Broken Vows

by Tom Bower

  The second Cabinet meeting lasted just thirty-five minutes.

  TWO

  Uninvited Citizens

  * * *

  After eighteen years in opposition, there was a long list of revisions that did not require Downing Street’s approval. The most controversial would become immigration.

  The last Commons clash on this issue had been fought over Michael Howard’s bill in 1996. Alarmed by the increase in the number of foreigners claiming asylum in Britain, the Tories had proposed a list of restrictions that Jack Straw had vigorously opposed.

  Britain had been a historic safe haven for those escaping persecution. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many fleeing the Soviet Union and other East European dictatorships had been welcomed. Among the 4,000 refugees arriving every year were politicians and artists from Africa and South America. Their applications automatically involved MI5, and were governed by the Geneva international convention signed in 1951. Asylum would be awarded only to those able to prove persecution by their government, and there was no legal guarantee such requests would be granted.

  By 1995, that approach had changed. Third World economic migrants were entering Britain as tourists and then, after their six-month visas expired, claiming asylum. That year, applications rose to 43,000. Pertinently, the number of asylum-seekers in the rest of Europe had fallen dramatically because borders were being tightened. ‘Britain was no longer a haven but a honey pot,’ declared Howard. Unlike in other European countries, successful applicants were given generous cash benefits, subsidised housing and free health care. Home Office officials estimated that in 1995 over £200 million was paid out in benefits and only 5 per cent of those claiming asylum were genuine refugees. In Howard’s opinion, the Home Office was losing control. Dilatory judges were allowing skilful lawyers to exploit a crumbling system. If the law were not changed, another 75,000 foreigners would claim asylum within the year.

  To stop the racket, Howard’s bill made it illegal to employ unrecognised asylum-seekers, withdrew benefits from those who failed to apply properly and stipulated procedures to remove bogus applicants as swiftly as possible. He also created a ‘white list’ naming those countries recognised as tyrannies whose nationals could genuinely be seeking asylum, and a ‘safe’ list whose nationals should have no reason to fear for their lives. Applications for asylum by nationals from the ‘safe’ countries would be automatically denied. Following the announcement of the bill, the number arriving in Britain dropped from 43,000 to 29,000 during 1996. Immigration from the Indian subcontinent also fell.

  At first, Blair said nothing about the bill. He believed that immigration was good for the economy. Beyond that, he was oblivious to potential political problems arising from immigration or bogus asylum-seekers. As he would subsequently write, ‘We had come to power with a fairly traditional but complacent view of immigration and asylum.’ But Straw was genuinely angry. Free to oppose Howard in the Commons, he described the home secretary’s focus on the number of immigrants as ‘racist’. He was supported by Gerald Kaufman, an acerbic Labour MP, who characterised the legislation as ‘vicious’. Blair was eventually forced into making a public comment, damning Howard for playing the immigration card as a sop to his party and the electorate.

  A succession of human-interest stories now strengthened the Labour case, in particular one concerning a group of failed Algerian asylum-seekers on hunger strike in Rochester prison in protest at their deportation orders. Tim Walker and other Home Office officials believed that Howard was prepared to let them die. His nonchalance was widely criticised.

  A second victim of the bill who received considerable publicity was Viraj Mendis, a Sri Lankan who was pulled out of a church and deported. A third was a family of Nigerians destined for deportation who were seeking sanctuary in a church in Stoke Newington.

  ‘We are seen as a soft touch,’ said Howard defensively. ‘My bill will prevent the abuse of the law.’

  ‘Wicked,’ retorted Straw. Not granting asylum to the Nigerians, he went on, was racist because Nigerians needed visas to enter Britain while Americans didn’t. According to Straw, all asylum-seekers arriving in Britain were genuinely fleeing from oppression and torture. Bogus claimants were products of Tory racism. He pledged to repeal Howard’s ‘arbitrary and unfair’ law. Labour’s manifesto, he predicted, would also include legislation to promote racial equality among those employed in the public sector.

