 |
THE GUARDIAN |
 |
|
COMMENT
|
|
Blunkett is
right to deny the Tories this
minister's scalp
Despite the witch hunt, Labour is making progress on immigration Polly
Toynbee Many an MP might prefer to stick pins in their eyes rather than take the asylum and immigration job in a Labour government. Plagued by special cases from virtually every MP, the minister is attacked on all sides. Civil liberties lobbies regard immigration control as inherently racist, while the racists regard letting anyone in at all as a sure sign that Labour is losing control of its borders. Meanwhile, harrowing documentaries make holding a hard political line miserably difficult, with heart-breaking human stories of migrants travelling from the far ends of the Earth, good people full of hope who must be refused. Beverley Hughes has had the job since 2002 and she is predictably the latest prey of the Tory press. Sharks are circling, hell hounds are camped outside her front door, and Tory editorials are shouting for her blood. The Telegraph says her sin is so great "not even Ms Hughes's prompt resignation would expiate it". The Star: "The prime minister must sack her immediately". The Sun: "At best she's a fool, at worst a fibber". But she's safe as long as she has the protective arm of her boss thrown around her. David Blunkett says: "You are not getting a scalp from a minister in my department." And yesterday his defence of her drew authentic cheers from Labour MPs. The opposition accuses her of grievous offences. They say she deliberately admits large (unspecified) numbers of illegals, fraudulent cases from Romania and Bulgaria who came here on a 48-day holiday visa and then applied for a business visa on a special scheme, the EC Association Agreement. These sham applicants claiming self-employed status had business plans to work as electricians or carpenters drawn up by dishonest lawyers, when the applicants plainly knew nothing of these crafts. Hughes is accused of turning a blind eye to it, a wickedness that defies rational belief. Let's be plain. They say she lets in people through criminal networks who might well be criminals themselves, or even terrorists. Why would she do that? The suggestion is that it helps her fiddle Home Office figures for dealing with immigration cases. But that makes no sense. These are not people languishing on asylum clearance lists where there are steep public targets to hit. There are no targets for these applications, so there would be very little motive to rubber-stamp them. Cleared of previous similarly baseless charges, this latest came from the consul in Bucharest, who sent an email to the opposition claiming, somewhat incoherently, that local checks were being deliberately abandoned to make the scams easier. The reason why Hughes should have authorised this remains baffling. The reason why the consul should have sent this to David Davis one can only conjecture. It was already an old story and it emerged in the Commons yesterday that he wrote the email just after a meeting in Bucharest with a senior Home Office official, where this scam was discussed and, it was said, action would be taken. Indeed, a lawyer in Britain had already been arrested in February and awaits trial accused of selling these bogus business plans and applications. So was the consul just recounting all this for political purposes? The Tory outcry that the man is a hero and the minister a villain is, well, hard to sustain. Here is what has happened on Beverley Hughes's watch as minister. Asylum applications have fallen by 41% since 2002 when she took over. The hefty backlog of cases inherited from the Tories in 1997 has been halved to 24,000. Nearly twice as many applications are getting decisions made, 79% within two months. Only 17% are granted asylum or given humanitarian leave to stay. Removals are up by 16% - with over 17,000 failed asylum seekers sent back. Since the closure of Sangatte, British officers in France stopped 9,000 crossing the Channel last year. The figures are not terrific: thousands of the refused can never be removed, since no country will take them. The rising number of appeals suggests some rough justice is handed out to keep numbers down. But nor is this a tale of "out of control" borders. In the unedifying warfare of the rowdy Commons yesterday, Labour did manage to land some good hits: if things are bad now, it's nothing like as bad as the chaos they inherited, with a failed computer system, a thousand sacked case workers and backlogs stretching back years. When the Tories ask how many illegals are here, Labour can answer they don't know for sure because it was the Tories who scrapped embarkation controls when Michael Howard was in charge. But the real difference between now and then has less to do with numbers and everything to do with fear and panic. The Tory press are out to hunt Labour ministers (preferably women), while there was no great press hue and cry at the far worse Tory figures back then. All applications from Bulgaria and Romania are suspended. Systems are being improved to ensure key alerts reach ministers. But, as ever, politically motivated civil servants who prefer to give the opposition dubious ammunition must expect to take the disciplinary consequences. Failing to score a hit on Beverley Hughes for deliberately rubber-stamping applications, now they turn on her for explaining that officials never passed the information up to her. Should a minister be responsible for every bit of paper that crosses her 12,000 civil servants' desks, if they fail to pick out some important ones to send her? In the British system, politicians are not the managers of their departments, unlike the more politicised US system where political appointments reach deep into layers of department. Here ministers need not resign unless they make a wrong decision or lie. Immigration will always offer oppositions plentiful scares and scandals: the government is about to clamp down on bogus marriages and sham students. As worldwide pressure grows, with the UN recording millions in refugee camps on borders near most conflict zones, the rich world will have ever more trouble keeping out the poor world. No borders can be impervious - but they can be made secure enough. Enough for what? Enough to reassure citizens' fears of "swamping". Enough to feel we mainly know who is coming in and why. It was welcome to hear both Blunkett and Hughes talk with sincerity of the need for more migration, and they mean it. This now goes beyond vague platitudes on the value of diversity: there is growing Europe-wide anxiety about fast-depleting European populations. GDP growth partly depends on population growth and helps to explain why the US streaks ahead of the EU. Size of GDP determines global power: Europe's influence will fade fast without more immigration. (As well as a much higher birthrate, which can, the Nordic countries prove, be achieved with universal childcare so families can afford the extra children most want.) People are the key to pensions and future wealth. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
|