Asylum and Immigration Treatment of Claimants Bill
Posted on January 20, 2004
Neither Closed Door Nor Open Door But Revolving Door
The 2004 Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act.
“We came here to seek asylum, but we are being reduced to non-people…The Home Secretary has announced he is changing the rules about who can claim asylum…Does the Home Office prefer us to disappear into the underbelly of British society? Not seen, not heard and working for shadowy bosses in the jobs many British people don’t want to do for a fraction of the minimum wage. We are a useful source of cheap, unregulated labour that can boost the economy” ( Semret Fesshaye, Eritrean Asylum Seeker (1))
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as a matter of faith. It is to be achieved either by acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet (Nineteen Eighty Four p 201)
Nineteen Eighty Four, 2004 and newspeak
George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four is a metaphor for immigration controls. Its language, imagery and politics have meaning and significance for all aspects of control. As such the novel sheds light on specific areas of legislation . So it is illuminating to examine under the beam of the metaphor particular statutes such as the recent 2004 Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act .
The parliamentary path of the 2004 Act is strewn with the newspeak and doublethink of
Orwell’s imagination. Newspeak –a language designed to numb critical faculties and “diminish the range of thought” (2) – is the vehicle used to justify the statute. In fact much of newspeak probably appears in the popular imagination as oldspeak given that it has been employed to justify with increasing usage every single piece of control legislation over he last decade - illegals, economic migrants, bogus refugees. However there has been some additions to the vocabulary – some newspeak for a new law. David Blunkett, Home Secretary and chief lexicographer, has introduced into the dictionary the demon “clandestines” (3) – a description straight out of science fiction. Clandestine: definition – secret alien from the planet Clan on a mission to enter Dover disguised as a refugee. However perhaps the real development of newspeak lies in the overall justification given for the Act. The Act is projected as a “reform”. A Home Office press release of 27 November 2003 (4) is headed “Final phase of asylum reform….” Beverley Hughes, the Minister for Immigration, said in parliament that the new law “is the next essential stage in our programme of reforms to the asylum and immigration system” (5). This is a complete bastardisation of the word, vocabulary and concept of “reform”. The construct of reform connotes progress, enlightenment, positive development, human improvement, social advance. Immigration control on the other hand is about negativity, reaction, obscuranticism, pain, misery, disress, enslavement – control of people.
The 2004 legislation is about all this negativity with vengeance. One section is entitled with euphamistic, bureacratic newspeak “unification of appeal system”. This abolishes the right to appeal an immigration decision from an Adjudicator (an immigration judge) to the Immigration Appeals Tribunal – which it achieves by the simple expedient of abolishing the Immigration Appeals Tribunal and creating a new one-tier Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. More significantly the “unification of appeal system” prevents any judicial review by the High Court, Court of Appeal or House of Lords of any decision of the new Tribunal where it is being alleged the Tribunal lacked jurisdiction to hear the case, or acted with procedural or any other irregularity, or committed an error of law, or breached natural justice or, just to ensure authority can never be challenged, behaved wrongly on “any other matter”. Remarkably the bar on further judicial scrutiny extends to decisions of the Secretary of State herself or himself to deport or remove someone from the UK. The Home Secretary thus becomes all-powerful. Becomes Big Brother. In this political war against migrants, immigrants and refugees the enemy is to be given even less rights than the enemy in a military war. Even in the Second World War, Regulation 18B allowing the Home Secretary to detain suspected enemies of the country was reviewable by the courts. Far from being in any jurisprudential or in any other sense “progressive” the appeal provisions (or, more accurately, lack of appeal provisions) of the 2004 Act feudalise English law by presenting the central authority with power that had arguably existed only prior to 1215 and Magna Carta (6) – with Magna Carta itself being that popular icon of supposed freedoms won against the Big Brother of his day, King John, and which still retains the same nationalistic status as Rule Brittania and God Save The Queen (7). Only in a world of linguistic newspeak, of Nineteen Eighty Four, of lies deceit, hypocrasy, of complte madness – only in such a world can the 2004 legislation be described as a “reform”.