  Straw’s damnation of Howard’s bill resonated among those directly affected. In the dying months of a discredited Conservative government, the immigrant communities assumed that Straw would be the next home secretary and pinpointed one particular pledge in the Labour manifesto. At Straw’s behest, the party promised to remove the ‘primary purpose rule’ – a regulation enshrined by the Home Office to prevent bogus marriages being used to enter Britain. The targets were naturalised immigrants from India and Pakistan living in Britain who sought to marry citizens living in the subcontinent and bring them back to Britain. That was forbidden unless they could prove that the primary purpose was genuinely to marry and not a ruse to enable a non-resident to live in the UK. For years, the law had kept out many suspect fiancés and members of the immigrants’ extended families.

  Straw had a special interest in the rule. Many of his constituents in Blackburn originated from the subcontinent, and they were pleading for the right to be united with their wives and family – real or acquired – in Britain. Straw wrote a pamphlet called ‘Firmer, Faster, Fairer’ that praised tolerance and reflected his belief in the benefits of immigration, and he promised to repeal the 1996 Immigration Act and abolish the primary purpose rule. Blair agreed with Straw that ‘the rule is a mistake and should be removed’.

  ‘Because I represent Blackburn’, Straw told Tim Walker, ‘and have been the shadow Home Office minister for many years, I know a great deal about immigration and asylum.’ The primary purpose rule, he ordered, was to be abandoned immediately. ‘There will be about 10,000 immigrants a year coming from India and Pakistan,’ he predicted with certainty. ‘I don’t like letting illiterates from the subcontinent into Britain,’ he added, ‘but people have the right to choose their wives.’ In passing, he also mentioned that ‘Tony’s not interested in immigration. He wants the manifesto commitment quickly implemented.’

  Mike O’Brien, the junior minister responsible for immigration, silently noted that ‘Straw’s also not interested in asylum.’

  One official sought to persuade the home secretary that he misunderstood marriage in the subcontinent. ‘Marriage in India’, she told him, ‘is an important part of the economy. Families are prepared to pay large sums to arrange for their daughters to enter Britain, not least so they can follow.’ She added that in Somalia the word ‘brother’ had a different definition to that in Britain. Straw was dismissive and, although he would never approve of any proposed legal definition of a dependant or a family, he waved her advice aside. Immigration, he told officials, was not a problem and was certainly not a priority.

  Taking his lead from Straw, Richard Wilson had no interest in immigration. His attitude was reinforced by the absence of any policy directive from Robin Butler. ‘Blair’, observed Butler, ‘never discussed immigration. I doubt if he ever thought about it.’ It was clear that Straw’s proposals had barely been discussed with his leader. Accordingly, the primary purpose rule was abolished and more immigrants from the subcontinent were made eligible to enter Britain. While Labour would formally retain Britain’s border controls with Europe, their enforcement was relaxed.

  In that halcyon year, the consequences did not materialise: Straw had inherited the legacy of Howard’s restrictions. The number of asylum-seekers arriving in Britain began to fall in 1997 from 32,500 towards 20,000 in 1999; immigrants from non-EU countries remained static at about 150,000. After deducting the number of Britons emigrating, ‘net’ migration was under 100,000. Straw also inherited an unmentioned difficulty: the 52,000 applications for asylum tha
t were piled up, unprocessed, at the IND’s headquarters in Croydon.

  Within the Home Office, the immigration department was an unloved backwater where some 5,000 civil servants were charged with scrutinising bulging files, highlighting discrepancies. In a forbidding atmosphere, newly appointed officials duly noted that most applications were riddled with lies. Their work rarely led to solutions but invariably to appeals. ‘Our task is often hopeless,’ Walker told Straw during his first visit to the centre. ‘Their efforts to get in are always greater than our efforts to keep them out.’ Straw was told that the IND’s task could be relieved only if the number of applicants fell or the conditions of entry were modified.

  He agreed. Officials were told to rewrite Howard’s restrictive index of approved nations. ‘Increase the countries on the list,’ Straw ordered. Asylum was to be granted to beleaguered Afghans, Nigerians and others. The unusually legalistic home secretary also asked officials to redefine ‘persecution’. Among those to be granted asylum were gays fleeing maltreatment in Africa and Roma suffering in Europe.

