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Transit camps are Labour's first good idea on asylum
The media obsession with every detail of the war in Iraq has almost obliterated other news, certainly most home news. But one interesting domestic news story did emerge through the fog of war last week.
David Blunkett, the home secretary, announced a proposal to send all asylum seekers arriving here (and elsewhere in the European Union) to transit camps in countries outside the EU. There their futures would be determined by the International Organisation for Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
If their asylum claims were successful, they would be settled in countries participating in the scheme on a "burden-sharing" basis. If not, most would be sent home.
Not so long ago, such a scheme would have been very inflammatory; in these times it got much less attention than it deserves. It seems quite extraordinary that it should be a Labour home secretary proposing such a radical and reasonable scheme and flying off to Greece on Friday to urge other EU members to agree to it. But so it is. (He has also made related proposals for temporary "zones of protection" near areas of war or disaster.) Civil liberties groups claim to be outraged. But the advantages are obvious to anybody but the very biased.
Genuine asylum seekers obviously ought, as far as possible, to be offered a refuge. However, the asylum system in Britain (and elsewhere) has been persistently abused and is entirely out of control; before long the social and financial costs will become politically unacceptable and will cause serious trouble. Britain's government has recently been persuaded of this; anybody who still thinks otherwise is ignoring the facts.
Curiously enough, there are lots of people who insist on ignoring the facts. Many persist in believing that immigration is not out of control and that it is anyway a net benefit. Some seriously believe that we should have an open-door policy on immigration, regardless of the cost or benefit.
There are people who see more or less any immigration policy as a sign of a shameful and selfish "fortress Europe" mentality. These views have pretty much prevailed for decades, so that until recently it has been almost impossible to talk about the effects of uncontrolled immigration on housing, schools and healthcare. Indeed, until recently most people genuinely believed, incorrectly, that more people were emigrating from Britain than were arriving.
However, reality does tend to intrude in the end, even on a Labour government and even on Europeans. Blunkett now says, and not a moment too soon, that "desperate measures" are needed to deter bogus asylum seekers and illegal immigrants and to thwart the vicious gangs of people-traffickers - without denying asylum, somewhere, to people truly fleeing terror.
France has started co-operating with Germany and Spain in chartering flights to deport illegal immigrants. Next week, in a new spirit of co-operation with perfidious Albion, France will share a chartered plane with Britain to send people back to Afghanistan.
So there is a new and fast-growing political will in Europe to admit to and deal with the problem. The idea of transit processing camps outside the EU is a strikingly neat and obvious solution. I can't see what the serious objection is.
Such camps won't deter genuine asylum seekers. Anybody who is really fleeing death and persecution at home will not object to a safe haven in a transit camp, assuming (of course) that it is humanely and efficiently run. A real asylum seeker might, obviously enough, prefer a certain country - say Britain - but would accept any safe port in a storm and be grateful for a welcome in, say, the Netherlands or France.
The only people who will object to safe haven camps will be those who are not asylum seekers at all but who are trying to jump the legal immigration queue into the country of their choice - usually Britain.
People who arrive here now are almost certain to be able to stay here permanently, no matter what happens - even if their applications and appeals are turned down. If all else fails they can just disappear into the black economy and wait confidently for an eventual amnesty. Untold tens of thousands have already done so.
None of this will be possible or - more to the point - desirable in poorer countries such as Albania or Ukraine, where the transit camps might be set up.
Economic migrants won't want to go to poorer countries, where there is little chance of making money and none at all of getting state benefits. Nor will they be able to disappear into the woodwork, even if they wanted to: the transit camps will be secure (which is politically impossible here). Again, that is something no genuine asylum seeker would object to for a short period of assessment. Meanwhile, the host country could earn some much-needed foreign currency from rich EU countries by selling low-cost services to the transit camps.
Despite the objections of civil liberties groups such as Amnesty International, UNHCR has said that there is merit in some of Blunkett's ideas and it will work with the EU to develop them. This looks and sounds like progress - but the devil is in the detail and in the interpretation of the 1951 refugee convention.
Most obvious is the problem of what to do with people who fail to get refugee status. Thousands will have to be put kicking and screaming onto planes and trains. Deporting people by force is dirty work and upsets the onlooking public.
Hence Britain's failure to deport even a fraction of the people who have no right to stay. Under Blunkett's new proposals, this miserable problem would fall upon those running the transit processing camps. Who is to say they would do any better?