Big Brother and memory holes
And the madness gets worse. In the name of “reform” reaction triumphs.The Asylum Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act is a storeroom of reaction..For instance it makes it an offence, punishable by imprisonment, for any non-British or EEA national arriving at a UK port, not to have a passport or to have a forged passport. This contravenes a central principle of the Geneva Convention ( Article 31 which was incorporated into the Convention exactly to prevent this type of legislation from being enacted ) that asylum seekers should not be punished due to the method of their entry. There are provisions strengthening the law against trafficking people for exploitation. However these provisions do not prevent the subsequent deportation of someone exploited in this way – which is penalising the victim. Moreover these provisions naturally leave untouched the central features of the international labour market – which are precisely about exploitation on a global scale. The Act provides guidelines for when a “deciding authority” should find credible (believe) an asylum seeker. Most of these already exist in the immigration rules – and it is anyhow bizarre that what are essentially matters of evidence should be determined by primary legislation. It could only happen to a refuge. Immigration officers are essentially elevated to the status of police officers by being given the powers of entry, search, seizure and arrest without warrant for a whole series of alleged offences- from bigamy to theft- supposedly uncovered when exercising a function under immigration legislation.. Powers of fingerprinting are also increased. Two sections deal with , that is make more intolerable, the dual concept of “safe country”. There is increased the already existing power of the Home Secretary to designate a human rights or asylum claim as “clearly unfounded” where the claim is for asylum from a “safe country” – preserving rights of appeal against the refusal of a claim whilst preventing such appeals being heard from within the UK (a truly Orwellian paradox). The Home Secretary can continue to make a list of countries of origin from which claims will be “clearly unfounded” but now can also specify that a country is “safe” in respect to particular criteria – namely gender, language, race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group, political opinion or the catch-all of “any other attribute or circumstance that the Secretary of State thinks appropriate”. What this does is extend the notorious concept of a “white list” of safe countries which was established by the Tories in their 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, which was heavily criticized in Labour’s first immigration white paper- Fairer, Faster and Firmer (8), which was supposedly abolished by Labour in the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act and which was reintroduced by Labour in the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. Much of this is redolent of the “memory hole” of Nineteen Eighty Four – the speed at which reality is changed and denied makes it virtually impossible to remember which politician said what and when. In addition to this ( and the other half of the concept of the safe country) there is enlarged the power to remove a claimant to a “safe third country” through which she or he has passed and of which she or he is not a national - without substantive consideration of an asylum or, in certain cases, human rights claim. The construct of “safe third countries” in effect reverses the flows of established transnational migratory paths and turns them into transnational corridors of expulsions (9). The list of “safe third countries” is not the same as, and does not coincide with, the “white list”. Nor is the list of safe third countries in respect to asylum claims necessarily always identical with that for human rights claims. Refugee and human rights protection , or lack of protection, is being reduced to list writing. Moreover the Home Secretary need not always stick to any particular list. In deciding individual cases he can designate any country in the world as a “safe third country” where in his opinion alone the country is “safe”. This opinion cannot be challenged. Big Brother rules.