  By the end of May, human-rights activists recognised that the 1996 Act had been swept aside. One lawyer even challenged the state’s right to withhold benefits from asylum-seekers who had, as required by the Act, failed to register their claim immediately, citing a clause in the 1948 Assistance Act that guaranteed the state’s duty of care towards the poor. Judge Andrew Collins, sympathetic towards Labour’s intentions, agreed that the 1948 act neutralised Howard’s prohibitions. Normally, the Home Office would have appealed the judge’s decision, but officials assumed that Blair wanted all immigrants, including suspect asylum-seekers, to be treated generously. Accordingly, even failed applicants became entitled to welfare benefits.

  In 2011, Blair would write, ‘Law and order – and to an extent immigration – were to me utterly mainstream and vital points of what the government was about.’ In reality, Downing Street’s directive to ministers was not to mention immigration. Blair was just not interested in the subject.

  Any doubts about that message were removed by the government’s announcement soon after the election that it would introduce a human-rights bill, under which suspect asylum-seekers would be guaranteed the right to have their cases heard by a judge in Britain rather than a European judge in Strasbourg. The change was interpreted across the world as the beginning of a new tolerance, described by Blair as ‘placatory signals’. In reality, his nonchalant dismissal of the topic would come back to haunt him.

  THREE

  Restoring a Vision

  * * *

  Four days after the election, Frank Dobson was summoned to Downing Street.

  ‘How’s it going, Frank?’ Blair asked.

  ‘I’m implementing the manifesto,’ Dobson replied proudly.

  Blair smiled. He had barely thought about New Labour’s health policy. On the Saturday morning after the election, in a telephone conversation with Alan Milburn, a former Trotskyite from a coal-mining village in County Durham, Blair had confessed his ignorance about the NHS. ‘You’ll be the junior health minister,’ he said. Milburn seemed a natural choice. He had made his reputation as a backbencher who asked awkward questions about the health service based on sensitive information leaked to him by a senior NHS manager.

  ‘What should I do?’ asked Milburn.

  ‘We need a health policy.’

  The service, Blair believed, was in crisis. However, he was uncertain about the solution.

  Dobson did not share those qualms, and had already ordered Graham Hart, the department’s permanent secretary, to restore the NHS to the purity of its founders’ vision in 1948. The Tories’ system of targets and league tables, along with the Patient’s Charter introduced in 1994, were rescinded. Simultaneously, Dobson abolished the Tories’ schemes to improve the quality of NHS care by empowering patients to choose their treatment and creating competition between hospitals.

  ‘I’ve ended the internal market and GP fund-holders,’ Dobson told Blair. ‘Now it’s co-operation, not competition and arguments.’

  The NHS at that point employed a million people and absorbed about a tenth of Britain’s GDP. In the manifesto, Blair had promised that £100 million would be saved by terminating the internal market’s red tape. That money, he had written, would be used to reduce the waiting lists for admission to hospital, which were at their highest level since 1948. One hundred thousand people would immediately be helped, even though 1.1 million would remain on the lists.

  That inheritance, Blair believed, was symbolic of the Tories’ disdain for the NHS. In comparison with other countries, Britons had a lower life expectancy and less chance of surviving cancer. With inadequate government funding, many hospital buildings were derelict, there were insufficient doctors and the use of new technology was limited. A plan introduced in 1988 to make the training of nurses more academic was producing ‘too posh to wash’ recruits who were reluctant to perform the traditional chores. The £100 million, predicted Dobson, would begin to solve these problems. ‘We hoped that all it would need was just a bit more money,’ recalled John Hutton, a junior health minister. Beyond that, on his own initiative Dobson had ignored the plans devised by Chris Smith over the previous year to refine the Tories’ introduction of market economics into the NHS. Any proposal to change Aneurin Bevan’s blessed legacy was heresy.

