David Waddington Memoirs (13 page)

When I think of 1982 I think of the Falklands, not of my own work in the Department. On the day after the Argentine invasion I, along with a number of other junior ministers, went to the PM’s room in the House of Commons to hear the Prime Minister talk about what had happened and what was to be done; and then on the Saturday the House met for an emergency debate. It was a disaster, with a dreadful speech from John Nott. I travelled back to London on Monday convinced somebody’s head was going to have to roll and, in the event, Peter Carrington, one of the most capable members of the Cabinet and one of the most honourable of men, resigned; as did Humphrey Atkins, the foreign affairs spokesman in the Commons and Richard Luce. John Nott went when the war was over.

The behaviour of the BBC during the Falklands War was
appalling
. In the country there was a great upsurge of patriotism and pride in the way our forces had responded when called upon to repel aggression, but the BBC and its employees seemed to find
such emotions quite incomprehensible. In reply to criticisms that the BBC never referred to ‘our’ forces during the war and seemed to show no particular emotional commitment to them, Mr Richard (later Sir Richard) Francis, managing director, BBC Radio, said the BBC carefully distinguished between ‘Argentine’ and ‘British’ forces, but ‘we [the BBC] have no task force in the South Atlantic; and the BBC has no role to boost the morale of British troops or rally the British people around the flag. The widow of Portsmouth is no different from the widow of Buenos Aires.’

The BBC may have thought it smart and trendy to be
uninvolved
in the war; but they were entirely out of step with the British people, as were also all too many churchmen. There was no doubt about the pride of the servicemen who attended the service in St Paul’s on Monday 26 July 1982 – pride in a job well done. They had come, I am sure, to thank God for giving us victory, but those responsible for arranging the service could not bear to talk in those terms and had devised a wishy-washy theme of
thanks-giving
for the cessation of hostilities. When the Church does not reflect the pride and joy of ordinary men and women at a job well done in a righteous cause it cannot be surprised if congregations walk out of the doors.

I got back to London on the first Monday of the New Year and there was a message from Downing Street asking me to ring the Prime Minister. I rang to find that I was to be Minister of State at the Home Office with responsibility for immigration matters, in place of Tim Raison.

On 7 January 1983
The Guardian
reported:

I
t was kind of
The Guardian
to write in those terms, but I was arriving at the Home Office faced with a problem for which there was no solution. In December there had been a Tory backbench rebellion when new immigration rules, making it easier for foreign wives to gain admission to the country, had been thrown out by the House of Commons. The obvious course was to table new rules tightening up the admission criteria, but this had been made more or less impossible by a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights extending the right of a man to bring into the country a foreign wife. So there were difficulties ahead, but I was not fully aware of them when the next morning I arrived at the Home Office in good cheer and ready for action. The correct postal address of the building was 1 Petty France but Willie Whitelaw, the Secretary of State, had soon spotted that to call it that would make
us all a laughing stock so it was decided to pretend that it was round the corner and to call it 50 Queen Anne’s Gate. And there at the door of 50 Queen Anne’s Gate I was greeted by Sir Brian Cubbon, the Permanent Secretary, and taken up to see the Secretary of State. Willie, sprawled on a sofa and in an expansive mood, told me what my job was and told me to get on with it.

The next day, at the routine morning meeting, I met my fellow ministers – Paddy Mayhew, the other Minister of State, Rodney Elton, under-secretary in the Lords, and David Mellor, a new under-secretary in the Commons. My place at the table was directly opposite Willie but the view was somewhat obstructed by two ornamental brass prison gates and a clutch of truncheons.

My private secretary and assistant private secretary were both hard workers dealing with the enormous number of immigration cases finding their way to my office. So many indeed were there that the files had to be wheeled in on hospital-style trollies, hundreds at a time. Cases found their way to the minister’s office as a result of what were known as MPs’ representations. Broadly speaking, the minister was not troubled with a case unless an MP had come on the scene at the request of one of his constituents. If an MP had become interested, the case was not dealt with by an official but looked into by the minister personally who then had to write to the MP telling him of his ruling.