Besides, the proposals acknowledge that some (perhaps many) failed claimants could not be repatriated anyway if their home country were unsafe - they might therefore be given "temporary" status in the EU. Everybody knows what that would mean.
More intractable still is the question of interpretation - not only of the 1951 convention (and the 1967 protocol on the status of refugees), but also of the all-embracing human rights legislation that covers the EU.
Oddly enough, Britain has been more generous in its interpretation of asylum than any other EU country, which is partly why this country is the most popular among would-be immigrants.
For instance, in the Shah case of 1999, British law lords ruled that women in Pakistan constituted a particular persecuted social group and were entitled to asylum here because they were subject at home to discrimination and inferior social status. There are 65m women in Pakistan, more than the entire population of Britain. It is anybody's guess whether the UNHCR would be more or less generous on such matters of interpretation. Such things should not be left to guesswork or the wisdom of unaccountable UN apparatchiks.
Blunkett has seized an important initiative; he should hang on to it until he has dealt with the detail. There will be many more asylum seekers to consider when the fog of war clears.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 30, 2003 | Comments (0)
Short's real betrayal was to act just like a woman
One of life's many minor mysteries is the question of what made Clare Short change her mind. Why did she threaten for so long to resign from government on principle over Iraq only suddenly, unaccountably, to agree to stay?
It doesn't matter very much, of course. She has ruined her career and her reputation and what she says or does from now on will have no political importance. She herself says she realises that the prime minister may well dump her before long. But it is an interesting question, all the same.
Here was a woman who, without much other claim to distinction, had become famous for being high-minded. She had somehow acquired the freedom of the court jester to speak her mind, both on the old Labour blasted heath and - remarkably - in the new Labour throne room.
Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that she tended to express what she felt, rather than to speak her mind, but either way she appeared to wear the motley of sincerity, of principle. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that millions of people loved her for it and others at least admired her for it.
Admittedly, her reputation for principle and proper feeling took a bit of a knock when it emerged that she had given away her baby son for adoption, even though she was married at the time. But somehow she got away with that, with lots of ecstatic public cuddling of the long-lost boy. After all, she was not the only cabinet minister with an abandoned baby in the closet.
Now, though, after her sensational U-turn over Iraq, she is being denounced on all sides. She said she would be vilified and she is right. Betrayal is the charge; contempt and ridicule are the sentence.
As to why she did it one can only guess. Perhaps the prime minister's heavy charm offensive worked; perhaps the darker arts of the chancellor of the exchequer prevailed. Maybe the perks of office had something to do with it.
What interests me is that she clearly thinks she did the right thing, even though everything about her public past suggests that she wouldn't be able to live with herself having done it. Who would have thought that Clare Short of all people could betray herself, her supporters, her principles?
To betray your principles, you need to have some. Perhaps it has been something of an error to imagine that Clare Short is a person of such strong principles. It's clear that she is a person of strong feeling - all her outbursts suggest that - or at least a person determined to express her feelings, when and if she feels like it.
She has often shared with the public her feelings that poverty is horrible, unfairness is sickening, war is revolting, compromise is uncomfortable, righteous indignation is fun. I suspect that's why so many people loved her.
She spoke in the language of feeling, like Diana, Princess of Wales; and in mass culture today, that's the way to become a heroine of the people. But it is a terrible mistake to confuse feelings and principles. Principles require the discipline of reason more than the erratic prompting of feeling.
Unfortunately for public life and public discourse, reason has gone out of fashion. Feeling is what moves the masses and, indeed, holds the touchy-feely Labour luvvies and Blair babes in fief to the nicey-nicey fantasies of the third way.
This is the Diana effect. It is the sentimentalisation of public life and the feminisation of politics. Cool operators who understand this, such as the prime minister, use other people's feelings to their own ends but they are too smart to be swayed by undisciplined feeling themselves.
I would guess that Clare Short, by contrast, has been for many days at the mercy of all sorts of conflicting feelings - an emotional muddle about war (which everyone must share), a longing to tell and to wield power (which explains her grandstanding threats of resignation), a touchy-feely reluctance to accept the adult constraints of cabinet responsibility (which explains her long, drawn out public disloyalty) and belated promptings of loyalty, or wanting to be wanted and to keep on being invited into Tony's big tent.
If Clare Short is guilty of betraying anything, it is the female sex. She has behaved, in our grandfathers' terms, just like a woman. She has been emotional, changeable, unreasonable and indifferent to honour.