  Back in 1991, Ken Clarke, the then health minister, had concluded that the NHS was weakened by the Luddite practices of the NHS’s own employees. To undermine their damaging self-interest, Clarke had created an internal market. His purpose was to provide faster and cheaper treatment for the public; to allow NHS hospitals to become more independent from Whitehall as so-called ‘trusts’; to give financial power to GPs as ‘fund-holders’ to select and ‘pay’ for the treatment and hospital care of their patients; and to use private hospitals to reduce NHS waiting times. Robin Cook, Labour’s spokesman at the time, had opposed all these ideas.

  In 1996, in an unusual innovation, Chris Smith had been encouraged by Stephen Dorrell, the Conservative health minister, to speak to his departmental officials so that he might understand the incentives and competition that had been crafted to cure the NHS’s chronic inefficiency.

  ‘We need to rethink how to provide what did not exist in 1948,’ Dorrell told those civil servants in the department who still worshipped Nye Bevan’s ‘covenant of past ideas’. The famous quip, ‘The British have only one religion, the NHS, and Tories are seen as non-believers,’ still resonated. Dorrell’s White Paper, ‘A Service with Ambitions’, summarised the cures developed by trial and error to reduce management costs and end the paternalism of the staff running the NHS to suit their own rather than their patients’ interests. Over the previous six years, the NHS had gradually placed GPs rather than administrators in the central role as leaders of the service, responsible for directing the expenditure of money to improve primary care. By using incentives and competition, GPs were encouraged to focus on the quality of treatment rather than on the number of people passing through hospitals. The innovation had been rewarded by a continuous rise in productivity. Taxpayers were getting more for their money and a record number of people were being treated. The downside was that the increasing demand for treatment by a growing and ageing population was not being met by sufficient expansion of the service.

  In crafting Labour’s health policy, Smith appeared to accept that Clarke’s innovations were improving productivity, but he intended to add refinements. At the same time, he could not resist mocking Dorrell and the Tories’ NHS as ‘a shambles’. Among the solutions he expected – by 10.30 a.m. on his first day in office – was the dismissal of Alan Langlands, the forceful and intelligent chief executive of the service.

  Echoing that policy, Blair had told a meeting of the heads of the royal colleges and the BMA before the election that he intended to clear out all the top NHS officials, including Langlands. Unanimously, his audience had protested that the NHS’s chief was sound, not least
because he opposed both the introduction of market forces into the service and the use of private hospitals. Blair retreated, but he lost his trust in Smith. For the moment he did not grasp the consequences of the fundamentally conservative medical trade unions’ objections to any shift from the gospel that the NHS should be free of state controls. For them, introducing competitive pricing through the internal market offended Bevan’s idealistic purity. Blair accepted their protests, which in turn were endorsed by Dobson.

  During his first substantial meeting in Downing Street about the NHS, at which Alan Langlands was present, Blair’s new health minister summed up his department’s officials as ‘dumbos appointed on a sleepy afternoon. They’re second-rate, basically incompetent.’

  Dobson’s opinion was shared by Robert Hill, Blair’s special adviser on the NHS, who was also at the meeting. The civil servants, believed Hill, ‘had not got a clue as to how to get a grip on the service, which had been left completely fragmented by the internal-market reforms.’ Hill did not recognise that civil servants in Whitehall set policy; they didn’t manage services.

  Neither Blair nor Dobson appeared to be embarrassed by the presence of Langlands. On the contrary, Blair shared Dobson’s dismay that Labour had inherited a public sector that, in their opinion, and despite the evidence, was largely unreformed. ‘The state was still as it had been in 1945,’ Blair later wrote, although he was unsure what to do about it. Nevertheless, the reforms introduced since 1991 were to be dumped.

  Faced with Dobson’s caustic appraisal, Langlands trod carefully. Although sympathetic to Labour, he knew that Robert Hill, whom he marked down as ‘well-meaning but an ideologue who would not listen’, shared Dobson’s disdain. Yet voicing any disagreement, he understood, would be unhelpful. The prime minister, he suspected, was uncertain about Dobson. Hours before he was appointed health minister, Downing Street had alerted officials in the department to expect Peter Mandelson as their new boss. To switch from Smith to Mandelson and end up with Dobson suggested Blair had no clear vision for the NHS.