A typical case arose in this way. A Pakistani living in Bradford would sponsor a visit to England by some friend or relative. When the friend or relative arrived at Heathrow the Immigration Service had to decide whether he or she was a genuine visitor intending to return home after a short stay in Britain or a would-be immigrant determined to get into Britain and stay in Britain. If the immigration officer, having questioned the person about his or her background and intentions, determined he or she was not a genuine visitor he would refuse entry. The relative would then go to his or her MP
and the MP would ring up Heathrow or the Home Office and demand that the person should not be removed back to Pakistan until the MP had made representations on the person’s behalf. The representations were considered by officials who drafted a letter of response for signature by the minister. The minister considered the case and either signed the letter which had been offered up to him or rejected official advice and drafted a different response. All this took many weeks if not months. Sometimes the MP would not take ‘no’ for an answer and either demanded a meeting so that he could argue the case in person or bombarded the minister with letters raising new points and daring the minister to remove the passenger before he had answered all these points in minute detail.

This meant that a person who was clearly not entitled to enter the country was often able to stay for months, and many tried to use the time they had won to make themselves irremovable. Marriage was one obvious method. Another was to get a job and then get a body like the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) to argue that in a matter of months he had made himself entirely indispensable either to the British economy or the race relations industry or both.

There were then all the cases in which people, having been given permission to enter as visitors or having been refused entry as visitors but granted temporary admission, disappeared into the undergrowth. Years later a man would be picked up by the police and then you could be sure it would be argued on his behalf that although he had cheated and lied to get into the country, and had then, by disappearing, cost the taxpayer a mountain of money, he should be allowed to make his home here.

There was then the problem of husbands and wives. Should men settled here be able to import wives? Should wives settled here be able to import husbands? In principle, yes. I would consider it an appalling interference with my daughter’s rights if she was
prevented from coming back to England to live here with her Australian husband. But she was born here. She is British. Should someone who is not British have the same rights? And surely, whatever the answer to that question, a person settled here should not be able to use marriage as a mere device to get someone into the country.

We were constantly told that we had to respect the institution of the arranged marriage. If a man wanted to bring a woman into the country for marriage he should be allowed to do so, even if he had never clapped eyes on her, even if he had been paid a
substantial
sum of money to marry her and thus facilitate her entry. But when it came to an application by an Indian or Pakistani girl in England to bring in an Indian or Pakistani boy and we argued that the custom of the arranged marriage required the woman to go and live in the man’s home not the man to travel half way across the world to come and live with the woman, a completely different set of arguments were paraded. How could the woman, having lived in England for some years, be expected to face the rigours of the Indian climate?

The self-proclaimed experts on these matters, and there were many, insisted that we were grappling with a non-problem. The number of people in Britain whose origins lay in the Indian
subcontinent
was already very large. In a few years’ time boys and girls who had grown up in Britain would not be looking overseas for partners. They would be marrying those who had been brought up in the same way as themselves. Illiterate peasants from the Punjab would not suit them. All this completely ignored the appallingly low living standards which most people in the Indian subcontinent endured. For them, winning the right to live in Britain was like winning the football pools, and those who had been lucky enough to get to Britain were expected to give their relations back in the subcontinent the chance to enjoy some of the same riches. The
custom of the arranged marriage was a ready tool ready to help them carry out this family obligation.

There were also rather more sinister reasons why the father of an Indian or Pakistani girl in Britain might prefer her to marry someone from the subcontinent. The boy would be likely to make a far more docile son-in-law than a boy brought up in Britain, and certainly would not expect the same sort of wage. Indeed, if he caused any trouble, if he became too demanding, he could be told that if he did not watch out the Home Office could be enlisted to speed his passage home.

And so, as the years went by, we did not see fewer people
entering
the country as husbands and wives, as fiancés and fiancées. We saw more and more; and by the time I left the Home Office there was not the slightest evidence of the flow abating.

