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WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Britain : 2001 Election

Britain's general election: Labour and Conservatives vie over which has toughest asylum policy

By Richard Tyler
22 May 2001

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On Sunday, the United Nations issued an unprecedented appeal for Britain's Labour and Conservative parties to drop their crude politicking on the issue of asylum seekers. Hope Hanlan, the UK representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, called it “very dangerous electioneering tactics on all sides.”

The UN intervention came after a weekend in which senior Labour and Tory leaders competed for who could advocate the most oppressive refugee policy in the run-up to the June 7 general election.

Last Friday, Conservative Party leader William Hague travelled to Dover to deliver a speech on asylum. Trailing way behind Labour in the opinion polls, the Tories are appealing to racist prejudice on an issue they believe to be a vote winner. The southern port of Dover has been the scene for a sustained xenophobic campaign, spearheaded by the Conservative-led Kent County Council, against so-called “bogus” asylum seekers. Numerous marches have been organised in the city by the fascist National Front, encouraged by the overt anti-foreigner sentiments espoused in official political circles.

In his speech, Hague claimed that under Labour, Britain was a “soft touch,” with genuine asylum seekers being “elbowed aside” by those seeking to “play the system”. The Tories' answer was to lock up all those who claimed asylum in “secure reception centres,” with a new Removals Agency being established to ensure all those whose applications were then refused are “removed quickly from this country”.

Tearing up the established individual right to asylum, the Conservatives would draw up a list of countries from which all claims would automatically be rejected, turning back all those who had travelled to Britain from a so-called “safe country”.

Not to be outdone by the Tories, Blair immediately went before the TV cameras to boast of the many measures Labour had introduced to curb asylum applications and ensure the swift removal of those whose applications have been rejected. On Sunday, Home Secretary Jack Straw upped the ante. He told the Observer newspaper that Labour was in favour of introducing a rigid quota system restricting the number of asylum seekers that would be admitted, regardless of the individual merits of their case. “There is a limit on the number of applications, however genuine, that you can take,” Straw said, “There is a ceiling and it has to be measured in thousands, and people have got to accept that.”

Both Hague and Straw's comments have elicited criticism from refugee organisations. Nick Hardwick from the Refugee Council said Labour's quota system “would be more harmful to refugees than even the current Conservative proposals.” Union leader John Edmonds, clearly embarrassed by Labour's right wing demagogy, felt compelled to distance himself from Straw's plan saying, “we can't win a Dutch auction with the Tories on who can be more brutal to asylum seekers and we shouldn't even be trying.”

Seen objectively, the number of asylum cases in the UK, even at their highpoint last year, and the public resources consumed is tiny: The 76,000 asylum applications only represent some 0.12 percent of Britain's population, generating total support costs of about £500 million, less than 0.1 percent of all government spending.

And yet, the ruling Labour Party and Conservative opposition have devoted a significant part of their campaigns to the issue. For both parties, the witchhunting of asylum seekers is symptomatic of their rightwing and repressive attitude to democratic rights.

The West, and particularly the governments of the economically advanced countries such as the US and Britain, bears a heavy responsibility for the fratricidal strife that has enveloped Africa, the Balkans, the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, etc.

The encouragement of one clique of nationalist politicians deemed supportive of Western interests against another, has fuelled bitter civil wars in which millions have been killed or displaced. Direct military intervention, as in Iraq or the former Yugoslavia, has only increased the suffering and misery of innocent populations, unleashing further refugee streams.

The policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank means that the world's most impoverished continent, Africa, is actually a net exporter of capital in servicing the huge debt repayments with which most African countries are saddled.

Those fleeing the civil wars, persecution and famine are the victims of the social system of capitalism that presently controls the world. Official politics has made them the guilty culprits. Like the Jews in Hitler's Germany, asylum seekers and refugees are treated as scapegoats for the social ills besetting workers in the West and which are again the responsibility of the profit system. Those least able to defend themselves, and denied a say in the present election, are the butt of attacks in tabloid papers. The Sun last week called on an incoming Labour government under Blair to put “the burning issue of illegal immigration top of the agenda for his second term as PM.”

Not content that Labour was routinely deporting four times as many asylum seekers as the previous Tory government, and that the party's manifesto promises to expel more than 30,000 in 2003-04, the Sun called on the next Home Secretary to “crack down on bogus asylum seekers.”

The proposals made by Hague and Straw would mean an end to the 1951 Geneva Convention, drawn up in the aftermath of World War Two. Labour's manifesto explicitly promises, “We will bring forward proposals to ensure a common interpretation of the 1951 Convention across the EU”. The intention is to place severe limits on an individual's right to seek refuge in the place of their choice by introducing lists of countries from where asylum applications would be automatically refused.

The right to asylum is a basic democratic question, as important as the right to free speech or assembly. As in other areas, such as ending the right to silence or abolishing jury trials, Labour is seeking to destroy long-standing democratic rights, as part of its authoritarian programme in favour of big business.

If the next government is able to abrogate the right to asylum, then workers should regard this as a declaration of intent regarding their own democratic rights. As history has so tragically demonstrated, the denial of civil liberties to those deemed “alien” or foreign today is usually followed by the removal of democratic rights enjoyed by the mass of ordinary working people tomorrow.