Counterproductive humility

For someone as politically astute as Alan Milburn, his apology yesterday for the death of DC Stephen Oake seems remarkably ill-timed and ill-thought-out. It is right to express regret or even apologise for the fact that at the time our immigration system was so leaky that the terrorist Bourgass entered the UK unchecked. On that level Milburn should be praised. However it is not the Government's fault that this man subsequently drew a knife and murdered Oake: that was Bourgass's own choice and rightly he is in jail in consequence. On balance, any apology that could be mistaken (by the public) or abused (by the Conservatives) to confer culpability for that crime to the Government would have been best left unmade.

There is little doubt that at the time Bourgass entered the UK, border controls were insufficient to stop him or others like him. What is being lost in the current debate is that there is equally little doubt that Bourgass would not get into the country were he to try to do so today. As Polly Toynbee comments:

... asylum applications have dropped by two-thirds since 2002. The backlog of claims, bequeathed by Howard (as Home Secretary) at 50,000, is now 10,000 and new cases are
fast-tracked. Airline liaison officers on the Asian subcontinent and in Africa turned back 30,000 last year. The system that lost track of Bourgass is much changed: all asylum seekers are fingerprinted and will soon be electronically tagged. By the end of this year, more failed asylum seekers will be removed than new ones applying. Charles Clarke's less punitive approach is securing agreements with previously recalcitrant countries to take back their failed asylum seekers.

Toynbee is getting increasingly angry about the deliberate conflation of the debate on immigration policy with terrorism. I agree with her totally. The Conservatives are appealing to the basest instincts of the white British population, as I have alluded to before on these pages, and this is, at best, irresponsible politics and at worst, cynical and evil tactics. I believe the truth lies closer to the latter than the former.

Michael Howard has been very fortunate politically that this terrorist was an illegal immigrant, allowing him to reinforce his odious splicing of immigration with terrorism, and that Milburn then apologised, allowing him to assert that the Government recognises that his claims of an immigration policy shambles are true.

The Conservatives are ahead in the polls in this one area. The message (being absorbed by the public anyway) is "we have wealth; they want to steal it" so "let's keep 'em out". Don't the Tories realise that by promoting this "them and us" culture, they foster hatred? Are they really so desperate for power that they will accept the degradation of a beneficial multicultural society into mutual distrust and possibly even violence in return for it? It seems so, and it is the major reason why the Conservatives, at least under Howard, must be utterly destroyed at the polls on May 5. Are we British and are we going to stand against the promotion of bigotry as we always have done? Or are we going to turn into the sort of people we defeated on the battlefield sixty years ago? That's the choice, ladies and gentlemen.