That distant growling you can hear is the revving of engines. The main political parties are gearing up for a long General Election campaign, and immigration policy enjoys a prime spot.
The Tories are setting the pace with stop-and-search on the tube and all the restrictions of today’s immigration bill. Tougher noises are coming from other quarters too. All this is predicated on poll after poll showing voters’ scepticism about immigration.
But it’s never quite as simple as this. Even amid such scepticism, there is almost no stomach amongst voters for forcing victims back into the grasp of their abusers. The public remains extraordinarily generous and hospitable towards people who have been tortured, raped and abused overseas. People want to see refugees looked after.
But what they see from the government instead is an utter shambles. That shambles is laid bare in today’s report from the Home Affairs Select Committee.
Backlogs are getting longer. One in three decisions to refuse is still overturned by a judge. The ‘culture of disbelief’ persists. People recognised as refugees are plunged into destitution because of “bureaucratic incompetence”.
Even as the officials struggle with the basics, though, there are strong signs in the report that MP’s are finally starting to get it.
Why, for example, are women who have fled from rape overseas routinely treated as liars when they seek asylum here? “At a time when the criminal justice system is finally waking up to the needs of victims of domestic and sexual violence”, the Committee concludes, “the asylum system should be doing the same”.
The question about gender is an important one. The abuse against women and girls in places like Syria and the Democratic of Republic of Congo (labelled by the UN “the rape capital of the world”) is a staple of TV news most nights. It defies credibility that no one in charge of asylum policy here has noticed this, yet women are more likely than men to get the wrong asylum decision. This has been the case for years. Poor decisions are “compounded by the inability of case workers to learn from their mistakes”, says the Committee: too right.
There are political rewards on offer, too. When the public was polled last year about letting Afghan translators settle here if they had served our troops and were now in danger, UKIP voters were alone in arguing that the interpreters should be abandoned to the Taliban. For everyone else, restoring fairness to the asylum system was the obvious and right thing to do.
