-Caveat Lector-

> www.wsws.org
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Britain
>
> British Home Secretary pushes through scheme to disperse
> asylum-seekers throughout country
>
> By Julie Hyland
> 25 August 1999
>
> Back to screen version
>
> Britain's Labour government is fanning the flames of racial
> prejudice in an effort to justify its Asylum and Immigration Bill
> and outdo the Conservative opposition.
>
> Home Secretary Jack Straw arrived back from his holiday on Monday
> to announce an "emergency" scheme enabling him to set a limit on
> the number of asylum-seekers that each individual Local Authority
> in England and Wales must accommodate. Those refugees who wish to
> live in areas that have already reached their limit will be
> dispersed to other parts of the country. Labour's Asylum Bill,
> due to take effect next April, already contains this provision,
> but Straw has deemed that the current situation warrants its
> introduction as early as possible—from November when the Bill
> receives Royal Assent.
>
> The "schedule eight" provision will apply to all asylum-seekers
> who do not claim refugee status the moment they arrived in
> Britain. It empowers Straw to direct them to live in particular
> towns and cities, and to allow their transfer from "overburdened"
> Local Authorities to other towns.
>
> The document outlining the new measure is designed to establish
> "clusters" of refugees based on a proposed ratio of one
> asylum-seeker to every 200 members of the "resident population".
>
> The move follows several months of highly publicised diatribes by
> the local media in Kent and from Tory politicians against
> "floods" of asylum applicants "swamping" the southeast of
> England. These xenophobic remarks led to a series of attacks on
> asylum-seekers in the Dover area, culminating in a weekend of
> violent fighting between immigrants and white youths.
>
> The national media and the political establishment went on to
> portray the clashes as the inevitable result of disrupting
> "monocultural communities"—i.e., white towns—by introducing
> different ethnic groups. The deputy leader of Tory-dominated Kent
> County Council, Keith Ferrin, put it most bluntly, saying, “The
> locals have simply been asked to cope with too much.... There are
> now a lot of people who are obviously different, who look
> different and act different.”
>
> Straw concurred with Ferrin's sentiments in his first interview
> on the subject, with BBC Radio on Monday. Having visited Dover
> some three weeks ago, he explained, "there is no question" that
> Dover's immigration staff and its "citizenry" are "under very
> severe pressure". His emergency scheme would alleviate such
> pressures, he claimed.
>
> Some representatives of the Local Authorities have accused Straw
> of issuing dictatorial orders and of fuelling anti-immigrant
> hysteria. Sir Jeremy Beecham, chairman of the Local Government
> Association, said Straw "has perhaps inadvertently fed the
> hysteria that's being promoted in certain sections of the press
> and by certain opposition politicians. We haven't got a huge
> crisis in terms of the country being overrun with refugees and
> asylum-seekers." Rachel Rees, Communications Director for the
> Refugee Council, said, "What's deeply worrying is first the daily
> knee-jerk reactions which further vilify asylum-seekers and
> secondly that politicians continue to pour petrol on the debate
> when their responsibility is to take the heat out of it."
>
> Emboldened by Labour's response, the Tory Party demanded even
> tougher measures against refugees. Speaking on BBC1's Breakfast
> with Frost programme on Sunday, Shadow Home Affairs spokesperson
> Ann Widdecombe said: "The signals that have been sent out over
> the last couple of years are that Britain is now a soft touch,
> that things have been relaxed from how they were, and that if you
> come here it is going to be a fairly easy place to disappear
> because it is a fairly easy place to work illegally.
>
> "The thing to remember is that of the 44,000 applications we are
> now getting, about 80 percent will not make a case not only for
> asylum nor even for compassionate leave to remain. It is not that
> we have an enormous influx of genuine people. We have some
> genuine people who are suffering from being clogged up in the
> system with bogus applicants."
>
> The Immigration Service Union (ISU) also jumped on the bandwagon,
> releasing figures claiming to show that applications for asylum
> would be up by nearly 50 percent this year "to a record 68,000".
> Martin Slade, ISU General Secretary, said, "The point of
> immigration control is to control immigration. We don't think
> that we're controlling anything.... It is like the Dutch boy with
> his finger in the dyke. We are shipping people from one end of
> the country to the other but people are still pouring in." He
> went on to reiterate Widdecombe's claims that "easy" access to
> benefits and illegal work was encouraging "bogus" refugees to
> descend on Britain.
>
> Keen to disprove the "soft touch" charge, Straw countered by
> showing that there had been 24,000 applications in the first five
> months of this year—including refugees from Kosovo—as against
> 46,000 for the whole of last year. He boasted that the UK was
> ranked eleventh out of 15 European Union countries in terms of
> asylum-seekers as a proportion of the population, and that the
> new Asylum Bill would further deter applications. Under the bill,
> all asylum-seekers will receive vouchers—rather than cash
> benefits—for food and clothing.
>
> Conservative-controlled authorities have complained that the new
> measures would increase the proportion of refugees in their
> towns. The 1 to 200 ratio in the Kent area, for example, would
> mean the authority almost doubling the number of asylum cases it
> must take responsibility for—exposing the claim that it is
> over-saturated. Stripped of the hysteria and false figures, the
> root demand of such authorities is for a “whites-only” residency
> policy. Sections of the media have even warned that the target of
> 1 per 200 would "spark protests by local people", demanding that
> Straw keep asylum-seekers out. Pandering to the Tory councils,
> Labour has made clear that its "dispersal" plans will focus on
> those areas that already have large ethnic minority
> populations—the more working class and poorer districts in large
> towns and cities.
>
> Such arguments are not new for the Tory Party, which is notorious
> for playing the "race card". In the 1960s, Conservative MP Enoch
> Powell made his infamous "rivers of blood" speech, directed
> against newly arrived Asian immigrants. Tory Prime Minister
> Margaret Thatcher claimed that immigrants were "swamping Britain"
> in the 1980s. The party has been unable to recover from its
> wipe-out in the 1997 General Election and exists as a divided and
> largely ineffective political rump. This makes it ever more
> reliant on racism as a means of mobilising the most backward and
> reactionary social forces.
>
> More noteworthy is the Labour Party's willingness to compete on
> the same agenda. Its response testifies not so much to electoral
> considerations—it currently holds an overwhelming majority in
> Parliament—but to the full extent of its right-wing degeneration.
>
>
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
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>
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> World Socialist Web Site
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