Broken Vows

by Tom Bower

  Boys-Smith agreed with Roche that Britain should welcome more foreigners in what he called ‘managed migration’. Introducing such a dramatic change should not be too difficult, he thought, because the government’s policy was half-baked. Blair and Straw discussed asylum but never immigration, meaning that more migrants were entering Britain than was being formally acknowledged in Whitehall. A policy vacuum existed because Blair refused to create a Cabinet committee dedicated to the topic, and nor would he appoint a Downing Street adviser who specialised in immigration.

  That omission, suggested Roche, was the opportunity to ‘signal a change’. On Spencer’s advice, she pondered transforming bogus asylum-seekers into legally admissible citizens. Over the following months, she sketched out a speech outlining the advantages of immigration and reducing controls, and portraying asylum-seekers in a positive light as skilled labour. She intentionally avoided giving any numbers, and did not discuss her speech with Straw: ‘He wasn’t interested. And nor was Blair.’

  During her two visits to No. 10 for presentations about entry into Britain, Roche found Blair impatient. As usual, he did not mention immigration. Instead, he complained about the increasing number of asylum-seekers and the slow rate of removals. ‘He didn’t understand the process and wasn’t interested in the detail,’ recalled Roche. ‘All he wanted to hear was the good news, and in his terms there was none. He was shallow. He had no grasp of immigration policy. There was no policy.’ Liz Lloyd, Blair’s special adviser, confirmed that he was interested only in responding to public anger and reducing the number of asylum-seekers to minimise media criticism. He demanded the removal of ‘30,000 failed applicants’ in 2000, out of the 90,000 who had applied over the previous year. In 1999, only 7,645 had been removed. Blair’s target was unattainable.

  Straw seemed to be similarly irritated by Blair’s lack of focus. ‘The man’s a lawyer, surely he understands the problems?’ Roche commented after they left Downing Street. Straw did not reply. Every person and institution had a limit of nervous energy. Blair, Straw knew, was interested in crime, prisons and the aftermath of the Metropolitan Police’s inadequate investigation into the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence – not immigration. Ed Owen, Straw’s special adviser, sympathised with the home secretary’s dilemma, one he shared with other ‘progressives’. Even the mere mention of an immigration policy was castigated as an unsavoury association with the prejudices of the racist Tories. Resolving the quandary fell to Spencer.

  The academic had been asked by Jonathan Portes, an economist in the Cabinet Office, to write a paper for the Policy and Innovation Unit advocating an increase in migration. ‘I was saying the kind of things that they wanted to hear,’ recalled Spencer. Both she and Portes emboldened their cause by naming Blair as the authority who commissioned their report. To impress the prime minister, both relied on Labour’s favoured ‘evidence-based policies’ to show the benefits of economic migration. Naturally, they were attracted to evidence that matched their argument. That suited Andrew Turnbull, the Treasury’s permanent secretary. Labour, he knew, believed in the ‘globalisation package’, which meant welcoming people, capital, goods and investment into Britain.

  An early draft of Portes’s own paper, ‘Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis’, was given to Roche to help her write her speech. In his report, Portes emphasised the economic benefits of migration unreservedly. Migrants, he wrote, were not a burden on the public purse but increased the government’s income through taxation. He focused on French entrepreneurs setting up high-tech ventures and earning jackpot salaries. ‘It would be counter-productive to constrain the growth of migration,’ he recommended, because the British economy would grow by an additional £2.6 billion in 1999/2000.

  Although his report was to be published in 2001, Portes based his arguments on statistics collected in 1997, the year Michael Howard’s Act had reduced migration markedly. Without fear of contradiction, he wrote that most migrants were white – omitting the 510,000 immigrants who arrived from the Indian subcontinent during the first three years of Blair’s government.

  In the same manner, he downplayed any adverse consequences of immigration. With Spencer’s support, he asserted that ‘in theory’ there was no ‘evidence’ that migrants would ‘increase the pressure on housing, transport … and health services’. On the contrary, he praised migrant children for bringing ‘greater diversity into UK schools’ and assured Blair that migrants had not caused any overcrowding in London – which was true in 1997. ‘There is little evidence’, he wrote, ‘that native workers are harmed.’ He added, ‘Migrants will have no effect on the job prospects of natives.’ Nine years later, a report by the Migration Advisory Committee found that twenty-three British workers had been displaced for every hundred foreign-born workers employed in the country.