The reaction goes on. For the first time there is allowed the electronic tagging of all those subject to immigration controls where residence restrictions are imposed, where reporting restrictions could be imposed and in some cases where immigration bail is granted. This satellite technology further criminalizes all migrants, immigrants and refugees. Furthermore in cases where a court recommends deportation following a criminal conviction then there will anyhow be automatic detention – previous power to release on bail is withdrawn. Hidden near the end of the Act is a little-publicised section – but a section which should be publicised. This allows the Home Secretary when setting a fee under existing powers in respect to immigration and nationality applications to do so at a rate designed to exceed the administrative cost of determining or processing such an application in order to “reflect benefits that the Secretary of state thinks are likely to accrue to the person who makes the application” or for whose benefit the application is made. We have now entered the free market economy of immigration control. This is an economy where the Home Secretary is authorized to assess the financial benefits of not being expelled from the UK. Once again we return to Magna Carta, chapter 40 of which declared “ To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice”. And once again the Home Secretary becomes King John becomes Big Brother. And yet more reaction: There are extended the powers of the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner over immigration advisors- allowing for entry, search and seizure where it is believed premises are being used by an unregulated immigration advisor. The role of the Office is itself quite Orwellian. It was established under the 1999 legislation to ostensibly drive out rogue advisors. However the only way to get rid of rogue advisors is to get rid of immigration control – otherwise the trade just goes further underground. This is because the real rogue is control itself - everyone and everything else are just parasites on it. A dung heap will always attract flies. The way to be free of the flies is to sling away the dung heap. In reality however the hidden agenda and longer-term aim of the Office of the Commissioner is not to attack rogue advisors – but to undermine principled immigration advisors, advisors who are often politically committed to opposing controls. In the debate on the Second Reading for the 2004 Act, the Home Secretary equates rogue advisors with advisors “who are dedicatedly against any removals, with their campaigns for what they call no deportation”. According to Blunkett both “will use any ends to make a monkey of the system” (10). In fact Blunkett is wrong. The crooks are interested in making money. Lots of it. On the other hand good advisors are good precisely because they want to win cases by, in the words of Malcolm X, any means necessary. This doesn’t mean the production of fake documents. What it does mean is a thorough understanding of the law combined with a proper appreciation of the political significance of each case – thus allowing for proper tactical decisions to be made throughout any claim, including a thorough discussion on whether there is a need for a public campaign to run alongside the legal challenge. A well conducted case professionally is a well conducted case politically. And such cases can take a considerable time to prepare. It is in full knowledge of this that the Home Secretary is presently about to slash legal aid for immigration and asylum advice and representation –changes which do not need primary legislation (11). New Labour’s theory appears to be that the greater the legal repression then the less need for lawyers. Big Brother would be proud.
Deportation Is Freedom!
After a time it becomes genuinely difficult not to believe that the 2004 Act did not come straight from the pen of George Orwell. A new criminal offence is created (which can carry a sentence of two years imprisonment) – an offence of failing to cooperate in one’s own removal from the UK! In Britain today the choice for those subject to immigration controls is now either imprisonment or expulsion. In Nineteen Eighty Four one of Big Brother’s mad, contradictory slogans of Party rule was Freedom Is Slavery. In modern Britain the equivalent is Deportation Is Freedom!
Finally another section seeks to deny even the limited poor-law based financial support and accommodation currently provided by the National Asylum Support Service (NASS) to the families of asylum seekers whose asylum appeals have been dismissed. The National Asylum Support Service itself is classic newspeak – its main role is to withhold support and it does not provide a service Citizen Advice Bureau workers “rate NASS as the worst government bureaucracy they have ever had to deal with”(12). Under the new Act assistance now terminates once the Secretary of State has certified that a person has failed “without reasonable excuse to take reasonable steps to leave the UK voluntarily”. Several points can be made about this. First in order for a local authority to maintain its obligations to the welfare of children in such families, they may have to be placed either voluntarily or involuntarily into the care of that local authority under Section 20 of the 1989 Children Act.. Second local authorities are further confirmed in their role of satellites of Big Brother and as immigration spies by being obliged to report to the Home Office any failed asylum-seeking families in their area who they know have not taken reasonable steps to leave the country (whatever that means). Third where a family’s claim for asylum has failed but they fear return or cannot be returned, the onus is taken away from the Secretary of State to remove failed asylum seekers and puts the burden on the family to try to leave the UK or to remain here in destitution. With the logic of Nineteen Eighty Four, Beverley Hughes has said in Parliament that children can avoid be put into care by joining their parents in leaving the country. And government lawyers have likewise advised that this provision will not breach either the inhuman and degrading treatment (Article 3 ) or the right to respect to private and family life (Article 
of the European Convention of Human Rights as families have the option of leaving the country together and immediately (12b) In other words and once again we are faced with an Orwellian slogan , a preposterous slogan, of “Deportation Is Freedom!”
