Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 79
asylum claims. According to the Sunday Times of 31 October 1999, John
Tincey, spokesperson for the Immigration Service Union, said the
amendment meant that ‘It is debatable whether we have any effective
immigration controls left.’ In addition, said the front-page article, a ‘confidential
internal Home Office briefing seen by The Sunday Times’ claimed the
Lords amendment would lead to a doubling of asylum seekers next year,
adding a further 40,000 at a cost of £500 million: ‘Jack Straw, the home
secretary, hoped the bill would curb the rapid increases in asylum applications
from migrants simply seeking a better life in Britain.’ But, said the the
Sunday Times, ‘A Home Office source said the bill may have to be delayed
until the next parliamentary session to overturn the amendment on
vouchers’, in which case ‘“You can forget any attempts to keep numbers
down next year.”’ When the bill returned to the House of Commons on 9
November 1999, Ann Widdecombe and William Hague withdrew Tory
support for the Lords amendment. On this occasion 60 MPs voted for the
amendment, of whom 17 were Labour, three were Conservative, five were
Scottish National Party, one was Plaid Cymru, one was Ulster Unionist, and
the rest, plus the two tellers, were Liberal Democrats. The Immigration and
Asylum Act became law on 6 December 1999.
The Labour Party’s actions seemed to many people inexplicable. But the
explanation is probably quite simple. Straw’s and Blair’s attitude towards
asylum seekers has many precedents in the behaviour of previous Labour
governments, and presumably parallels their attitude to criminals: Labour
must demonstrate that it can be tougher towards them than the Tories were,
and so remove one of the perceived electoral assets of the Tories. Yet the
Labour government is unlikely to be successful in its attempts to outdo the
Tories. In the summer of 1999 Ann Widdecombe, Conservative shadow
home secretary, and William Hague, leader of the Conservative opposition,
embarked on a campaign of attacking Labour – for being soft on asylum
seekers. The Guardian of 1 September 1999, under the heading ‘Hague takes
up the battle over asylum seekers’, reported that Hague had called a ‘crisis
summit’ on immigration, accusing the government of ‘dereliction of duty’
for allowing so many people to seek refuge in Britain, and saying that he was
‘particularly outraged’ to discover that Westminster Council ‘had more
asylum seekers dependent on social services than “old ladies in nursing
homes”’. Straw responded with a letter to Hague ‘pointing out that in the
past Westminster Council had supported the government’s measures to deter
abusive asylum seekers’ and had said the government’s asylum bill was ‘“a
considerable move forward”’. Claiming that ‘the Tory party nationally had
failed to make any proposals to deal with illegal immigration’, Straw, says
the Guardian, wrote:
You can either support the views of our party colleagues in Westminster and back
our moves to crack down on the problem of illegal immigration – or you can side with
your frontbench colleague, Ann Widdecombe, and weaken control. It cannot be both.