Yvette Cooper isn’t wrong when she speaks of the “chaos that has blighted the immigration system for too long” – but it’s still profoundly dispiriting to hear her plans. She promises a “large surge” in return flights for refused asylum seekers, and others with no right to be here; 100 new intelligence officers and two new removal centres in Hampshire and Oxfordshire. Given that Harmondsworth currently has the worst conditions the prisons inspectorate has ever seen, it seems like poor prioritising, at best, to pledge more removal centres before sorting out the ones we have.
What’s the home secretary’s long game here? Does she want to go down as a more competent, slightly fairer version of Theresa May – all the tough talk with extra deliverability? Or is the real Yvette Cooper the one seen giving parliamentary speeches, including the one of which she is most proud, placing humanity and empathy towards refugees at the centre of the British identity?
With the exception of the new removal centres, all of these policies could have been announced and indeed enacted, with a different emphasis, and would have sounded like signs of a fair and functioning system. Expediting the asylum claim process, which will presumably take more trained officers, is essential for everyone. Once that’s functioning, inevitably there will be more return flights, but there will also be even more people whose claims succeed. It would be great to hear a home secretary talk about them – the refugees released from needless limbo, able to work and build a life and find security, thanks to a system that finally works.
She can’t talk about that, however, because it doesn’t sound tough enough. So we’re left to infer, through some mix of hope and reason, that there’s a decent programme under here somewhere. Meanwhile, those who have built their political stock on xenophobic ritual are presumably meant to pipe down for a bit, having been delivered the semi-skimmed, health-food version of their poison.
It won’t work. In her book, She Speaks, an anthology of speeches by female politicians, Cooper includes that speech of her own, in which she makes the case that it’s in cruelty we lose our national identity rather than in offering sanctuary. On record then, Cooper is “good people”. But values that aren’t consistent are meaningless.
Meanwhile, there is nobody in this country who cares less about immigration policy than Nigel Farage, in the sense that no practical solution would satisfy him. Arrivals could stop tomorrow and Britain would still be at “breaking point” because of everyone already here. The asylum backlog could be cleared with a magic wand and we’d still be in the grip of a clash of civilisations. We could empty the country of everyone not born here and it wouldn’t be enough: some people would still be the wrong religion or the wrong colour, or the focus would shift completely and some other othering would take its place. It’s pointless trying to appease people who seek to make migration the most salient issue in politics. Any conciliatory nod towards their point of view, in language, emphasis or frame, just emboldens them.
The government needs to set its own narrative on migration generally, and asylum in particular, which it struggles to do partly because the foundations of this grim prefab were laid by Tony Blair. He passed four migration-related parliamentary laws, all of them restrictive or in some way designed to indicate “toughness”.
Probably the most damaging, on a human level, was in 2002, when refugees were denied the right to work while they waited for a decision. We could (and did) argue a lot about his motivation in making the issue such a priority when its practical impact on most people’s lives was so minor. It often seemed as though he was using asylum seekers as red meat to throw at those who objected to freedom of movement.
But apart from all that wasted potential, all those (at best temporarily) wrecked lives, Blair left another legacy – which was that Labour forgot how to talk about asylum seekers in anything other than negative terms. The idea that the nation should be proud to offer sanctuary; that legitimate refugees who made it this far would be an asset to any society; that processing claims and integrating citizens should be well within the wit of any halfway competent government – all of that got lost in the new normal, where toughness was strength, humanity was weakness and foreigners fleeing war zones were mainly chancers.
The Blair years showed us that vindictive policy doesn’t heal divisions around immigration, but only deepens them. While 14 years of the Conservatives showed that cruelty is incredibly expensive and utterly ineffective.
This new stance – a little less cruelty, a little more efficacy – is all performed for an imagined centre. It is for the BBC-minted citizen, who would never throw a brick at a police officer or shout “Britain is full”; who likes human rights fine, but who recognises that there’s a problem yet can’t exactly discern what the problem is. Is the problem that the small boats keep coming, and the system is creaking? Is it that public services can’t cope, or that there isn’t the housing stock? Is it that the “red wall” is angry and the whole country is a public order tinderbox?
Labour can explain it to them but not down the path it is taking: that path, of triangulation between humanity and inhumanity, doesn’t exist. The home secretary needs to pick a side – and since she will never, convincingly, pick inhumanity, she may as well pick the other one.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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