Doublethink and echoes of a genocidal past
“His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink” (13)
“Deportation Is Freedom” is not just newspeak. It is also Orwellian doublethink. How can deportation be freedom? But yet how can it be anything else when the alternatives are imprisonment or being forcibly taken into care? And how can “reform” mean reaction? But again how can it mean anything else when racism is dragging society backwards in time – backwards to a new dark age? As in Nineteen Eighty Four the logic of immigration control is supremely irrational – that is illogical. Doublethink rules supreme. Sanity, a healthy way of viewing the world, can only return with the abolition of controls. It is imperative, in the words of the great nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel ,to negate the negation.
Just as controls are based on doublethink so each and every justification for the 2004 Act is erected on doublethink. And none of these apologias are particularly new. One is that the new Act is making the law “fairer” (14). This is classic Orwellianese – “fairer” meaning “more repressive”. Another is that , in the words of David Blunkett, it provides a “warm welcome to people from around the world” (15). “Warm welcome” here meaning “cold shoulder”. In New Labour newspeak such a welcome is known as “managed migration”. Beverley Hughes clarified this piece of doublethink when she said “this government’s policy is to welcome migrants where this helps our economy” (16). In other words legal provision will only be made for, and welcome will only be extended to, the “right sort of “ migrant – who tomorrow, when there is no longer a labour shortage or pension shortfall, will once again become the “wrong sort of “ migrant and will once again be liable to expulsion. This is not so much an open door policy on immigration nor a closed door – but a revolving door. It is also a clear illustration of the political nature of the law – whereby today’s lawful migrant can become tomorrow’s illegal immigrant and vice versa. A sub-catagory of this particular piece of doublethink occurs in the usual rewriting of history, with the assertion that the UK historically has “a proud tradition” of welcoming refugees (17) – as though, even if true, this somehow justifies excluding today’s refugees. But it isn’t even true. The very first immigration control legislation was the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at Jewish refugees fleeing Russia and Eastern Europe – though a century of silence has ensured that this has gone down the memory hole along with everything else of significance. Yet another doublethink apologia is that the legislation “in the interests of good race and community relations” (18). This is the same as arguing that mass redundancies are in the interests of good industrial relations . Most outrageous of all (what in Nineteen Eighty Four might well achieve the superlative doubleplus-doublethink) is the assertion that the greater the demonisation of the refugee and the tougher the immigration controls then the less chance there is of fascism and the British National Party growing in strength – this being the same fascism and British National Party that consistently campaigns for the strengthening of controls. At this point it is also difficult to distinguish the puppet from the puppeteer , the Labour Party from the BNP, and who is pulling whose. At the 2003 Labour Party Conference Beverley Hughes in a Question and Answer session stated “The BNP feed on people’s fears and use that for their own racist political objectives. It’s imperative that we sort out the asylum system and have a fair, robust process the public can have confidence in” (19). She calls this “a progressive approach to migration”. This is similar doublethink and political cowardice – where fascism is opposed with racism, where racism is defined as progressive - that lead the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, down the road to appeasement in his dealings with Hitler and the Nazis.
Doublethink permeates the entire debate around the 2004 Act. For instance the Home Secretary describes the slashing of legal aid as a “generous” measure (20). Again there were frequent references made in Parliament to asylum seekers arriving here “illegally (21). However there was no reference to the fact that successive governments – with their imposition of carriers liability (transforming airlines into immigration spies) and visa schemes- have made open entry impossible. The very idea that asylum seekers can be here unlawfully is itself doublethink – because as refugees they have every right to be here under the Geneva Convention. The politics of doublethink reduces all such rights to theory. To non-rights. .
