Where will all the blacks go now?
Patrick Cosgrave
It makes one wonder, as Mr Enoch Powell once said in a different dimension of the same context. It certainly made me wonder last Thursday when I heard the Home Secretary announce his new immigration rules to the House of Commons. I wondered, as I heard Mr Carr tell us that, having admitted the Ugandan Asians, "to have a similar burden thrust on us again would impose unacceptable strains and stresses in our society . . . ," whether the Home Secretary remembered his own fine words on the rights of coloured British citizens at Blackpool last October; why it Was felt necessary to make that particular announcement, bearing as it does on the hopes and future of thousands of British Asians in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. I wondered, above all, whether the Government has simply come to like U-turns in Policy, and indulges in them for fun.
Let us be perfectly clear what Mr Carr was announcing — in addition to saying that he was going to make entry to this country easier for citizens of the White Commonwealth: he was saying that, if President Kenyatta, or President Nyerere, or President Kaunda, acted like General Amin and expelled their various British Passport holders en masse, this country would not receive them. No storm was created by this announcement; there were no newspaper headlines. And Mrs Shirley Williams, Mr Carr's Shadow, and supposed leading light of compassion in the Labour Party, scarcely referred to it when she questioned Mr Carr:
Now, it is true that the Labour Party Were pretty weasely in their support for the Government's initial decision to admit the Ugandan Asians; but they did eventually agree that it ought to be done. It is true that another refugee influx would be very unpopular. It is true that there is an argument — made most often and most forcefully by Mr Powell — that these People have no real legal right to come here. But this is all beside the point when We consider Mr Carr's extraordinary behaviour: for the Government said in the Past that they had a right, an absolute and Perfect right, to come to Britain in the event of an emergency. And, that right has been taken away from them, not by Act of Parliament, but by ministerial edict; and With the underhand collusion of the Opposition; and without any serious kind of public outcry. Even Mr Powell, who is a constitutionalist before anything else, ihad a Slightly shocked note in his voice when he rose to ask the Home Secretary "to recognise the undesirability and danger of a rule-making power under an Act being used either to alter a principle that has been decided by the House or to introduce a major new distinction of policy that was not considered in the course of that legislation."
Yet there has been no outcry, no serious debate, even. No wonder one of the Home Office Ministers replied in relief to some questions I was asking him about the whole business, " Well, I think we were
very lucky to get away with it. I thought there'd be a dreadful row." They were
lucky to get away with it. They were lucky to get away, not merely with welshing on an obligation deliberately, with care and consideration, undertaken; but with another attempt at making and changing law without due legislative process.
Let us consider another aspect of this sorry muddle. I have never believed that
there was an obligation in international law to receive in this country British citizens expelled from another — though I did, and do, believe that there is an obligation in British law. However, through bad advice from the Foreign Office, the Government based part of their case on our supposed legal international obligation. Now the European Commission of Human Rights has recently decided that there is a prima facie case for saying that Britain has violated the Human Rights Convention by refusing to admit thirty-one Asians who have been carted around the world in various aircraft after being denied permission to land here. Unless British diplomacy is extremely adroit — and it is a long time since it has been that — the matter will shortly go before the European Court. If the Court finds against Britain it will, theoretically, be binding on the British Government to admit all British passport holders when and if they want to come here. Of course the Government can — and if Mr Carr's words are anything to go by, presumably will — simply refuse to accept any such judgement. What then of those earlier professions that we did accept an obligation under international law?
Being a kindly sort of chap, however, I
am prepared to admit that our immigration laws, and even more our citizenship laws, have always been in such a mess that any poor minister can be forgiven for getting himself into an odious and tangled muddle in trying to work his way through them. But what of the practical handling of events leading up to Mr Carr's statement? For one thing the Government has for a long time had an assurance from the Indian government that, in the event of another crisis, India would take the great majority of the expellees. That agreement will presumably now go by the board, even though Mr Carr's new rules give a right of entry to some 50,000 Anglo-Indians who did not otherwise have it. I suppose, though, that the Government may have made a new deal with Delhi, according to which India will take any further Asians expelled from East Africa, and send us an equal number of Anglo-Indians in return. The other curious feature of events leading up to Mr Carr's announcement was the choice of Lord Carrington to announce the British Government's new plan in Nairobi. Let us leave aside the question of whether or not Mr Carr's precipitate anncuncement of government thinking might make the situation worse in East Africa: the question remains — why Lord Carrington? True, he is the Prime Minister's troubleshooter: but there is, as yet, no trouble to shoot of the size he normally deals with. Strictly, the matter was one for the Foreign Office: the Foreign Secretary is not known to be averse to travel; and even if he were he has an ample number of ministers — more than ample, some might say — who could fit in a trip to Nairobi between urgent engagements in Honduras and Brussels. The only locus standi I can conceive of Lord Carrington having in the matter is that he is chairman of the Conservative Party; and the Conservative Party has a very large number of members who abhor the idea of letting in any more blacks; and most of those members are already pretty fed up with the Government. But if I am right in suggesting a connection between Lord Carrington's role as chairman of the party and his role as bearer of bad tidings to President Kenyatta, then the Government's offence is even more heinous, for a law will have been changed, an announced obligation denounced, not because of the ordinary pressure of business on a government, but for strictly party reasons.
Even when Mr Callaghan introduced the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, he merely restricted the rights of British citizens: he did not take those rights away. And he added, when introducing his Bill, with the consent of practically the whole House, that, in an emergency, Britain would take her citizens. Mr Carr did not simply announce restrictions: the only conceivable interpretation of his words was that no further influx would be acceptable. Even that would be a conceivable action, if it were accompanied by legislation. It was not. It was accomplished by edict. And, whatever the rights and wrongs of the specific issue, that means that another part of our freedom as a parliamentary democracy, in which the law can be changed only by Parliament, has been eroded.
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