Without Prejudice - Nick Cohen [The Observer, 13/6/99]<p>

'Give us your watches'

Mike O'Brien:
'Many asylum seekers come from communities where wealth may be stored in jewellery or other financial bonds - and it is right for us to take account of that wealth.'

Diane Abbot:
'Is the minister suggesting that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their wedding rings, as an alternative to the Government meeting it's moral and international responsibilities to provide a reasonable level of support?'

O'Brien:
'I certainly am suggesting that...'

Unidentified Tory:
'You'll be wanting the gold fillings out of their teeth next.'

Abbot:
'Is the Minister going to strip the rings from their fingers?'

(From the transcriptions of the Commons Standing Committee on the Asylum Bill, 11 May 1999)

The Coming week will bring the last chance for Labour MPs to salvage the remnants of their party's and country's honour by rebelling against an Asylum Bill which will turn the victims of the world's greatest crimes into criminals.
With the strength of character for which they are famed, many Labour MPs have caved in before a vote was cast in anger. All that was required was for O'Brien, the Immigration Minister, and Jack Straw, his boss, to make a 'concession' last week that a more-than-usually-stupid child of three could see wasn't a concession at all and the white flag was raised with hearty cries of 'we have a listening Government'.
For this is a story about silver pieces as well as gold fillings and, as always, what is striking is not that the Parliamentary Labour Party has sold out but that it is bought at car-boot-sale prices.
If it does not fight you will be able to see pinched and nervous foreigners proffering Europe's newest currency in supermarkets and corner shops by the end of the year. The Asylo is a debased note like no other. Its production will allow refugees to recieve meagre supplies of baby food and nappies and beatings at the hands of local racists and nail bombers. Asylos publically mark refugees as the 'bogus cheats' and 'slippery aliens', New Labour's favourite paper, the Daily Mail, has worked so hard to make respectable objects of racial hatred now that it is no longer polite for family newspapers and political parties to go for niggers, Pakis and Yids.
Refugees seeking sanctuary will recieve our first racial currency in the form of £1, £5, £10 vouchers as well as a handful of pocket money in the more familiar coins of the realm. The package will be worth just 70 per cent of income support - the absolute poverty line for everyone else. A single mother with one child will have to live on cash and Asylos worth £53 a week compared with the £81.20 Britain's generous benefits system gives a comparable member of the native poor.
We can catch a glimpse of how the currency will trade by looking at single male refugees who don't declare that they want sanctuary in a place of greater safety as soon as they arrive in Britain. A failure to display an immediate understanding of the workings of an immigration system whose Byzantine wonders few lawyers can grasp is, of course, a clear sign that you are a sponging cheat and the hapless men have already been forced to live on asylos worth £43.30 a week.
This bleak necessity forced Ilijan Memaj and a group of Kosovar refugees to pool their vouchers. Eating communally was the only way to keep their bellies full. He handed his Asylos in at Tesco in Harrow. The checkout girl suspected that some weren't his and called the police. Memaj was arrested and cautioned for the crime of trying to get food on to his comrades' table.
The Government tells shops not to give change from vouchers because coins would put real money into refugees' pockets which might be used to phone the lawyers they need to fight off a bullying and reactionary Home Office. Stores take their policing duties seriously. They are reluctant to serve asylum seekers at all when they suspect thay are exploiting the system by buying luxuries.
One was turned away from the Premier Co-op in Dover when he tried to get a razor and shaving foam. He walked a mile to find a social worker. She told him the shop must have made a mistake. He returned. The Co-op refused to accept his vouchers. He walked back to the council office. Only when a social worker escorted him to the shop was he allowed to have a shave.
Straw and Blair ignored all pleas to reconsider. The aim of the Asylum Bill is to stop refugees, authentic or otherwise, reaching Britain. Thus car, lorry, plane, bus, train, boat and car owners will be fined and arrested if there is a refugee on board. It will be no defence to say that he is genuine or, in fact, dead. When Tory MPs, once considered to be on the far Right, pointed out that modern lorries were sealed and desperate asylum seekers had suffocated in the containers, Geoff Hoon, deputy to Cardinal Irvine, the Lord High Chancellor, said he found accounts of how asylum-seekers choked as the oxygen ran out 'tedious'.(The bored Hoon has since been promoted to the Foreign Office where he now maintains a languid guard over our ethical human rights policy.)
Asylos were essential to stop refugees being 'pulled' to Britain by cash benefits, the Government said. Ministers forgot to tell the public that other European countries, from Belgium to Finland, offer more generous benefits and the right to work, and that asylum-seekers preferred to go to civilised countries such as Germany which recieves four times as many refugees as Britain.
Until last week, Ministers were brutally explicit about the need to push refugees into destitution. Paragraph 4.19 of the White Paper on the Aylum Bill says 'the proposed provision is set at 70 per cent of income support levels'. The hard line held until labour MPs threatened to remember what their backbones were for and prepared to fight. In a frantic series of meetings last week, Straw promised to raise the amount of pin money. He claimed that he wasn't such a bad guy and would give asylum-seekrs the right to 90 per cent of income support. To the surprise of no one, his figure turns out to be a fiddle reached by pretending the furniture in furnished flats is part of the benefit - a calculation not made when British claimants have their right to welfare assessed.
Straw said he would be able to deal with cases in six months. The misery he wanted to inflict would be temporary. Straw is a Minister who has allowed a backlog of asylum cases dating back to the early Nineties to grow to 70,000. His incompetence is so great he cannot even get the computer system in the Immigration and Nationality Department to work.
Few asked him how he could deliver, or how his ramshackle department will administer the Asylo when it cannot even call up an asylum seeker's computer file or produce passports for the rest of us. The Home Office is going to have to print, distribute and get shops to accept a new currency. It will have to make sure Asylos can't be forged and that a black market does not grow up in the debased notes. Any mistake will leave refugees with no option but to beg, steal or starve. Even the most doltish Labour Mps might be expected to weigh the odds against the most blundering of public institutions being able to run what is in effect an alternative Bank of England.
If they are inclined to give the Government the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they should consider the exchange at the top of this piece. A hyperbolic Conservative is so angry at the barbarism of a Labour Minister he can accuse him of being a potential concentration camp commandant. Diane Abbott, a Labour MP, wonders if he wants to prize of women's wedding rings. (O'Brien replied that, on reflection, he didn't, but he could well want to take their watches.)
Doesn't the above stir any feelings of shame, or if the emotion is considered old-fashioned, unease? Is the Labour Party prepared to sell what's left of its good name so cheaply to devalued men? Even Judas insisted on being bought with hard silver currency rather than promissory notes on worthless paper.