinion which undoubtedly
existed.’20 Roche argues, however, that even by the time she became
Immigration Minister in 1999, it was already very difficult to change the
terms of the debate. There was no interest in positive messages, such as
the refugee integration strategy. ‘It was positive, progressive stuff – on
refugee doctors for instance – but there was little interest in that.’
Immigration ‘control’ to ‘managed migration’
In contrast to asylum, Blair initially had little concern about labour migration. Employers critical of the work-permit system were soon satisfied by
relaxation of work-permit controls and streamlined procedures, enabling
skilled migrants to fill vacancies in the public and private sectors. Eager to
20 Don Flynn, director of Migrants’ Rights Network, interviewed on 21 May 2007, from
which other quotes are also taken.
shift the focus of political and media debates, it was on these migrants that
Roche focused in a path-breaking speech to the Institute for Public Policy
Research (ippr) in September 2000. Emphasising the economic and social
benefits of migration to the UK, she said: ‘we are in competition for the
brightest and the best talents, the entrepreneurs, the scientists, the high
technology specialists who make the global economy tick . . . the evidence
shows that economically driven migration can bring substantial overall
benefits both for growth and the economy’.21
‘I wanted’, she says now, ‘to be the first Immigration Minister to say
“immigration is a good thing”, that we are a nation of migrants. But it has
to be legal, and it has to be well managed.’ It was only with the arrival of
Blunkett at the Home Office after the 2001 election, however, that Roche’s
theme was reflected in a marked shift in language and policy from that of
immigration ‘control’ to ‘managed migration’ . A report commissioned
by the Prime Minister from his Performance and Innovation Unit had set
out the evidence and rationale for a shift in approach, a report received
with some enthusiasm at the Treasury, if less so within IND itself.22
Blunkett came into office having overseen the growth in labour migration at the Department for Education and Employment. With the breakup of that department he took this responsibility with him to the Home
Office, bringing recognition of the economic benefits of migration into a
department that had traditionally focused only on keeping migrants out.
It created the opportunity to join up policy on family migration, asylum
and migrant workers for the first time.
Blunkett saw that policy on labour migration and asylum could not be
addressed in isolation. High job vacancy rates and the lack of legal channels
for migrants to take those jobs were both encouraging illegal immigration
and lengthening the asylum queues. Conversely, clamping down on illegal
migration and asylum would mean closing off some sources of much
needed labour. He recalls discussing it with Brown because the Treasury
was ‘very jumpy’: ‘We knew that if you didn’t have very substantial legal
routes for working in this country our economy would be closed down.’
The growth in work permits had, moreover, been a tangible demonstration that labour migration flows could be managed and had, at that
stage, aroused little opposition. Within days of taking office Blunkett had
21 Barbara Roche MP, ‘UK Migration in a Global Economy’, presentation to ippr event, 11
September 2000.
22 S. Glover, C. Gott, A. Loizillon, J. Portes, R. Price, S. Spencer, V. Srinivasan and C. Willis,
Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis, RDS Occasional Paper 67 (London: Home
Office, 2001).
announced his intention to open up new skilled and low-skilled routes
for legal migration in order to ‘undercut the people smugglers’. The willingness to open up low-skilled routes, and the overt intention to use this
to avoid migrants resorting to alternatives, was a significant departure
from past Labour and Conservative policy. ‘My view was that legality
breeds confidence in the system, illegality undermined all that we were
trying to do and encouraged the theory that everything was falling apart
which the right wing press reinforced over and over again.’
A 2002 White Paper, Secure Borders, Safe Havens: Integration with
Diversity in Modern Britain, thus sought for the first time to set out an
integrated approach. Largely written by Blunkett and Pearce, in the face
of some incomprehension in the IND, it anticipated opening up labour
migration channels; further restrictions on asylum-seekers; and developing a new approach to citizenship as a tool of integration for those
remaining in the long term. Published within months of the events of 11
September 2001, and in the midst of constant media pressure on asylum,
it was already clear that control measures would dominate debate.