  Portes’s enthusiasm was reinforced by his relying entirely on pro-immigration groups for information. He failed to consult Migration Watch, a group critical of unrestricted migration that, he assumed, supported the entry of white Christians but not Muslims. Although the government clearly could not discriminate on the basis of colour, it could distinguish between migrants by country of origin. Purposefully, Portes avoided the word ‘integration’, which offended the Labour progressives’ embrace of multiculturalism. Instead, he advocated that migrants should be helped to become a ‘cohesive’ part of society. He ignored any damaging consequences to British life by not mentioning the reluctance of the growing Muslim and Hindu communities to integrate. His solution to reducing isolation was for a race equality grant scheme to distribute money that would help ‘connect communities’.

  Spencer admitted later, ‘There was no policy for integration. We just believed the migrants would integrate.’ Her assumption that the British would unquestioningly accept hundreds of thousands of migrants was underpinned by the BBC’s general categorisation of critics of immigration as racist, which had censored a public debate, thus concealing any problems. Accordingly, Portes’s assurance that the number of migrants entering Britain could be ‘totally controlled’ appeared incontrovertible.

  Numbers, Portes knew, were critical. He relied on Spencer’s ‘evidence’ to predict that net migration of non-EU nationals into Britain would rise from 100,000 in 1997 to 170,000 in 2004. He and Spencer were wrong. In 2004, 500,000 migrants entered. No fewer than 370,000 stayed – 200,000 more than Spencer had predicted. The cumulative effect over five years was that there were a million more migrants than Portes had anticipated.

  Portes’s report was ideal material for Roche, who also drew on her previous job as a junior minister at the DTI. Employers had frequently complained about red tape preventing their recruitment of skilled foreign workers, despite the dearth of equivalent British labour. To overcome that bottleneck, Roche argued that Britain should ‘modernise the work permit system’. Instead of migrants posing as asylum-seekers, they could enter Britain legally with permits. By then, the number of such permits had already risen from 25,000 in 1997 to 40,000.

  In drafting her speech, Roche avoided the phrase ‘asylum-seekers’. Migrants were described as ‘entrepreneurs, the scientists, the high-technology specialists who make the global economy tick’. She also avoided setting target figures, which, she said, would be a ‘foolish’ mistake. Once her script was completed, she asked Andy Neather, a speechwriter for Blair, to give her text ‘a gloss’.

  It was a memorable experience for Neather: ‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended, even if this wasn’t its main purpose, to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.’ Later, in an interview, Neather also allegedly disclosed that Blair supported migration as it would increase electoral support for Labour. He would later claim to have been misquoted.

  Next, Roche showed her speech to Straw. Over the previous months, the two had argued. Straw wanted more deportations, but Roche had refused and nothing was resolved. She found
Straw’s manner ‘hard to read’. When offered her draft speech, he said nothing. Roche suspected that Straw was keeping his head down to avoid being labelled in the argument, a conclusion he did not later deny. Straw’s silence did not surprise IND officials. The minister, they had noticed, was also avoiding any discussion about the accession of eight countries, including Poland, into the EU. In Boys-Smith’s opinion, Straw left them leaderless.

  Finally, the speech was sent to No. 10 for approval. Roche was uncertain whether she would receive Blair’s support. While the prime minister did believe that Britain needed skilled migrants, he also blamed ‘liberal’ judges and ‘out-of-date’ civil servants for not accelerating the deportations of bogus asylum-seekers. Roche’s own experience suggested that, despite media reports, Blair was still not entirely focused on the surge. She was mistaken. He was principally worried about the electoral risk but, unknown to her, Gordon Brown had warned him, ‘Don’t mention immigration, it’s a Tory issue and should be ignored.’ Accordingly, her draft elicited no comment from Downing Street. But David Blunkett and Charles Falconer, having spotted that Roche was using ‘economic migrants’ as an apparent smokescreen for increasing immigration, did suggest that Portes’s report should be modified. Falconer was more forthright: Roche’s speech should not be delivered. His advice was ignored. The silence from Downing Street encouraged the pro-immigration lobby to believe that Blair endorsed the chancellor’s and the Treasury’s argument about the economic advantages of increased migration.

  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 f
or 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.

  SIXTEEN

  Class Conflicts

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  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’.