Robin Cook (much though I hate to admit it) has in those terms, and in my terms, behaved like a proper man. He has for once been self-disciplined, decisive, reasonable and honourable. I am convinced that women are capable of all those virtues, once thought of as being exclusively masculine.
It enrages me to see a prominent public woman demonstrating flamboyantly that she lacks every one of them, just when she needs them and has a chance to prove that she has them. Just like a woman. What a hostage to misogyny. What a disgrace to our sex.
It is difficult to understand how it was that the Diana effect took hold so powerfully on public discourse - and on private discourse, too. Feminism seems to have led to a feminisation of a very unfeminist kind - at least that's how it seems to me.
When I was young and going to feminist meetings, with terrorists such as Leila Khaled displayed on giant posters, it never occurred to me that the success of feminism would coincide with the growing predominance of not so much female strengths as of traditionally feminine weaknesses.
It was feminists who insisted that the personal is political and so, by extension, the political is often reduced to the personal. It would be wrong to blame feminism alone; the growing rejection of objectivity and emphasis on subjectivity have been part of every kind of 20th-century thought, male and female. Hence the vulgar supremacy of feeling. It is immensely depressing.
We know it is all too easy to give in to emotion. And it's dangerous. It is something, all too obviously, that responsible people should do their best to resist.
Watching the anti-war demonstrations and the violent feelings expressed in the name of peace, I have often felt that the demonstrators are driven not by conviction or by argument but by unthinking feeling.
I'm not suggesting in any way that it is irrational to oppose the war in Iraq. On the contrary, there are many powerful reasons for doing so, just as there are powerful arguments the other way.
Nor do I think the feeling that war is monstrous - which we all share - is irrelevant. It's just that feeling alone is not enough. And acting on feeling alone is dangerous; it's irresponsible and infantile or - as people used to say - just like a woman.
It is perhaps unfair to single out Clare Short as an icon of irrationality. There are plenty of helplessly irrational people in public life and many of them are men. Feminine failings are not restricted to women. But she is a terrible warning to our daughters and granddaughters that sooner or later tragedy very often follows, in the words of George Eliot, from the promptings of an undisciplined heart.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 23, 2003 | Comments (0)
Something rotten in the prince's feudal kingdom
Whether the Prince of Wales's servants are bullying or buggering each other and what they do with his unwanted presents is not, in the great scheme of things, very important. These questions have been pretty much eclipsed by the prospect of war. That is very fortunate for Charles; in other circumstances they might have been taken much more seriously. But the inescapable truth is that his household is a very bad joke.
I must admit that it is a bad joke I can't help enjoying. I have tabloid tastes too and they are as low as anybody else's - maybe lower than most. There is something richly comic in the image of the Prince of Wales drowning in a sea of useless and unwanted presents, while wrestling with a camp army of flunkies, flogging and dumping and burning them - the presents, I mean.
All of his recent troubles come, ludicrously, from presents and servants. His difficulty is that he sees these troublesome luxuries as necessities. But servants and presents can be bad for you. Enormous numbers of servants and gifts are without a doubt very bad for you. What's so absurd is that Charles really doesn't need them and shouldn't take them on, but having them and receiving them is precisely what blinds him to this obvious fact.
It is not a moral or puritanical point. I mean that servants and undue deference give you an inflated idea of yourself, even in a fairly small way. Equally, a constant flood of lavish objects, from mass murderers and unknown pensioners alike, cannot avoid distorting Charles's relations with everyone and putting temptation in the way of his legion of servants. Both must make him lose touch with other people and, worse still, with himself. Both create a dependency that is corrupting to both master and man.
I do not believe the stories that Charles is so grand that he needed Michael "the Fence" Fawcett (retired) to squeeze toothpaste onto the princely toothbrush or to hold the royal urine receptacle, but I have been slightly startled by what I do know of what he considers to be due to his position.
On at least one of his weekends for leading cultural lights at Sandringham, he thought it necessary to his taste and his standing to send lorry loads of carefully chosen china, crystal, silver and other embellishments across the country from Highgrove. One can hardly imagine that there isn't a lot of perfectly adequate kit at Sandringham already - adequate, at least, for the Queen and the late Queen Mother. But Charles clearly takes himself and his taste and his status more seriously than his mother and grandmother. And this for an eco-friendly prince, in the 21st century.
I ought to admit to some slight sneaking sympathy. Servants can go straight to your head. I lived for the first few years of my married life in Hong Kong, where even 23-year-olds like me had full-time old-fashioned servants, of the sort that would make Jeeves look like a slouch.