And it goes on. Poor law (NASS) support will be terminated and children will be taken into care unless families agree to leave “voluntarily”. However “voluntary” departure is itself doublethink in the context of families wanting to remain. This also throws into relief the often hidden and ugly underbelly of immigration control – that is expulsion by stealth. The annual statistics as to removals produced by the Home Office do not tell half the story – in fact they conceal the story. The Home Office has an ambivalent attitude towards invoking formal removal processes. On the one hand such processes help keep up the statistics. So in the debate on the 2004 Act David Blunkett boasted that “we have increased the number of removals to 1500 or 1600 a month , which is now over 18000 on an annualized basis. We have separately managed each month to stop 3000 clandestines getting into the country. The total picture is rarely presented…in our media” (22). On the other hand removals are often cumbersome and expensive. So as an alternative (as an offer you can’t refuse) the Home Office prefers to “assist” people to return “voluntarily” by paying their passage and now giving them poor law support until they leave – with departure often facilitated by the International Office of Migration, a body whose Orwellian role is thus to prevent migration. Beverley Hughes, speaking at the Standing Committee on the 2004 Act, provided a humanitarian twist to this preference saying “Members have heard me speak about enforced returns, but have they been out with an arrest team and seen what this means? With families, it is always done with mixed teams of men and women who are specially trained, and it is done very well, but if one imagines someone turning up at people’s front door at 4 or 5 in the morning and getting them and their children out of bed and taking them to a place of detention, ready to go on a plane…this is an experience that one would want to avoid, however well and professionally it is done by immigration officers, however kindly people are spoken to” (23). Beverley Hughes’s concerns seem as much about the sensibilities of immigration officers as the plight of asylum seekers. Though expulsion is not, is manifestly not, the same as extermination yet Hughes’s words have a resonance of a genocidal past. This is a past where Heinrich Himmler , the Nazi leader, addressed the SS officers whose role it was to implement extermination: “Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them has been through it. Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and–apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness — to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough (24)”. Genocide and removal are not the same. But the bureaucratic mind-set behind both is often indistinguishable. It is the mind-set of what Hannah Arendt famously described as “the banality of evil”.
Just another brick in the wall
The Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act is politically the creation of a highly confident government – a government that believes a century of parliamentary and media newspeak and doublethink plus a top layer of New Labour spin has generated enough support for immigration controls that migrants, immigrants and refugees can be simply stamped on. Another dreadful image from Nineteen Eighty Four springs to mind “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (25). This super-confidence of the creators of the 2004 Act, the Labour government, is seen in the fact that it felt powerful enough to simply ignore numerous criticisms made by both of its central parliamentary think tanks - the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (26) and the House of Commons Library research papers (27). Of course in a “liberal democracy” such as Great Britain it is inconceivable to imagine a form of control which existed without parliamentary sanction. However this does not in any way mean that law and legislation are somehow neutral. Rather they are weapons. They are weapons which are just as powerful as guns and tanks – and ultimately they may need guns and tanks to enforce them. And immigration laws are weapons in the war against immigrants, migrants and refugees. The wider the law and the more the law then the wider the power and the more the power. Just as in Nineteen Eighty Four the British state (along with most other states) is continually harnessing what is left of its inventive energies in order to develop the ultimate weapon of destruction – this now being the ultimate weapon of immigration law. Hence the significance of the quote at the start of this chapter. The 2004 Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act- is part of this weaponry development. It is a piece of military/judicial ordinance. Every statute since the 1905 Aliens Act has provided a stage in this development. The creation of all this ordinance has been exponential – it has been manufactured at an ever-increasing rate. From 1905 until 1962 there were just three major pieces of primary legislation (28) . From 1962 until 1993 there were six (29) . From 1993 until 2004 there has been another four (30). As in Nineteen Eighty Four “war had been literally continuous”(31) so the attack, the war, on refugees, migrants and immigrants has the appearance of being never-ending.
