Growing up Under New Labour'

On a balmy evening in June 1997, a motley collection of refugee and human rights campaigners gathered in a corner of the Home Office’s less than salubrious canteen. Jack Straw was throwing a party to thank those who had briefed him in opposition. Few if any of those present had ever met a Labour home secretary before, and the excitement was real.

Keen to gauge the prospects of the policy ideas we had been pushing on Straw, especially on asylum, some of us gently probed the fledgling cabinet minister on his first impressions of senior officialdom. This, we knew from bitter experience, was already busy pouring buckets of bureaucratic cold water on our carefully nurtured policy ambitions. "Wonderful chaps", came the heart-freezing reply. In the lift on the way out, the silence was broken only by the sound of naïve hopes evaporating.

After that, it was downhill all the way. Campaigners who had spent years battling Tory asylum policy and rhetoric whilst Labour cowered in silence for fear of upsetting the focus groups had to get used to being lectured by ministers about the need for a "grown up" debate on asylum and immigration. This, it soon transpired, meant keeping our mouths shut whilst ministers filled the airwaves with talk of "clampdowns" on "bogus" asylum seekers and the ‘wonderful chaps’ finalised their ridiculous and ultimately doomed plan to impoverish and stigmatise asylum seekers with vouchers. Any failure to comply with these terms of ‘debate’ was met with the sort of derision and scorn that only turncoats can deliver.

But with the arrival of David Blunkett, things have gone from bad to worse. A white paper is published, but the resultant Bill is written before the responses are even submitted, let alone read. The deeply flawed Bill is then rushed through Committee, with many controversial clauses not even being debated, and through its final stages in the Commons. New, highly controversial clauses — removing the vital suspensive effect of an appeal in "clearly unfounded" cases and restricting the right to seek judicial review in the courts — are tabled only at the last minute, without any prior consultation, thus denying refugee and human rights groups (as well as MPs) an effective opportunity to scrutinise them.

When refugee and human rights groups dare to express evidence-based criticism of the likely impact of the Bill’s proposals to segregate asylum seekers’ children in de facto detention centres, they are told to concentrate on feeding starving children in Africa. And when informed civil servants present Blunkett with research evidence from other countries that large accommodation centres in rural locations do not work, they are told to "go away and find some research showing that they do work".

The minister for Europe goes on the Today programme to repeat the Michael Howard-era claim that only one in ten asylum claims are accepted by the Home Office, when he must know, surely, that the real figure is at least one in two. The immigration minister insists that the Bill’s renaming of detention centres as ‘removal centres’ is absolutely essential to speeding up the Home Office’s decision-making. Right, Bev, of course it is — pity you didn’t do it years ago then.

And the day after ministers assure MPs that the Bill’s provision to end the cash-only option for NASS support will not be implemented in the near future, Tony Blair and other senior ministers discuss a secret Downing Street action plan to implement the proposal in "the autumn".

This isn’t grown up, it’s puerile.

Richard Dunstan