With each new revelation, most of them by this newspaper, the muddle and mayhem within Britain’s immigration system has been shown to be alarmingly endemic. When David Blunkett said last year that he “hadn’t a clue” how many illegal immigrants there were in Britain, he was trying to advance the case for identity cards. But what the home secretary was really admitting was that under his watch the system has become a shambles. When despairing civil servants, having tried to warn ministers, turned to the press or opposition politicians with leaks of e-mails and internal correspondence, they were not being disloyal or underhand. They were being concerned public servants who had nowhere else to go.
Beverley Hughes, the former immigration minister, has finally resigned. Typically, she quit on a technicality. “I may, however unwittingly, have given a misleading impression,” she said. It may be human to grasp at a fig leaf, but Ms Hughes cannot get away with that. Having repeatedly blamed civil servants for failings that were her direct ministerial responsibility, it had become a question of whether she jumped or was pushed. Mr Blunkett says her resignation gave him “the worst day of my political life” and expressed the hope she would be soon back in government.
The home secretary’s response to the immigration crisis has been revealing. A normally sure-footed politician, not so long ago tipped as a serious challenger to succeed Tony Blair, he has been flailing all over the place. Desperate to save a friend and political ally, Mr Blunkett has been guilty of uttering absurdities. The Tory party, he suggested, should make any inside information that comes into its possession quietly available to the government, rather than trying to make political capital out of it. And this from new Labour, which when in opposition rewrote the rulebook on using embarrassing leaks to maximise political advantage. For sheer brass neck, the government’s approach takes some beating. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, commendably kept his cool when faced with this humbug.
Mr Blunkett has also had it in for the media, always a sign of desperation, and has particularly had it in for this newspaper. “The message to the right-wing press is look somewhere else because you are not getting a scalp from a minister in my department,” he said on Monday. On Tuesday he was even more robust. “The Sunday Times, the Tory party and anyone else can keep on throwing mud but my right honourable friend is not resigning,” he told the House of Commons. She had, he added, the backing of everybody on the Labour side of the House. Even as he spoke the rug was being pulled from under his right honourable friend. On Wednesday the prime minister noticeably failed to back Home Office ministers. On Thursday she was gone.
The home secretary is also blaming those officials who have been public-spirited enough to blow the whistle. Steve Moxon, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate official in Sheffield who came to this newspaper with his concerns, has been pilloried and suspended. James Cameron, the British consul in Bucharest, has also been suspended for e-mailing the Tories about the inadequate controls of bogus, probably criminal, entry applications from Romania and Bulgaria. As a result of his efforts, an emergency halt has been put on immigration from those countries. But why wasn’t this done 17 months ago, when Mr Cameron first wrote to the Home Office with his concerns? His revelations, full of tales of one-legged roof-tilers and fingerless electricians, carrying business plans they could not understand, provided some entertainment. But this issue is deadly serious and it has not emerged suddenly. Sir John Ramsden, a senior Foreign Office official, wrote to the Home Office 16 months ago warning that immigration procedures from Bulgaria and Romania had “developed into an organised scam that completely undermines our entry control procedures”.
There have been other scams. Last year, under pressure, the prime minister pledged to halve the number of asylum applications. Further internal revelations, reported in this newspaper today, show that one of the means of achieving that target (vital for a target-obsessed government) was a policy of not arresting illegal immigrants. These illegals may have been dangerous criminals. They were certainly abusing the system. But to arrest them would have run the risk of boosting asylum applications, thus making a mockery of Mr Blair’s target. So they were allowed to walk free.
It is not just Ms Hughes who has failed to be honest with voters over immigration. “The vast majority of people who are migrants here are from countries such as the United States, South Africa, France and Germany,” Mr Blair said last week. That is simply not true. What is true is that net migration into Britain has trebled under Labour, from just over 50,000 a year in the 1993-97 period to an annual 158,000 since. This newspaper has welcomed those who come to this country to contribute to the economy and society and has acknowledged the waves of immigrant entrepreneurs who have hugely enriched British life. There is little evidence, however, that this is what has been happening in recent years. Migration has been boosted by asylum and by eastern Europeans carrying dodgy business plans. Overriding it all has been the perception, from Abuja to Bucharest, that Britain has become a soft touch.
Senior policemen, trying to keep a lid on the terrorist threat, say that this country now has no effective frontiers. If a terrorist attack occurs, voters will give short shrift to ministers who claim that everything was done to prevent it. They know that our borders have become dangerously porous and they have little confidence in the ability of the Home Office to do anything about it.
Even without a terrorist outrage, immigration has shot up the political agenda. At the last election, Tory attempts to capitalise on public concerns over asylum and immigration failed; it was not seen as a big issue. That has changed dramatically, as Labour’s private polls and focus groups show. Published polls show that next to public services it is the main concern of the electorate. When even Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, calls for an end to once-fashionable multiculturalism, it is clear that the failure to integrate immigrant groups into society is becoming a potentially inflammatory problem. Mr Blair, according to the Downing Street spin, has promised to take personal charge of immigration. That is probably a recipe for some headline-grabbing initiatives and a few more targets. It is not enough, nor is the internal inquiry into recent events by a Home Office official. The public needs to be reassured. Only a public inquiry will do.
