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Managed Migration

I will exempt the hon. Lady, because I read her leaflets from start to finish, and they never mentioned immigration. She rightly concentrated on four of the five pledges in her inner London seat. It is not appropriate, in a general election or at other times, to publish the ignorant phrase,"““Which part of ‘Send them back’ don’t you understand, Mr. Blair?””," and expect it to be treated as a serious contribution to public policy debates on asylum or immigration. It is not clever to talk, as one leaflet did, about unlimited immigration and the"““strain put on local schools by bogus asylum seekers””." It is not clever to show a little map of the world with a big arrow pointing at the immigration and nationality directorate in Croydon, along with the phrase, ““Unlimited immigration—this way.”” Those are not substantive contributions to the debate. Our work since the election shows that we have not run away from that debate. Public policy generally was not well served by the tone or tenor of an election campaign that conflated race, community relations and asylum and immigration in the nastiest way possible. It is not appropriate for a political candidate to say that five illegal immigrants were arrested in his local town centre and freed in the area. He went on to say that no one knew whether those people were criminals, were carrying diseases and so on. Those are serious allegations to level at fellow human beings. There was routine misinformation, in which central Government funding was conflated with other matters. Newspaper adverts up and down the country dressed up the issue, implying that there would be an impact on local council tax payers. However, they simply lied about the level of financial commitment and the cost of asylum to council tax payers. There was absolute misinformation and lies.