Fear of immigration has been a key factor in the politics of post-imperial Britain. Campaigning to become Britain’s Prime Minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher signaled that she understood the anxieties of Britons who feared that their country was in danger of being “swamped” by people from alien cultures. This was cynical, but brutally effective politicking. At a stroke, Mrs. Thatcher secured the allegiance of Britain’s racists and xenophobes and sidelined the burgeoning Far Right, which was threatening to rob her of valuable votes. She never needed to mention the matter again.
Things, it is true, seemed very different by the time Tony Blair came to power in 1997. Stringent legislation had effectively ended immigration into Britain by black people from the former British Empire. In any case, there was a growing sense that Britain had moved on. The popularity, among other things, of black media and sports personalities suggested that, albeit slowly and grudgingly, the British were at last coming to terms with the increasingly heterogeneous character of their society.
What few anticipated in the late 1990s was that the fear and loathing once provoked by black immigration were going to be reawakened in dramatic fashion by the issue of asylum seeking. Thanks not least to endless television coverage of the (now closed) Sangatte refugee camp on the French coast, the issue has seldom been out of the British news during the past couple of years. And it is fair to say that many British people have not reacted kindly to “asylum seekers”, proclaiming on camera their determination to cross the English Channel and take up residence in Britain come what may.
It is a widespread British belief that such people are less apt to be genuine refugees than professional parasites; that, once admitted to Britain, they jump the queue where housing and welfare benefits are concerned; and that they bring with them all manner of crime and disease.
Public feeling about asylum seekers was, to be sure, already running alarmingly high when the Manchester policeman, Stephen Oake, was stabbed to death last month in the course of interrogating a suspected north African terrorist, who is alleged to have sought asylum in Britain.
Suddenly, a veritable nightmare scenario is taking shape: In paranoid British minds, asylum seekers and terrorists are becoming indistinguishable from one another. It is an appalling development — one, alas, that is ripe for exploitation by rabble-rousing rightists.
Trailing far behind Blair in opinion polls, the leader of the British Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, has not been slow to make political capital out of the asylum issue. Blaming Blair’s New Labour government for reducing Britain’s immigration service to a chaotic shambles, Duncan Smith maintains that all asylum seekers should be held in detention centers, pending the verification of their bona fides. His stance is aggressively endorsed by much of the British press, with Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing, nationalistic tabloid, the Sun, especially bellicose in its anti-asylum seeker pronouncements.
As it happens, the Sun has a provocative new editor in the person of Rebekah Wade. An unashamed populist, Wade first came to prominence when, as editor of Murdoch’s tawdry Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World, she sought to instigate a witch hunt against pedophiles. Now, this journalistic witch-finder general is busy demonizing asylum seekers (along with anybody who dares to speak up for them).
While the Sun’s tabloid rival, the Daily Mirror, has been inviting readers to protest against attacking Iraq, she has been encouraging readers of the Sun to sign a petition insisting that the government act over asylum seekers without delay. It must be said that the number of people who have signed the Sun’s petition (in excess of 300,000 so far) leaves public backing for the Mirror’s anti-war crusade looking distinctly modest.
Though often at odds of late with watchdogs of civil liberties, Britain’s Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has — to his credit — been unequivocal in his condemnation of this poisonous demagoguery. Likening Britain to a “coiled spring,” Blunkett deplores the damage that is being done to race relations and social cohesion by intemperate commentators. Not that he has received much support on this score from his prime minister. For the reaction to the asylum issue of Blair himself has been characteristically evasive and mealy-mouthed. In line with Duncan Smith and conservative editorialists, Blair announced last week that Britain may have to review its obligations under the European Treaty on Human Rights. Yet the truth is that — unless Britain were to forego its participation in the comity of ‘civilized” nations — this is the stuff of fantasy. Like his response to a great deal else, what Britain’s current leader had to say about asylum seeking was so much temporizing humbug.
The awkward truth is that the right is not entirely wrong about asylum seeking. It is the systematic inefficiency of Britain’s privatized immigration service which lies at the root of the country’s asylum seeking crisis. Approximately 100,000 people applied for asylum in Britain last year — an overwhelming number considering that, at any given time, the service is striving to cope with a prodigious backlog of unprocessed claims. And because claimants often appeal against negative verdicts and their appeals usually take an interminable time to be heard, there are cases which remain unresolved even after the passage of several years. The result is that an incalculable number of asylum seekers are wandering about Britain in a state of limbo. Not a few of them have simply melted into the background, taking advantage of the country’s booming unofficial economy and of the fact that Britain — in curious contrast to other European countries — does not require its citizens to carry identity cards. God knows who or where they are.
For some time, a great many British people (some of them members of Britain’s established ethnic minorities) have barely been able to contain their fury about all this. Now, in the wake of the murder of DC. Stephen Oake, Britain is turning into an edgy and vindictive place — a place which will almost certainly become edgier and more vindictive still should the country go to war against Iraq and should further examples of criminal behavior involving asylum seekers hit the headlines. Interviewed the other day, David Blunkett acknowledged that there was “not a lot of fun and laughter around some of the challenges” that he faces. Who would envy him in his efforts to combat the mass hysteria that is sweeping Britain? Blind from birth and long accustomed to handling guide dogs, Britain’s home secretary finds himself struggling to tame a tiger.
— Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
