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Blair's crying game
Their emotions were used to manipulate ours
M RS Tony Blair wept last week when she visited a refugee camp in Macedonia, as well she might. Anyone would weep. But she isn't anyone. She is the Prime Minister's wife, and she was photographed. The image hit the news and the front pages, and it probably succeeded in hitting what it what it was aimed at, by the deeply cynical people who constructed it - the popular mood. At the same time, her tender-hearted anguish was counterbalanced by virile, shirt-sleeved shots of her husband, going about high-fiving and emoting, and moderating a little of his practised lip-trembling with a lot of manly resolve and righteous indignation. I am not suggesting that their emotions were insincere; what I find offensive is the way Mr Blair allowed them to be used to manipulate ours, for political purposes.
Tony Blair may enjoy public triumphs of the sort he had in Macedonia, with excited crowds chanting his name in gratitude and awe. He gave every appearance of doing so, just as he has done at other highly emotional moments, such as the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. But public endorsement as the Prince of Hearts is by no means all he gets out of it. The Blairs' performance in the camp at Bradze was intended to soften us up about taking refugees. It was intended to warm the cockles of our hearts so thoroughly that we might fail to notice yet another Government U-turn about asylum for the Kosovars in Britain. Sure enough, little more than a day later, Mr Blair announced that Britain will, after all, accept up to 1,000 refugees a week; on being asked how many thousands this would mean, the Prime Minister's spokesman refused to say, and added loftily that the Government would not play "the numbers game".
Up until this week, at least, public opinion in this country has been hardened to asylum-seekers, bogus or not. That is why Jack Straw introduced the Asylum and Immigration Bill, now going through Parliament. And that is why Mr Blair and his ministers have dithered so disgracefully about whether they will allow Kosovar refugees asylum in Britain. Their public statements about it have been most confusing. Ministers contradicted each other daily, and in one week the Prime Minister changed his mind three times. If the subject had not been so serious, this incompetent ministerial muddle would have been funny. Besides, it is genuinely difficult to know what it right to do about refugees, and about political asylum in general; even those of us who are not addicted to public adulation, and who are not trying to govern by opinion poll, must find ourselves uncertain.
On the face of it, anyone who has suffered as the Kosovar Albanians have suffered has a claim to our sympathy and to our help. If anyone ever deserved political asylum, they do, hundreds of thousands of them. And so do hundred of thousands, perhaps millions, of other people, who live under terrible regimes, which torture and rob and bereave them. All these people have equal rights, if rights there be, to political asylum in this country, or in any other civilised country. Most people make this assumption. I often notice, listening to interviews with people who work to support asylum-seekers in this country - social workers, doctors, priests and volunteers - that they assume, absolutely, that their clients do indeed have this right, absolutely. Some of them even object to the distinction between genuine asylum-seekers and those who are economic migrants; both, they assume, have the right to the better life that this country can offer.
It seems odd to me to make assumptions that have no practical reality. However much one might feel a duty to Kosovar Albanians, or to Hong Kong Chinese, Somalis, Sri Lankans, Kenyans, Bosnians or Turks, this country cannot possibly fulfil that duty even to a minuscule proportion of them. It isn't big enough and it isn't rich enough. Perhaps people will soon realise that although New Labour stealth taxes are costing every working person pounds 1,500 extra a year, NHS waiting lists have risen sharply and 75 per cent of school classes have got bigger, not smaller - not my figures, but Polly Toynbee's, in The Guardian. Last week I noticed reports that one of the best new cancer drugs is being withheld from thousands of cancer patients because it is expensive and many health authorities cannot afford it; indignation was expressed by all the usual suspects, who expect the money to keep on coming, as of right. Other reports showed that the poorest cancer patients in Britain have a shamefully low hope of survival, compared to rates in other developed countries. Already this country cannot afford what its citizens already expect as a minimum.
The number of asylum-seekers, apart from Kosovars in camps, is soaring. So is the cost. So too are costs of legal and illegal immigrants. The "numbers game" that Mr Blair sneers at is not a game - it is a painful reality. And as to whether we really want large numbers of a religious minority, I think it would be illegal for me to say anything. However, I do think we have a plain duty, and a prior duty, to the Kosovar Albanians. They are "our" victims, and their misery is partly due to Nato incompetence. So I have a suggestion, in the midst of all the usual imponderables. I think we should accept many plane-loads of Kosovar political refugees in the hope that they will go back one day and in the knowledge that they can't and won't. At the same time I think we should cut back general immigration completely and indefinitely, to balance the numbers.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, May 09, 1999