With usual Orwellian doublespeak this has been explained by New Labour ministers, in two completely different and opposite ways. New Labour ministers are jugglers of their own contradiction. Firstly it is said that various legislative measures are somehow planned with forethought at the same time – even if enacted at different times. So Beverley Hughes MP, minister for immigration, said in the debates on the 2004 legislation, “This Bill sets out our third planned phase of reforms to the asylum and immigration system and builds deliberately on the action that we took in the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002” (32). Secondly , far from an acknowledgement of forward planning, each new piece of legislation is presented as a quickly invented weapon to deter those who have discovered breaches in the existing law. The image presented is that of the boy with his finger in the dyke or rather with an increasing number of fingers in the dyke – this time holding back the flood of the alien. So the Home Secretary ,David Blunkett MP, said in the second reading of 2004 Bill: “we are constantly fighting a battle to close the loopholes and thwart those who will use any ends to make a monkey of the system” (33). What all this shows, apart from ministerial contradiction and dishonesty, is that immigration controls are a composite inter-locking package and the package is continually growing.. Controls do not consist simply of the latest piece of legislation. The latest piece of legislation is just another brick in the wall. And whilst the inter-locking package is continually growing so the wall in continually getting higher
This has political consequences for those antagonistic to immigration controls. The consequences are that it is insufficient to attack only the last or the latest statute. The whole wall has to go. Otherwise opponents of controls end up in the bizarre situation of, if only implicitly, defending today the legislation they were attacking yesterday. This is because simply demanding the repeal of the most recent, and only the most recent laws only serves to legitimize those preceding them. Though this attitude is often presented as “realism” yet actually it is a very pessimistic form of politics – a politics which effectively denies anything can be done about the past. It is itself another illustration of a reluctance to demand the abolition of all immigration laws – another illustration of the belief that best that can be hoped for is for the law to become “fairer”. A clear example of this is given in the Manifesto of the No One Is Illegal Group (UK) – which attempts to put a principled opposition to all controls in a programmatic form and which is reproduced as an appendix to this book. This example concerns the agitation against that part of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (the then latest legislation prior to the 2004 Act) which refuses support to asylum seekers who make “late” asylum applications – thus rendering these refugees destitute. However in 1999 there was a campaign against the then latest legislation – the Immigration and Asylum Act. This was the legislation which created the NASS-enforced poor law of forced dispersal and below-subsistence support. But now the agitation is to include late asylum applicants within the poor law! The only tenable political position is to campaign to break all links between immigration status and entitlement to welfare. The reason why attempting to get rid of only the latest bricks represents a pessimistic form of politics (and is actually, contrary to assertions, quite “unrealistic”) is that in practice, as is known by the best demolition experts, the most effective way to get rid of any extension to a wall or a building is to dismantle the foundations – preferably by blowing them up.
The 2004 Act – more bricks, higher walls
Opposition to the 2004 Act (and the Bill on which it was based) frequently falls into the same trap of ignoring and therefore legitimizing all legislation that preceded it – although much of this legislation was itself the subject of organized opposition. For instance there has understandably been much vocal criticism to the provision whereby children may end up in care following certification by the Home Secretary that a failed asylum family has not taken reasonable steps to leave the UK. However this obnoxious provision only develops a similar one in the 2002 Act - where NASS poor law support can be withheld from failed asylum-seeking families who have failed “to cooperate with removal directions”. Ignoring this provision is to sanction it. All the 2004 Act does (and it is significant) is allow for the poor law to be cut off at an earlier date – that is as soon as it is confirmed the family is in a position to leave the UK. The point being made here is that politically it does not make sense to attack the provisions, any provisions. of the 2004 Act , and any immigration Act, without recognizing that what preceded them also has to go. Likewise it does not make sense to think that the law can be rolled back incrementally for nearly a century (34) The battle to be won is an ideological one – the battle for no controls. It is success here which would allow the whole edifice, from the foundations upwards, of immigration control to be demolished.
Finally it will be seen later (35) that what distinguishes Nineteen Eighty Four from the system of immigration controls is precisely that Oceania, the territory over which Big Brother rules, is controlled without any legal system. Rampant deceit, brute force, physical weaponry - these are the instruments of control of the Party and are the only instruments. There is no legal sub-structure. Only the boot on the face. To utilize Frederick Engel’s definition of the state (36) - Oceania consists simply of the “bodies of armed men” without any of the “material adjuncts” of law. However if the Party were ever to decide to revert to a parliamentary form of government – something also inconceivable – then in classic double-speak it surely wouldn’t bother defining the limits of any piece of legislation. It would simply add on an undefined, undefinable and limitless “etcetera” to the scope of any new law. This is precisely what New Labour did in titling its Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act. And it is this “etc” which points to a future of larger and larger, thicker and thicker, wider and wider, higher and higher walls. The foundations have to go – and the foundations are the acceptance of the principle of controls, any controls.
