Mr Blair should stand up for asylum-seekers

There is nothing that makes it impossible for an electorate to vote for leaders who suggest that we have responsibilities to the dispossessed

Tony Blair had a very good 50th birthday, with flowing, fawning media tributes, expensive wines from an apparently chastened Jacques Chirac, his own little bit of a real colony in Iraq, and an easy win over the rebellious pups in the House of Commons over foundation hospitals. But the balloons didn't stay up long.

The local elections were a kick in the teeth for a victorious PM who believes he can clean up any nuisance anywhere in the world. Then the all-party Home Affairs Select Committee produced an alarmist report on asylum-seekers, which concluded that if the rise in numbers of arrivals was "allowed to continue unchecked it could overwhelm the capacity of the receiving countries to cope, leading inevitably to social unrest." After seven years in power, responsibility rests with this Government alone for this dangerous chaos. And now our Great Leader has been voted the "worst Briton" by a Channel 4 audience of 100,000 who were asked to nominate a hundred rogues, an irreverent antidote to the BBC's Greatest Britons series.

Among these ungrateful bounders who voted Mr Tony leading bad guy you are sure to find friends of George Galloway and other anti-war reds, some disgruntled parents of treasures who will not get into Oxbridge because they never lived on Peckham housing estates, Scargill's New Army – the firefighters, loonies and cynical luvvies, bullying atheists who hate the PM's radiant Christian piety, and thousands who blame him for "floods" of new immigrants. The Tories are delighted to torment him about this "failure".

He has indeed failed to create a better, fairer, more humane system for asylum and immigration. And he has failed to inform, educate or give a fair account to the people of this country about the flow of migrants. He has failed spectacularly to live up to any of the promises implicit in the speeches made by New Labour when they were in opposition. Then they aggressively rejected the policies of the Tories, particularly during the passage of the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, and before that when Joy Gardner, a Jamaican, was killed in July 1993 by police and immigration officers who manacled and taped her up in front of her little boy, who had to watch his mother die. Who remembers Joy today? This abominable killing was the result of a country demented over "uncontrolled" immigration.

Today we are in the grip of even more such scapegoating and fear-mongering.

The Blairite Institute for Public Policy Research even believes this. Heaven Crawley, a former Home Office researcher, says as much in a report out this week. The Government fails to understand the reasons why asylum-seekers come to the countries of Europe. They do nothing to stop chaos in the countries that produce the outflows. They sell them arms, for example. If they carry on in this way "[they] will be responsible for allowing a political context to develop in which the rise of far-right parties and public hostility towards non-white immigrants is seen as acceptable."

This tough message should not be difficult for New Labour to grasp. Look at the speeches and rebuttals in Hansard and reports in the media to see how ignited with noble outrage were Labour MP's in opposition, when it came to the way the Tory government was treating migrants. As shadow home secretary debating the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Bill, Jack Straw pronounced: "Britain has been immeasurably enriched by the contribution that has been made to its economy and its society by successive generations of immigrants." He excoriated the Tories for an iniquitous set of laws that discriminated against immigrants of colour. Gerald Kaufman said: "Our Asian and black constituents are being talked about as potential invaders of our country and as potential bogus applicants for housing benefits and social security benefits." Doug Henderson said: "The 1996 Bill will cause untold damage to race relations." The entire shadow Cabinet howled when the Tory head of party research, Andrew Lansley, said in 1995 that hard-line immigration policies "played well in the tabloids".

Since coming to power, Tony Blair has not made one stirring speech to this nation about the reasons why so many people are displaced around the world and how we are seen as "the refuge of mankind" (Thomas Macaulay, the Victorian historian).

I do not accept that all British governments since the Thatcher revolution must be the inheritors of that diseased legacy. There is nothing in our collective genes that makes it impossible for electorates to vote for leaders who suggest we have responsibilities to the dispossessed – whether as a result of violence, fear or deprivation – especially when in many cases we helped create the messes, historically or by our more recent megalomaniac interventions. The UK, the fourth-richest country in the world, is 34th in terms of the refugees it supports. Half of those who arrive can prove – in spite of our scandalously unjust procedures – that they have a legitimate right to stay. If and when they feel safe enough to, most of them will make good and add to the nation's wealth.

Economic migrants are no different (except they are poorer and need more chances) to the thousands of Britons moving to Spain, Italy, South Africa, France; or the thousands of Americans, New Zealanders, white South Africans and Europeans on the move. The economic refugees from deprived countries have no way to come in without pretending to be asylum-seekers. Not all asylum-seekers are really seeking political asylum, but equally not all those seeking entry are "bogus" or terrorists. Besides, economic migrants are intrepid, hungry, and often desperate people too, not villains we should hang on the cliffs of Dover.

People go back, too, and it is so much more productive for all sides when they choose to do so rather than being bundled off when we decide they must. Kenyans, many highly educated, are returning home after exile because for the first time in decades their country is not ruled by a despot supported by the West. Thousands have gone back to Afghanistan, but that is not told to the British public.

I found the Select Committee's conclusions depressing and dangerous. They were given the task to look not at arrivals but at removals (and do British people not care that in their zeal to keep to targets, the immigration services are removing real victims of state violence to war zones like the Congo?) The Crawley report says rightly that no evidence was provided to underpin their wild "social unrest" assertions. We need the public to better understand the dynamics of migration and the benefit of having new blood flowing in and out of any nation. Sure there are many costs and disadvantages, but the net gain is proven.

This Select Committee report will only encourage New Labour to become even more of a bulldog on asylum and immigration. Blair is now such a son of Thatcher, I cannot see any other response. That will lead to even worse national paranoia and ill-will towards incomers and settled Britons of colour. The gulf between the powerful and powerless will damage both sides. So, until he does better on this, I must agree with those who voted Tony Blair into the dog house.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk