David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  I then soon learned that Tony Berry (MP for Enfield Southgate), who I had known from Oxford days and had then been a colleague in the Whips Office, was among the dead. He had been a good friend. Also among those murdered was the Chairman of the North West Area, Eric Taylor, with whom Gilly and I had been having a drink the night before. His funeral was a glorious celebration of patriotism with a brass band belting out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Eric would have loved it.

  In 1985 the Zola Budd case hit the headlines. Leon Brittan was still Home Secretary and he asked me to see whether there were any difficulties in the way of Zola Budd obtaining British Citizenship so that she could run for Britain in the Olympic Games. Her father, having applied for and obtained a British passport in South Africa on the basis of his father’s birth in Britain, travelled here with Zola. She was then still under the age of eighteen; and as the daughter of a British citizen could expect to be registered as such herself. But an almighty row broke out when she got her British citizenship, it being alleged among other things that she, a white South African, had been put to the top of the queue while millions of black people were waiting patiently for their own applications to enter Britain to be dealt with. The argument was completely fallacious, those advancing it deliberately confusing the right to British citizenship with the right of a foreigner to come to Britain for settlement. To the best of my knowledge, there was at that time no queue of people waiting abroad for their applications for British citizenship to be processed. What the critics were really arguing was that the Home Office should have sat on Zola Budd’s papers long enough to make sure that she missed the Olympics and then, when she had missed the games, should have produced the passport she was entitled to all along.

  What happened thereafter was really quite appalling. Racial bigots set about making Zola Budd’s life a misery and eventually destroyed her running career. I wrote at the time: ‘Perhaps the churches will take a little time off from encouraging illegal immigrants to defy the law and will instead preach the simple message that being born white in South Africa is not a mortal sin. Still less should being white disqualify a person from international athletics.’

  Nobody would have thought from the ill-informed criticism and press attention focused on cases like Zola Budd that most of my time was spent going round the country speaking to and getting on well with ethnic minority groups. But in November 1985 I was invited to speak at Manchester University and there I did not receive the polite and friendly reception I was used to. The Union was packed with people out to make trouble and as I tried to speak above the uproar I was jeered and spat at by a foul-looking young man who placed himself immediately in front of me. Eventually a rush of people invaded the platform, and the police moved in and carried me away to safety. The case had an amusing sequel. The Council of Manchester University appointed a disciplinary committee to look into the incident, but the committee got nowhere. A young black man volunteered that he was the fellow who came on to the platform and hit me, but I knew one thing beyond a shadow of doubt. There was not a black man in sight. So his attempt at martyrdom failed miserably and the inquiry ground to a halt.

  Bill Molloy, Labour MP for Ealing North and later a member of the Lords, wrote me a note which I treasure. It read, ‘David, I hope the hand of the thug that aimed a punch at you rots and drops off.’ But the best letter I got was from a Mr Angus Macnaughton (of Ascot) who wrote:

  While deploring the behaviour of the students of Manchester University … I was surprised to see you quoted in the press as saying that ‘they acted like pigs’. Pigs are peaceable, orderly creatures, much abused by men. They do not deserve this pejorative description. In fact, in all the animal creation, only man is capable of the excesses with which we are so familiar today.

  In a leader entitled ‘Blind Eye?’ the London Evening Standard was very censorious:

  Television viewers could see it plainly enough. Spit was running down his face. His jacket was soaked with beer. At least one of the punches thrown at him, and a hefty one, appeared to land on its target. This was not some war criminal being paraded in front of his victims. It was the Minister of State at the Home Office, Mr David Waddington, attempting to deliver a speech on immigration at Manchester University. Mr Waddington was neither foolish nor optimistic in expecting his opinions to be heard in what is supposed to be a forum for opinions. Manchester University is not a lunatic asylum for the criminally insane. But what happened there last week was far uglier and more violent than a normal student demonstration.

  People who witnessed this vicious hooliganism on their television would have every reason to suppose that the university authorities would by now have taken firm measures, hauled the most repulsive troublemakers up and expelled them. However, the authorities would appear to have been somewhere else that night and seen nothing, to judge by their response. This has been to give the students’ union executive sixteen days to prepare a report on the incident, which will be scrutinised by the University council on 26 November. If this report is ‘not satisfactory’ the question of with-holding some part of the Union’s £573,000 grant ‘is bound to arise’.

  This reaction is timid and inadequate; it is also off-target. To fine the Union some £30,000, as happened at Warwick University in 1983, won’t worry the thugs. It will simply penalise the great majority of student union members who took no part in the viciousness. To put the onus on the union to identify the troublemakers is a pathetic evasion of responsibility.

  It is the reputation of Manchester University itself which has been sullied; it is up to the university authorities to punish the minister’s assailants.

