Years of ‘soft-minded liberalism’ were yesterday blamed for the chaos at Calais by a former Labour immigration minister.
Phil Woolas made the blistering intervention as he demanded a British-run detention camp on French soil.
The former Home Office minister said the illegal immigrants ‘wouldn’t come’ if they knew they would be locked up.
He blamed an absence of ID cards in Britain and his own party’s Human Rights Act – which he said had made it harder to remove foreigners who had been effectively given equal rights to those of British citizens.
Mr Woolas, who was an immigration minister between 2008 and 2010, said: ‘The mess in Calais is down to years of soft-minded liberalism and utter naivety.’
He added: ‘Many migrants are fleeing war, but once in France they’re safe.
‘Others paid money to people traffickers in the hope of a good life. That’s not political asylum.
‘These people want to live in a rich country. This is economic migration.
‘As for Calais it’s French territory but our border control. A detention centre to replace the migrant encampments would send a signal.
‘If migrants knew they’d be locked up and deported when they got to Calais they wouldn’t go,’ he wrote in an article on the Daily Mirror website.
Actually, it wasn’t soft-minded liberalism, but hard-headed political calculation that caused Labour to open up immigration:
The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s “social objectives”.
The paper said migration would “enhance economic growth” and made clear that trying to halt or reverse it could be “economically damaging”. But it also stated that immigration had general “benefits” and that a new policy framework was needed to “maximise” the contribution of migration to the Government’s wider social aims.
The Government has always denied that social engineering played a part in its migration policy.
However, the paper, which was written in 2000 at a time when immigration began to increase dramatically, said controls were contrary to its policy objectives and could lead to “social exclusion”.
Last night, the Conservatives demanded an independent inquiry into the issue. It was alleged that the document showed that Labour had overseen a deliberate open-door policy on immigration to boost multi-culturalism.
Voting trends indicate that migrants and their descendants are much more likely to vote Labour.
That’s exactly what’s going on here now, of course. Import voters until you can’t lose.