Matthew Norman: The policy that shames our country

Does anything gladden the heart like the mellifluous sound of a foreign leader telling us how absolutely marvellous we are? The Britain that saved France's bacon in the war, cooed Nicolas Sarkozy, is still seen around the world as "a political and human ideal".

In the wake of such delicious words, how indelicate of the Independent Asylum Commission to choose yesterday morning, midway between the President's speech and the Anglo-French love-in at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium, to publish its report on the treatment of those who come here seeking sanctuary.

Evidently unswayed by Sarkozy's eulogy, the commission described the handling of asylum seekers as "seriously below" the standards expected of a civilised society, referring to "perverse and unjust decisions" and describing it as a blemish on the UK's international reputation.

I don't suppose this had much of an airing at the Emirates yesterday. The same selective myopia that prevents Arsène Wenger, that personification of the new Entente Amicable, noticing his players' misdemeanours necessarily afflicts leaders during state visits. What holds for a potentially limb-shattering, studs-up lunge by Emanuel Eboue goes in triplicate for a report reinforcing what has been both blatantly obvious and largely ignored for years: that there is something terribly wrong with the country Sarkozy praised for its humanity, and that thing is a monstrously inhumane policy on asylum and immigration.

You may be personally acquainted with stories painting a gruesome portrait of a government that promotes the appeasement of Rupert Murdoch's Sun far above its most basic moral duty. I know of two myself, less nauseating than the betrayals mentioned below but sickening enough for all that.

One concerns the partner of a British woman forcibly removed to Jamaica because a duff lawyer had led him to overstay his visa. The fact that her tiny son calls him "Daddy" was irrelevant to an administration that affects to regard paternal role models as a magic bullet against social ills. The other involved a British man whose Ecaudorian wife was detained at Heathrow and sent back to Quito purely because she was heavily pregnant. Thankfully she'll be back, a tribunal having found that the immigration service acted unlawfully, but for the first six months of his life that baby has been denied his father.

Few appreciate the importance of bonding with a new baby more keenly than our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. It was to attend the birth of his adoptive son in America, you may recall, that he absented himself from the last state visit at which Britain's shared values with a major foreign ally (adorable Saudi Arabia) were loudly celebrated.

But does he also appreciate the importance of asylum and immigration? He certainly should. Had the current ethos held sway when that fight to save France was beginning, he would no more be here now than would I, whose great grandparents fled Ukrainian pogroms a century ago. In the present climate, those forebears of mine would be sent back, as would Mr Miliband's father, Ralph, the Marxist historian, who came here in 1940 from Belgium as Hitler's army marched towards Brussels.

Only bad publicity and resulting political expediency has the power to force the Government to relocate that fabled moral compass, and Mr Sarkozy's reflections on wartime courage strike a harshly discordant note when we remember how many unflattering headlines were required before it rethought expelling the Gurkhas, and how many months of media-led pressure passed before it backtracked a few tiny steps over abandoning the Iraqi interpreters who risked their lives to help British troops in Basra. Only then did Gordon Brown, whose book on moral courage becomes a more savagely ironic indictiment of its author by the week, to send David Miliband to the Commons to make a few half-hearted concessions to the translators.

He offered them a bit of money to relocate in the region so long as they had worked for the British Army for at least six unbroken months, presumably imagining that would-be executioners would show mercy to anyone who'd notched up 25 weeks and six days. Denmark has taken all 367 Iraqi military aides, and their families, who have asked it for asylum. Sweden took 15,000 Iraqi refuges last year. Britain, happily free from any blame for the state of their country, took fewer than 200 out of some 1,500 applicants.

Not everyone agrees with the commission's findings, of course. "I totally refute any suggestion that we treat asylum applicants without care and compassion," declares Lin Homer of the Border and Immigration Service. She must be thinking of Dumisanu Lungu, the seven-year-old son of two HIV positive parents expected to develop the illness soon himself. All three were plucked from their beds before dawn and taken to a detention centre. But for a campaign led by an Anglican bishop, Britain would have sent them back to Malawi to die.

Barely less excruciating than the facts themselves is that, in seeking to explain how such wickedness can be tolerated, we need only look in the mirror. We know that right-wing papers and quarter-witted shock jocks enrich themselves by stoking fear and hatred of immigrants, and that modern governments and would-be governments are too enfeebled to fight them. But then so are we all.

We heard the then immigration minister Barbara Roche – another Jewish beneficiary of British humanity – describe asylum-seekers begging with their children as "vile", and let this wash over us.

We have given up hoping that Mr Miliband, a bright and thoughtful potential PM, will ever make a speech even half as candid and coherent as Barack Obama's on race last week, understanding resentment over the perceived favouritism shown to immigrants, but citing his family history to reassert faith in the simple humanity to which M. Sarkozy so anachronistically referred; and explaining why it is a moral imperative to look after those, be they allies in war or African Aids victims, who genuinely need looking after.

What we of the liberal centre-left have done is join Brown, Miliband and all those who so absolutely fail to represent our beliefs in allowing ourselves to be brow-beaten into silent, sullen acquiescence by the unrelenting right-wing propaganda of recent decades. We glow in Sarkozy's facetious praise when we should shriek in rage about what a nasty, brutal, mean-spirited country our spineless apathy has helped create, and this report on the systematic maltreatment of asylum-seekers shames and diminishes us all.