  So absorbed was I with my own ministerial responsibilities, I did not feel deeply involved in the events surrounding the miners’ strike. But I do know that the successful outcome was largely due to Margaret Thatcher. The traditional Home Office line was that we did not have a national police force and while one force could ask for help from a neighbouring force, there could be no question of the government directing another force, or forces, to help one which was under pressure. When, therefore, in 1972 the West Midlands police could not prevent the mob blockading the Saltley Coke Works, no reinforcements were sent to Birmingham to relieve the situation. That led to the chief constable giving up the struggle and the coke works having to shut down.

  In 1984, however, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and she was not going to allow a shameful outcome like that. Day after day newspapers had had on their front pages pictures of miners fighting with police as the police tried to make it possible for other miners to get to work, and the Prime Minister made it plain that a way had to be found for other forces to help the police in Yorkshire. A few days later I came back to London from Lancashire by the A1, and as I travelled south streams of police vehicles were travelling north to the Yorkshire coalfield to do their duty on the Monday morning. A political strike doing great damage to the country was on the way to being defeated.

  A little later Leon Brittan was removed from the Home Office and Douglas Hurd was brought back from Northern Ireland to take his place. Douglas Hurd had to deal with some riots, but for a time my end of the shop was relatively quiet. Then, with the whole system of immigration control bogged down because MPs were showering my office with repeated representations whenever we made a move to remove from the country a person who had no possible right to be here, I exploded at Question Time and said it was about time ‘abuse’ of the system stopped. Later in the afternoon I was summoned to Douglas’s office and Douglas, with a rather pained expression on his face, said that he did not mind my stirring things up as long as I had some idea what I wanted to get out of it all. I said I wanted a set of rules governing representations by MPs in immigration cases and he sent me off to work them up.

  In the House of Commons Douglas was not as robust as I would have wished, being careful not to use the indelicate word ‘abuse’ to describe what had been going on. He said that all I had been trying to do was call attention to some
‘misuse’ of the system; but I had no real reason to complain. I had got my way and in an astonishingly short period of time produced a booklet setting out ‘guidance for MPs in immigration cases’. This guidance has, with various amendments and refinements, stood the test of time and it has greatly improved the efficiency of the system without taking away from MPs their right to make representations.

  But we had to take further steps if our immigration staff in Britain were not to be overwhelmed. Everyone knew that it was people from just a few particular countries who were putting most of the pressure on the immigration system. Many from these countries came for settlement, having obtained entry clearance at a British post abroad to do so. Many more came pretending to be visitors but intending to stay permanently if they possibly could. Surely those saying they wanted to visit should obtain visas abroad just like those saying they wanted to come for settlement. That way their credentials would be checked before they set out on their journey and they would not suffer long delays waiting to be examined at Heathrow. It would be better for the bona fide traveller and take an enormous weight of work off the Immigration Service. It was all common sense, but the fact that something is plain common sense does not mean that it will not cause a row in Parliament; and the introduction of visas for the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria and Ghana caused another great fuss. The most spurious arguments were mounted against the policy. It had to be racist: otherwise why weren’t Americans being required to obtain visas? As if tens of thousands of Americans had the same economic motive for wishing to come to Britain as people in countries with pitifully low living standards.

  Bill Deedes put the matter well in the Daily Telegraph on 3 September 1986:

  Labour spokesmen who berate this (the introduction of visas) as discriminatory and racist really must clear their minds. Do they favour unrestricted immigration? If not, they have to accept that, amid this enormous traffic (5,550,000 people coming on visits each year), sifting the lawful from the unlawful entries to this country can no longer be satisfactorily done off desks at Heathrow. Opposition spokesmen crying ‘racist’ have two questions to answer. Do you accept restricted immigration? If so, where is cheating most effectively checked – there, or here?

  Gradually the storm subsided and the policy helped enormously to lessen the pressures on immigration control.

  The other measure that helped enormously, but again was very controversial, was the Carriers’ Liability Bill which provided that if an airline, for example, brought someone to Britain without the proper documents the airline suffered a penalty. No one seriously imagined that many of those arriving in Britain and claiming refugee status were in fact refugees and our system of control was being overwhelmed as a result of people arriving without any valid claim. The Act worked wonders, but Lord King (then chairman of British Airways) and others complained bitterly, saying that it was a diabolical liberty to require BA employees to look at passports and see that people had the proper documentation before setting out on their journey. We were, however, surely right to assume that BA employees could read and it was hardly surprising that, with the help of the Immigration Service, they soon got used to the new requirements.

  Sometimes my duties in the field of immigration control brought me close to despair. I see that on 18 September 1985 I wrote in the Clitheroe Advertiser: ‘My immigration job is impossible. Everyone demands firm immigration control, but a sizeable slice of the population screams blue murder whenever an attempt is made to enforce it.’ At that particular time I was in trouble over a two-year-old Pakistani boy who had been refused entry to the country. The child’s mother and father were fit and well, living in Pakistan with the little boy’s sister, but had, so it was alleged, agreed to hand over the boy to the father’s brother in England. Britain at that time did not (and for all I know may still not) recognise adoptions in Pakistan because proceedings in that country were not considered to provide sufficient safeguards for the interests of the children concerned. That did not stop a group of churchmen writing to The Guardian complaining about my ‘separating’ the child from its ‘parents’ by refusing the child entry into Britain. The Home Office had the last laugh because at the eleventh hour the true parents refused to hand over the child to the brother, but I cannot remember the Church of England Board of Responsibility conceding that it might have been in error.