The first time I crossed my own new matrimonial threshold I was greeted by Ah Yee, a Chinese amah in servant's costume and bare feet. She murmured, bowing slightly: "Hello master, hello missy." She then ushered us in and offered master a drink.
Then she turned to me: "Missy like drink same like master?"
Very quickly you stop laughing and start to feel demanding, full of yourself, newly important, newly somehow better than others.
After that Ah Yee waited on all our whims, hand and foot, day and night, until my husband offered her more money to do less and live out. He rightly thought that so much personal service was bad for us. I also sensed the painful envy and contempt that underlay it. After all, what was she to make of a very young employer who spent more on a handbag than she earned in a month, as she unwrapped the handbag and threw away the bill? At least I didn't expect her to curtsy.
A false sense of self is only one of the problems. Too much intimate personal service leads to too much intimate knowledge. In Hong Kong we had some friends whose amah, Ah Ho, was suddenly terribly upset. Finally, they got her to explain what had happened to shock her so. "Other master go topside missy in the kitchen," she finally blurted out. There has obviously been a certain amount of going topside in the Prince of Wales's residences, not to mention bottomside as well, all observed by servants who couldn't help observing.
In the household of Charles there seems to be a curious connection between shirt warming and shirt lifting. Rinsing out the royal smalls turns to washing the dirty laundry in public, then hanging people out to dry. The temptation of royal servants to abuse their knowledge, what with their envy, resentment, bitchery and very poor pay, must be almost overwhelming. Only somebody with a very mistaken sense of self and others could imagine otherwise.
The problem with servants is obvious. The problem with positional presents, though less obvious, is much the same. When I arrived in Hong Kong, a new anti corruption body had just been set up. This was much bewailed by expatriate wives, from British provinces and suburbs, whose stream of diamond-encrusted watches and jade from Chinese businessmen was suddenly drying up - "No more Christmas kumshaw!"
There's something about real jewellery and kickbacks showered on you only in tribute to your position (or your husband's) that makes you take yourself much more seriously than otherwise you might. A girl from Pinner in pearls as good as the Queen! But it is very dangerous and confusing.
Presents that are not purely between family and close friends are often suspect: they hover between boasting and bribery, they carry expectations and they impose obligations - if only not to burn them in contempt.
I can't understand why anybody gives or accepts "official" presents. There can be no proper point to it. It can only help perpetuate a confusion between what is public and what is personal and private - the basis of Charles's problems as it is of many others, such as Cherie Blair.
Charles doesn't need all the outdated hoopla and red-carpet flummery and flunkery he goes in for. He doesn't need 80 intimate servants to wait upon his person. He doesn't need the formidable array of fancy dress that makes him look like a spoilt and superannuated prat - or the valets and under-valets and aspiring valets of the clothes closet to maintain them.
I feel slightly like King Lear's monstrous daughters, telling him to cut down his dreadful retinue of unruly retainers. "Oh, reason not the need," the king cried in anguish. But that was the 17th century; this is the 21st.
Charles could perfectly well live an elegant and hospitable life as a very rich man, with some ceremonial duties, and has every right to do so. But there is no reason - indeed, every reason not - to carry on like a feudal monarch of the pre-modern period. Yet that mentality seems to be something he finds hard to escape.
But he must, if he is to survive.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 16, 2003 | Comments (0)
Do-gooding schools that do everything but teach
As the poet Dryden wrote: "beware the fury of a patient man". It is all the more terrible for being slow. For years and years the patient British have put up with the long and shameful decline of the public services.
Most mysteriously, they have put up with the collapse of our state education system at all levels. I cannot imagine why, but somehow it has been possible to ignore it. At last, however, the first signs of real anger are appearing.
One was the decision last week of Britain's top schools (state and private) to boycott Bristol University, which is discriminating against their well-taught children, as per the government's quite astonishing exhortations. Indeed, the government is proposing yet more discrimination against students with any advantages at all.
Discrimination in universities against educated children has been going on haphazardly for years, but only against privately educated children of rich parents. I think a great many people felt a sort of sneaking tolerance for that - including some well-off parents and children themselves in their liberal guilt.
But now that state school children are to be officially persecuted as well, we can all, privileged or not, unite against the state persecution of good schools, good pupils and good parents, privileged or not. It is, surely, a recipe for revolution, even in middle Britain.
