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Bogus friends of asylum seekers
The subject of race, like sex, makes people lose their heads. It makes them emotional and irrational; for that reason it is surrounded with taboos and myths, which make everyone yet more emotional and irrational.
The same applies to political asylum, which has become (for all the wrong reasons) a subset of the subject of race in this country. So we get rage and resentment on all sides, and some rather sanctimonious assumptions. This has made political debate on asylum seekers nasty enough even to arouse people from their election apathy.
I am convinced that the left has been much nastier than the right. The accusations of racism constantly heaped on the right are truly unforgivable. The assumption that, in addressing asylum seeking, William Hague is playing the redneck race card, is libellous. He may be wrong in his policies and he has been embarrassed by a couple of his supporters. But he is no racist, nor is racism any part of Conservatism, institutional or otherwise. I've come to suspect that the explanation for this undue nastiness is that the left feels much more guilt and confusion about asylum than the right.
Whether or not that's so, there is a great deal of confusion around. Take the idea of the genuine asylum seeker. There are endless arguments about who might be bogus, or whether the word should be breathed at all. But most people seem to agree that all genuine asylum seekers ought to be granted a safe haven here. That at least, in all the political muddle, is not problematic - all genuine asylum seekers have the right to stay.
Unfortunately it is nonsense. It would be quite impossible. The world is awash with people in desperate need of political asylum; there are millions of people who suffer prison, torture, violation and civil war, and millions in mortal fear of them. All they lack is transport; if they had it, they would be here on our doorstep and unmistakably genuine.
And if we really wanted asylum seekers, we know where to find them; we could go for a start to the vast refugee camps and gather them up in hundreds of thousands. Of course we don't, partly because we couldn't take them all, and partly - surely - because we don't want them.
There is nothing new about this. We tell ourselves, and in particular the left is given to saying, that this country has a proud tradition of accepting asylum seekers. Well, up to a point. We may have taken a few Kosovans, after a lot of soul searching, but Britain's doors were closed to the Hong Kong Chinese, just as they were to some of the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in all this, and I think it is a hypocrisy which troubles the internationalist left much more than the nationalist right - I mean the genuine left, as opposed to the bogus New Labour left.
Traditionally the left has felt responsible for the wretched of the Earth, at least in theory. In practice there is no big idea, no sense of what to do, no coherent policy. Those on the left ought to feel angry with New Labour, but seem to find it easier to rant at the Tories.
What we have, meanwhile, is an asylum system which is without any doubt badly abused and badly run. Fewer than one in five of the people who claim asylum here are found to be genuine. The rest can, and do, appeal through the courts for years, at huge public expense, but without success, even though British judges have the loosest definition in Europe of "fear of persecution".
In practice they stay anyway. Very few of those denied asylum are ever deported, and many of them - about 300,000 - have disappeared into the shadowy world of the illegals, discrediting the others. It is a waste and a shame.
Economic migrants are in need too, I admit. They are fleeing misery and deprivation too and, according to Refugee Council figures, published in the Guardian on Monday, many of them are highly employable and highly qualified - rather embarrassingly more so than the British; perhaps that's why they're so good at figuring out the system. And who can really blame them for trying to beat it? But it is grossly unfair to others in much more urgent need. Why should it be so disgraceful and racist to say so?
There is a lot of angry confusion about detention centres too. The Conservatives' new election proposal to build lots more may be un workably expensive, but denunciations about locking up women and children are silly. There's nothing punitive about it; it would protect the genuine applicants.
No genuine asylum seeker would object to it. If you were fleeing from execution or prison or torture, a safe centre, with food, medicine, legal aid and the company of fellow sufferers and perhaps your family, would without a doubt be acceptable, if acceptably run.
It would actually be preferable to being shipped out to a lonely tower block in a grey Midlands town. In fact the willingness to spend a period in a detention centre (and even gratefully) seems to me to be an obvious marker for a genuine political refugee.
The Guardian | Tuesday, May 22, 2001