(1) Guardian 1.11.2003
(2) Nineteen Eighty Four p 31
(3) Hansard 17.12.2003 col 1592
(4) ref 326/2003
(5) Hansard.1.12.2003.Col.1674
(6) Chapter 29, Magna Carta. No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
(7) The reality of Magna Carta was that it contained many quite reactionary and racist provisions – such as stigmatising Jews as a group to whom debts need not be repaid (“c10. If one who has borrowed from the Jews any sum, great or small, die before that loan be repaid, the debt shall not bear interest while the heir is under age, of whomsoever he may hold; and if the debt fall into our hands, we will not take anything except the principal sum contained in the bond. c11. And if anyone die indebted to the Jews, his wife shall have her dower and pay nothing of that debt; and if any children of the deceased are left under age, necessaries shall be provided for them in keeping with the holding of the deceased; and out of the residue the debt shall be paid, reserving, however, service due to feudal lords; in like manner let it be done touching debts due to others than Jews “)
(8) Fairer, Faster and Firmer, paragraphs 9.9 and 9.10, 1998 Cm 4018
(9) See Peter Nyers, Abject Cosmopolitanism: the politics of protection in the anti-deportation movement, Third World Quarters, Volume 24, No.6 pp1069-1093, 2003
(10) Hansard, 17.12.2003 col 1592
(11) See Catherine Fairbairn, Asylum and Immigration: proposed changes to publicly funded legal advice and representation, Research Paper ref 03/89 Home Affairs Section, House of Commons Library research paper, 12 December 2003
(12) Written evidence submitted by the CAB to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report on the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Bill. First Report of Session 2003-04. HC 109
(12b) (Guardian 1.12.2003) ).
(13) Nineteen Eighty Four p37
(14) Prime Minister, Hansard 26.11.2003, col 30
(15) David Blunkett MP, Home Secretary, Hansard 17.12.2003, col 1603
(16) Beverley Hughes Mp, Hansard 17.12.2003. col 1670
(17) Beverley Hughes MP, Hansard 17.12.2003. col 1671
(18) David Blunkett MP, Hansard 17.12.2003, col 1603
(19) http://www.labour.org.uk/ac2003qandaarchive/?chatid=46
(20) David Blunkett, Hansard 17.12.2003. col 1591
(21) eg Humfrey Malins, speaking for the Tories, Hansard 17.12.2003 col 1604
(22) Hansard 17.12.2003, col 1592
(23) Beverley Hughes MP, Standing Committee B, Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Bill, Fourth Sitting, 13.1.2004, col 154
(24) Excerpt from a speech given to SS leaders 4 October 1943 at Posen, Poland (source: Noakes, J. and Pridham, G. Nazism: A Documentary Reader. Volume III “Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination” Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1984, pages 1199-1200)
(25) Nineteen Eighty Four, p 280
(26) The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report on the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Bill. First Report of Session 2003-04. HC 109
(27) Arabella Thorp (Home Affairs Section) and Ross Young (Social and General Statistics Section) Asylum and Immigration, the 2003 Bill, House of Commons Library research paper ref 03/88 11 December 2003
(28) 1905 Aliens Act, 1914 Aliens Restrictions Act, 1919 Aliens Restrictions (Amendment) Act.
(29) 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1971 Immigration Act, 1981 British Nationality Act, 1986 Carriers Liability Act, 1988 Immigration Act
(30) 1993 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act, 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, 2004 Asylum and Immigration (treatment of claimants etc) Act.
(31) Nineteen Eighty Four p.16
(32) Beverley Hughes MP, Hansard, 17.12.2003, col 1670
(33) David Blunkett MP, Hansard 17.12.2003, col 1592
(34) Not quite a century as the 1905 Act was repealed by the 1919 Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act.
(35) See chapter 9
(36) Engels, F. (1978), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Peking, Foreign Languages Press
steve cohen 20.1.04
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