  On one occasion a delegation from the Church of England Board came to the Home Office to talk of their concerns and their leader claimed that he knew of a case of a lady from the Caribbean who, having had a child in Britain, was not being allowed to stay here. The child, however, could not go back with her to the Caribbean because, being born British, he had no right to live there. Hayden Phillips said: ‘Which country in the Caribbean does she come from?’ Back came the reply ‘Jamaica’. ‘That’s funny,’ said Hayden Phillips, still batting away as under-secretary responsible for immigration, ‘The last time I heard that story the woman came from Barbados. Have you ever met the woman?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you know her name?’ ‘No.’ And, of course, we never did discover any such woman.

  In 1986 I became a bencher of Gray’s Inn and on being called paid ‘caution money’ of £1,000. To this day I do not know what the money is for. To pay for broken glass or bent silverwear in the event of the bencher running amok? Also in 1986 rumours began to circulate that I was to be deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. I do not know where they started and so far as I know they never had any foundation.

  In the autumn of 1986 Gilly and I went to Hong Kong to see the Vietnamese refugee camps. I also had to meet a number of people, particularly leaders of the Indian community in Hong Kong, about the Hong Kong Nationality Order which I had recently helped take through the House of Commons. This provided that those who ceased to be British Dependent Territories citizens on the Chinese takeover in 1997 would have the right to acquire British National (overseas) status; but there was genuine concern among those who were not ethnically Chinese and had, therefore, no expectation of acquiring Chinese citizenship, that they might be left stateless. Members of the Indian community pointed to the fact that when the East African Asians were expelled from Kenya and Uganda the Indian government made clear that those expelled were Britain’s responsibility not India’s, and these Indians in Hong Kong wanted to know what would happen to them if at some time in the future they were forced to leave what had become their homeland. I pointed out that there was no question of their finding themselves stateless, that they were being offered a form of British nationality and under the Joint Declaration they were guaranteed the right of abode in Hong Kong. I was, however, authorised to give an undertaking that we would look sympathetically at the case of any British national who, in spite of the Joint Declaration, came under pressure to leave.

  On our arrival at one of the refugee camps a guard of honour of scouts and guides was formed to greet us. The movement had been introduced by one of the refugee organisations and had proved immensely popular among the Vietnamese. The scout and guide movements had every reason to be proud of what was being done in their name.

  At the end of 1986 I got a letter from the Prime Minister in these terms:

  I have it in mind on the occasion of the forthcoming list of New Year honours to submit your name to the Queen with a recommendation that she may be graciously pleased to approve that you be sworn of Her Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council. I should be glad to know if this would be agreeable to you. I shall take no steps until I have your reply.

  I replied without delay and on 1 January 1987 became a ‘Rt Hon.’ I received a very nice letter from Willie Whitelaw, appreciated because he knew better than most the difficulties of the job I had been trying to do. On 10 February I reported at the Privy Council Office to be rehearsed by Mr (later Sir Geoffrey) de Deney, Clerk of the Privy Council, in the art of kneeling and kissing the Queen’s hand and was then whisked off to Buckingham Palace for the ceremony. In the words of the official announcement: ‘This day David Charles Wad
dington Esquire, was, by Her Majesty’s Command, sworn of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and took his place at the Board accordingly.’ The oath of a privy councillor as administered by the clerk may seem archaic but it is modern and crystal clear compared with the oath, now abandoned, which I took when I became a QC.*

  A nice cartoon appeared in The Times on Friday 6 February 1987 arising out of demands in Parliament for a relaxation of the licensing laws. I was portrayed as Nelson putting a bottle of brown ale to my blind eye. I had forgotten about my involvement in all this until I went through my papers, so I don’t think it can have loomed large in my workload. We were not, however, ducking the issue as the cartoon tended to suggest. Indeed, not very long afterwards a reform measure went through the House.

  What greatly increased my workload at this time was the decision to introduce legislation to deregulate Sunday trading on the lines of the Auld Report. Eventually, the Bill was lost on second reading, but that was not my fault. It was decided that Douglas Hurd should open the debate because it was a Home Office measure and the winding-up should be left to Kenneth Clarke, then the DTI minister in the Commons, because of the provisions in the Bill concerning the rights of employees. Douglas’s opening was a disaster. When answering an intervention he gave the impression that there would be no Party whip during the committee stage. I whispered to the Chief Whip (John Wakeham): ‘did you know anything about that?’ ‘Certainly not,’ he said. The measure was done for before we had hardly got started because the backbenchers could see what we could see – that if the Bill ever got into committee, without a whip it would never get out. As a result, our side decided that there was no point in prolonging the agony and threw out the Bill there and then.