Charles Clarke, the education secretary, admitted last week that primary schools will fail, for the second time running, to meet key government targets for English and maths, pitifully modest though they are compared with the performance of private primary schools. This, too, may help stoke the furnaces of middle class revolutionary rage.
The question remains, however: how did we get from there to here, to this extraordinary mess? How did we get from the high standards of the 1950s and 1960s to the nonsense A-levels and degrees of today? Where were teachers, pressure groups and powerful parents when we needed them to protest about falling standards and disappearing opportunities? The answer is that they were either talking irrelevant nonsense and pursuing irrelevant goals or they were meekly putting up with all that.
The problem with education and public services generally is not simply a lack of money or human capital. The real problem it seems to me is a perverse, pervasive, one could almost say institutionalised pursuit of the wrong goals.
It was the wrong goal if you wanted a more literate and numerate population to pursue equality rather than education. And many people are still pursuing the wrong goals in education. Last week, for example, the government announced figures (again) showing that black Caribbean children in British schools get the worst GCSE results of any ethnic group. Only 30% got five or more good GCSE passes in 2002.
This is clearly unacceptable. It demands an explanation and a solution, if possible. Yet what do we get? The usual wittering about "institutional racism" in schools from the head teacher of an ethnically mixed school. This is the conventional response from the liberal establishment - much like a comment in January by the new head of the Commission for Racial Equality about our schools' "shameful failure".
Well, amid all this Orwellian self-denunciation, there are some rather inconvenient facts. If Caribbean children come bottom because of institutionalised racism, how is it that Chinese come top (73% with five or more GCSEs) and Indians second (64%) - way ahead of white children (51%)? It does not seem likely that racism in schools is institutionally skewed in favour of Chinese and Indians and against whites and Caribbeans.
Then there is the problematic fact that Indians (64%) perform so much better than Bangladeshis and Pakistanis (40%). It is hardly logical to argue that this must be due to institutional racism in schools; it hardly seems likely that your average school would be capable of such refinements of racial injustice - your average racist can hardly distinguish between these groups at all.
The only sensible inference must be that racism cannot explain these results. A much more plausible explanation lies in the cultural differences between these ethnic groups. Some groups value hard work, self-discipline and learning more than others. Some groups are still trying to emerge from peasant cultures. Caribbeans have a very high proportion of lone mothers. And so on. Cultural attitudes to education vary, and they are not all equal.
However, those in the educational establishment who are eagerly following the wrong goals - such as their obsessions with resisting assimilation, promoting multiculturalism and generally changing society - are distracted from the right goal, teaching, or in this case solving the problem of poor results.
Thorough, basic, disciplined teaching for all children would be a start. But this has been overshadowed - as our illiteracy rates show - by some strange mania for the wrong priorities. It is sometimes almost comic.
Last week, for example, the head teacher of an infants' school in Yorkshire asked her staff not to read aloud to their very young pupils (66% are from Muslim families) any books about pigs. I was unconvinced by her subsequent denials. She did, after all, give the instruction, based presumably on the assumption that since to Muslims pigs are unclean, Pigling Bland and Charlotte's Web might offend the tiny tots.
The joke is that she was quite wrong. A leading Muslim said, very politely, that there is no scriptural authority for this view. It is a misunderstanding of the Koran but it is true that there are some "parents and families who believe that portraying the pig in books is wrong," he said.
The head teacher should have stayed out of this. There was no need to volunteer to protect sensitivities she doesn't even understand, if indeed they exist. Instead of tilting at multicultural windmills, she should have stuck to the simple job of encouraging her staff to read aloud the best of children's stories, particularly (but not only) the best of the stories of the host culture, which certainly includes Pigling Bland.
This, in its minor way, is a classic example of the loss of direction in education. It is counterproductive to use up energy and resources on goals that are irrelevant or inessential.
Once, after some spectacular bankruptcies, I asked a clever banker for an explanation. Pursuing something irrelevant, he said immediately - something other than making the business successful. It could be the chief executive's pursuit of personal glory, jetting about in private planes and sponsoring museums, or the company wives' pursuit of tickets to the opera and the races.
Pursuing false objectives in business always ends in disaster, and the resulting bankruptcies make shareholders very angry, especially as they usually have very little idea, until too late, of what's been going on.
In the same way, the patient shareholders in Britain Inc are at last becoming very angry as they watch the rapid decline of their national assets in the hands of people who can't always keep their minds on the job in hand. It will be interesting to see where this anger leads.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 09, 2003 | Comments (0)
