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The nasty government?

1 December 2003

Tory leader Michael Howard sounded more liberal than the government on asylum last week. So perhaps it's time to acknowledge that the public attitudes on this issue are more complicated than they look.

If George Bush squares off against Howard Dean in next year's U.S. presidential election, American electors will have a clearer right/left political choice than for many a year. The common European perception that the Democrats and the Republicans represent two different flavours of essentially the same politics will be challenged by this contest between an incumbent who has pushed so far to the right that his centrist opponent looks decidedly alternative in his political complexion.

The election that follows six months or so later in Britain will be very different. In place of the polarisation the U.K. electorate have been used to, they will be presented with a Labour government that has pushed deep into the territory of the right in pursuit of both authoritarian and market solutions to intractable problems. Confronting them may well be a resuscitated Conservative party pushing equally determinedly in the opposite direction, its face firmly fixed in the sweet smile of social engagement and renewal.

Indeed, so sunny has been Michael Howard's disposition since his recent elevation that it is difficult now to remember where Ann Widdecombe got her celebrated barb. Surely this former Home Secretary cannot have been more illiberal in office than his Labour successors, Messrs Straw and Blunkett? Given the Labour record on the core issues of criminal justice and asylum and immigration, that becomes increasingly difficult to believe.

Presentation, not policy, is the key to this. Take the row on asylum that blew up last week. The government said that failed asylum applicants might lose their children into care if they did not take up an offer of repatriation. It was mooted as the logical consequence of a policy of withdrawing benefits from failed applicants, bearing in mind the legal duty to protect their children from the ensuing destitution. If parents were to be left without the means of supporting their children, the argument ran, the state would have to do it for them. The image was raised of children being brought up by British foster parents and then being deported when they reached the age of eighteen.

The principle of withdrawing benefits is presentationally attractive. It addresses headlines about welfare scroungers - the state paying out to support people who shouldn't be here in the first place. But the idea of taking (foreign) people's children away because they lacked the means to support them sounded like a throwback to the values of the workhouse. And, if the government hadn't intended the measure as a punitive one, they were struggling to put it in a positive light. The headline writers were scandalised, which was manna to the new, sunny-delight, Michael Howard, who condemned the idea in the roundest terms. The spectacle of this old right wing war horse outflanking the government on its vulnerable, humanitarian left was a significant political coup that did Mr Howard no harm at all.

The episode offers a powerful vignette, illustrative of what can happen when policy is driven by presentational objectives. The policy (of withdrawing benefits to failed asylum seekers) is attractive all round. The consequence of it (destitute children, not to mention destitute adults) is not attractive. To put it another way, it sounds like a good idea (which is why the government wants to do it), but its inevitable consequences mean that it is not a good idea (which is why the government ought not to do it.) Unless it stops to think the policy through to this point, the government is likely to end up with worse political problems in the future than it has today.

Mr Howard's answer is the one espoused by many people who have no responsibility for acting in the matter. It comes in the form of the question: why are failed asylum applicants and other illegal immigrants not simply removed? It seems only logical that, if there is a system for adjudicating applications, removal should follow at the end of the process when an application fails.

Logical it may be, but as a former Home Secretary Mr Howard knows that it is neither as simple nor as attractive as it looks. For a start, it may not be certain where the applicant came from. Nor does their country necessarily want them back. In the meantime the family has been in the U.K. for some time, learning the language, meeting the neighbours and doing rather better than average at school. Hardly anybody has the stomach for ripping these people out of their already fragile lives and dumping them once more on the international down-escalator.

Frightened people being dragged screaming and kicking onto aeroplanes make for bad newspaper copy and families being taken from their new-found communities make for protest groups, angry vicars and letters to MPs. Once again the consequences of a policy tun out to be less attractive than the policy itself, which is why successive Home Secretaries have made a lot of presentational fuss about the asylum issue while quietly accepting that a high proportion of failed applicants will never be removed.

Recent government efforts in this area have concentrated upon stopping the asylum seekers at source, and this is what is behind the much vaunted "halving of applications" during the course of this year. This probably means that some people in genuine need don’t get to come here, but those stories of woe are likely to pass the headline writers by. It is an approach that displaces rather than solves the problem, which may be as good as the government can hope for in the short term. But the conflict between the presentational objectives of policy and the unpleasant consequences of the policy itself present important challenges that will need to be addressed if any real progress is to be made.

For a start, it will be interesting to see if the reduction in asylum applications has any bearing on the public and media reaction to the problem. If the crime figures are any guide, it won't. The British Crime Survey reveals that the public believe the level of crime to be rising even as the survey itself shows it to be falling. In other words, the public's perception of the level of crime has no bearing on the reality that they experience. In the same way, a reduction in the number of asylum-seekers will not translate into a perception that the problem is being solved, since the " problem" exists in people's mind not through direct experience but because of what they are encouraged to believe.

The problem for the government is that the asylum-seekers who don't make it to Britain are not "news". That is why they are upping the ante by seeking to be seen to get tough on the ones who did make it but whose applications were refused. They are doing their best to get themselves cast as the nasty party in relation to this supposedly undeserving group just as the Conservatives are rowing as fast as they can away from that dubious tag.

But respectable British voters don't want to be governed by nasties; they like high-minded principles like fairness, and their objection to "benefit spongers" is precisely the unfairness of people who "get away with" something that they shouldn't. As soon as the suffering, fortitude and human feeling encapsulated in a specific asylum case is revealed to them, the public quickly come on-side. They have no difficulty distinguishing a narrative of individual human need from a generalised narrative myth about exploitation of the British welfare system.

Getting tougher, or "nastier" is not a solution for the government in this case. It has the combined negative effect of (a) making people imagine that the problem is worse that it is (it must be bad if it requires that much nastiness to solve it), and (b) making people feel bad about the nastiness allegedly required to solve it. The true solution is to understand that there is no catch-all solution; that population flows have a dynamic that is difficult if not impossible to control, that Britain is and has always been the creation of this process and that to talk up the latest manifestation of it as a mighty problem of state is to heighten expectations of something so ill-defined that failure to "solve" it is pretty much assured.

What, after all, is the "problem" of asylum seekers? Is it the presence of the uninvited guests themselves? Or embarrassment at the reluctance to welcome them? Or collective anger at the conditions of poverty, tyranny and war that send people from their homes? Or guilt at the complicity of societies and governments like Britain's in creating these conditions? Before the governments tries to satisfy the electorate on this subject it is a question it would do well to address.

Asylum links

The Column, 27 October 2003 - Making asylum work

The Column, 11 August 2003 - The cruelty of numbers