UK: Blunkett’s security nightmare: the 2002 White Paper
01 January 2002
"Refugees are to be cherry-pciked abroad; others, if they get here, must be policed, detained, harried and hurried through an increasingly harsh asylum determination system"
Finally, on 7 February, the long-trailed White Paper on immigration, nationality and asylum, Secure Borders, Safe Haven was launched. The title - and the sub-title, Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain - indicate the themes and suggest a careful balance to the various interests engaged. The message is that while refugees will continue to be protected, there will be no compromise on the security of the state, post-September 11, and the ’war on illegal immigration’ will continue to be fought. The sub-title echoes the argument of the Cantle report (1) into the disturbances of last summer, that multi-culturalism has gone too far and ’a new framework of core values’ is required ’which would set limits to the laissez-faire pluralism of the past’.
Many of the provisions of the White Paper had already been announced. We had been told to expect provisions for language and citizenship classes for intending British citizens, so these came as no surprise. The same is true of the proposal for a new asylum support system, in which policing asylum seekers is the main priority. We had already been told that vouchers were to be replaced with new technology, that the ’detention estate’ was to be increased to 4,000 places, all in dedicated centres rather than in prisons, and that the aim was to remove 30,000 rejected asylum seekers a year, up from around 12,000. We had also been told that there would be no need for asylum seekers to rely on dangerous and illegal means of reaching safety, and that economic migrants would not need to pretend to be seeking asylum any more as the opportunities for migration for work would be opened up. But the gateways to safety proposed here will be narrow indeed, and the economic opportunities similarly limited, save for the “globalised” few.
The White Paper deals with, in turn, citizenship; migration for work; asylum; trafficking and smuggling; border controls; and marriage, family and war criminals.
New Britons for new Labour
The white paper concedes that there is “historically a weak sense of active citizenship’ in the UK. The government will change this; it has introduced citizenship classes into the national curriculum, and as a result Britons will become ’active citizens”. They will be joined by naturalised Britons - immigrants who will have been taught (by “light-touch education for citizenship”) the virtues of human rights, democracy and law and the duties of citizens, and who will have passed an exam in it and taken a pledge of citizenship in a special ceremony. The white paper hopes that these new Britons will not engage in polygamy, under-age marriage, forced marriage or arranged marriage to people who are unfamiliar with British values and so need the ’light-touch education’ all over again.
Language classes are clearly of vital importance, and their free provision to all coming to the UK for settlement is long overdue. No-one can seriously object to preventing forced marriage - and there are criminal offences of kidnap, rape and assault to deal with it. But the rest - the talk of undesirable attitudes and practices, of the need to accept responsibilities as well as rights - is redolent of the Victorian missionary attitude to the blighted natives, or the Victorian industrial capitalist’s attitude to the undeserving poor. More seriously, it conceals a failure to engage with institutional racism as the real cause of segregation and social fracture, as Kundnani points out (2), instead blaming the victims who lose faith in the ability of the system to deliver justice.
But the white paper adds the insult of forgotten obligations to the injury of citizenship tests. In the mid-1980s, Labour in opposition proposed to abolish the racist provisions of the British Nationality Act 1981, which took away the right t