The tabloids have been in a frenzy in recent weeks over the Home Office's failure to consider 1,023 deportation recommendations and the apparent shocking incompetence it demonstrated, but rather more noteworthy has been the Government's own response. Displaying an alacrity that his last few Home Secretaries could have done with, Tony Blair pledged last week that British law would be reformed so that asylum claimants were treated just like any other criminal. Though he acknowledged how unwelcome such a step might be to "some of those people who have a very traditional view of civil liberties", he dismissed the suggestion that refugees could claim any special privileges. "[I]t is wrong [to say] that we are prevented from deporting them because they may go back to a country where we can’t guarantee their safety one hundred per cent," he claimed.

Blair’s assertions sound like common sense. Who in their right mind could think that the United Kingdom has to shelter proven criminals, just because their home countries don’t play by the judicial equivalent of the Queensberry Rules?

The problem for Blair is that his scheme is not merely displeasing to a handful of fusty civil libertarians; it is unworkable unless he is prepared to turn the United Kingdom into a legal renegade. Sending refugees back to their countries of origin violates the UN Convention Against Torture if the threat they face is sufficiently severe and their automatic return would give rise to countless instances of "inhuman or degrading treatment" forbidden under the Human Rights Act. Although that particular statute could theoretically be amended by Parliament, the deportations would also contravene the equivalent provision of the European Convention on Human Rights – which is the most ring-fenced right in the entire treaty, inviolable even at times of war or national emergency.

Surmounting those obstacles is a tall order. Home Office lawyers are currently arguing, in the case of Abu Qatada, the refugee cleric, that it is safe to deport him to Jordan because that country’s authorities have undertaken not to torture him. But whatever the courts might make of that specific contention, the states that produce most refugees (like Zimbabwe and Somalia) have leaders who are either too hostile to promise Britain anything, or too weak to guarantee their promises. In respect of the European Convention, Blair has proposed that the UK might simply withdraw and then rejoin on its own terms. Such a manoeuvre, undertaken specifically to circumvent the most absolute of all the treaty rights, would very probably violate the Convention’s own provisions; it would certainly throw immigration strategies across the Continent into disarray.

At the risk of sounding like someone with a traditional view of civil liberties, the feasibility of sidelining the treaties is in any event secondary to the principles that underpin them. People are not granted asylum simply because their safety cannot be guaranteed "100 per cent", but because they have proved that they are likely to suffer discriminatory persecution, torture or death if returned to their country of origin. The risk does not alter just because a refugee goes to jail, and if the situation does in fact change, his or her right to remain is in any event reviewable after five years. A law that automatically returns someone to their death because they were once jailed for theft is simply unjustifiable. The fact that it would affect only a small number of people does not make it better – it makes them scapegoats.

Blair understands the legal position, and it may even be that he privately sympathises with the ordinary asylum seeker. He is faced, however, with a perfect storm of outrage, combining xenophobia, fear of crime, and widespread perceptions of a government that is losing its grip – but hopes turn the anger to political advantage. His Government’s failure to consider the deportation of foreign criminals in general is being recast as a morality tale about wicked asylum seekers in particular.

A willingness to exploit the asylum issue is hardly unique to the Labour Party. It was the Tories who first proposed renegotiating the UK’s acceptance of the European Convention, and David Cameron has added his tuppenny-worth of fuel to the current firestorm with a promise to "reform, replace, or scrap" the Human Rights Act. His party was also responsible for the most spectacularly ludicrous initiative of all, when Oliver Letwin declared in late 2003 that a future Conservative government would send claimants to a "far offshore processing island" – the location of which, he then admitted, he had not "the slightest idea".

Blair’s pseudo-policy is similarly fantastic, doomed to float for a while before ending up marooned in legal quicksand. It complements the public spats his government has had with liberals in the media and judiciary – seen in fights Blair has picked with Henry Porter, the journalist, and Lord Steyn; and in his recent decision vocally to criticise a yet-to-be appealed High Court judgment in favour of Afghani hijackers who fled the Taliban in 2000. At a time when the government is desperately seeking "renewal", certain ministers and their advisors may hope that attacking civil libertarians will prove just how in touch and on the ball they are. But it is a dangerous game. Promise what you legally can’t deliver, and people eventually notice. And on a subject as volatile as asylum, that’s when things start to get ugly.