BRITAIN: Mr Tony Blair was accused of "blind panic" yesterday as he declared Britain to be at a "crunch point" on immigration and signalled a "top to bottom" review of policy, writes Frank Millar in London
The charge came from Conservative leader Mr Michael Howard as Mr Blair confirmed that "economically inactive" migrants from the 10 new EU countries, and elsewhere around the world, would be denied access to public housing. Britain would operate neither a "fortress" nor "open-door" policy.
"Where necessary we will tighten the immigration system," he told a CBI conference in London: "Where there are abuses, we will deal with them, so that public support for the controlled migration that benefits Britain is maintained." Downing Street acknowledged there was nothing new in a speech in which Mr Blair sought to regain control of the immigration debate less than a month after his Immigration Minister, Ms Beverley Hughes, was forced to resign.
And Mr Blair won cautious Liberal Democrat approval as he praised the "huge contribution" made to the British economy by migrants, said public services would be "close to collapse" without them, and tackled the "myths" which characterised so much of the debate about immigration and the numbers of foreign nationals living and working in Britain as a proportion of its total population, compared with countries like France, Germany and the United States.
However, with polls showing concerns about immigration at their highest since the 1970s, Mr Blair said these could not be dismissed as "figments of racist imagination". The prime minister told his audience: "There are real, not imagined, abuses of the system, that lead to a genuine sense of unfairness. There were real problems with asylum . . . Then there are high-profile examples of the absurd - not many in number but very damaging in terms of impact - like radical clerics coming here to preach religious hate, people staying here to peddle support for terrorism. The combination of all these things - with the reporting of them not exactly calculated to douse the flames of concern - lead to a crunch point."
The vast bulk of the British people were not racist, said Mr Blair: "They can accept migration that is controlled and selective." But Mr Blair said it was because stopping migration altogether would be "disastrous" for the country that the government was determined the system should not be abused. "We are putting in place tighter rules to restrict migrants' access to benefits and social housing. Migrants will not be able to access social housing unless they are here legally and working. No one will be able to come to the UK from anywhere in the enlarged EU simply to claim benefits or housing. There will be no support for the economically inactive . . . They must be self-sufficient."
Liberal Democrat spokesman Mr Mark Oaten welcomed Mr Blair's "positive" defence of managed migration, adding: "The problem with this government is that they may say the right thing on Tuesday, but they then pander to the right on Wednesday."