But back to the immediate problem with which, at the
beginning
of 1983, Willie and I were faced. The immigration rules which had been thrown out by the House had tried to comply with the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights without allowing completely free entry for spouses and fiancés, but at the general election the Conservative Party had promised to toughen up immigration control not weaken it and, in saying that a man could import a wife or fiancée provided his primary purpose in marrying or contracting to marry the girl was not to obtain entry into the country for her, the rules marked a weakening of the control. And, said the Tory backbenchers, if we cannot do what Parliament wants to do because of a bunch of unworldly lawyers in the European Court of Human Rights, we are in a real mess and the government had better try and get us out of it. Much the same arguments against equally unworldly decisions of the Court are advanced today.

Willie and I went to see the executive of the 1922 Committee where there was much hand-wringing but no suggestions as to how
to sort out the mess; and eventually with heavy hearts we decided we had no option but to table another set of rules broadly
similar
to those that had been rejected. All we could do as a sop was make a change in the burden of proof and require an applicant to prove that the primary purpose of the marriage was not to obtain entry rather than make the immigration officer show that it was. By offering this very small concession we managed to persuade a reluctant House to let the new rules through.

There was one type of case which a minister always dealt with, even if no MP had shown an interest in the matter. Every case of a person claiming the right to stay in Britain because of fear of persecution in the country from which he had come deserved, and got, the most careful consideration.

Back in 1983 there was a Refugee Council which took an
interest
in the welfare of those who sought asylum, but there was no formal procedure to ensure that individual cases were brought to the attention of the council. Often, therefore, the only investigation into a claim for asylum was carried out by a refugee section at the headquarters of the Immigration Service in Lunar House, Croydon.

Before my arrival in the Home Office a man called Papasoiu had travelled to Britain from the Continent and had walked into a police station in the East End, presumably to ask for help. He could not speak a word of English and at first the police, who called in numerous interpreters to assist, did not even know the man’s nationality. Eventually, however, someone recognised him as a Romanian and when questioned by a Romanian interpreter Mr Papasoiu said that he had been imprisoned in Romania for trying to leave the country without permission and on his release had made a second and successful attempt at escape. Naturally he was frightened of going back and wanted to stay in Britain as a refugee. He did not explain why he had chosen Britain as his place of refuge or how he had found his way to Britain.

At subsequent interviews the story was enlarged and enlarged, and eventually Mr Papasoiu was saying that he had been
imprisoned
not once but three times and each time had been imprisoned for three years, making nine years in all. Enquiries were made through our post in Bucharest and the Home Office was told that it was most improbable that Mr Papasoiu had been treated as he suggested. On the basis of this information, and because Mr Papasoiu, with his changes of story, could hardly be thought a
reliable
witness, the application for asylum was turned down.

This was the state of play when I came on the scene. The application for asylum had been rejected but no arrangements had been made for Papasoiu’s removal; and in due course I was asked by officials whether appropriate arrangements should be put in hand. No one suggested to me that the refusal of asylum did not
necessarily
mean that he should be removed. Still less did anyone suggest that the case should go forward to the Secretary of State for him to decide whether and, if so, when removal should take place. As far as I could see the buck stopped with me. And I accepted the advice given me by officials that there was no chance of any other country accepting Mr Papasoiu and the only place to which he could be returned was Romania, the place from which he had said that he had come.

I do not know how it came to the notice of Bernard Braine (then MP for Essex SE) that Papasoiu was about to be removed, but on the very day on which removal had been planned Bernard rang me up and asked me to reverse the decision. I said that in the absence of new evidence I did not think I could. He was not pleased and delivered a broadside on the BBC. The case was then taken up by others and soon there developed a press campaign of vilification and abuse the likes of which I had never before
experienced
, and have never experienced since. In the
Sunday Express
Michael Toner virtually accused me of being a murderer. Every
word spoken by Papasoiu was accepted as gospel truth, every
rebuttal
by the Home Office was summarily dismissed. Toner’s choice phrases included:

Gradually the truth emerged, much no doubt to Mr Toner’s displeasure. The Romanians would not allow Papasoiu to enter the country and in due course he arrived in Austria where, it turned out, he was wanted for crimes committed on a previous visit.