Red Pepper, July 2006

by Solomon Hughes

Liam Byrne came into parliament on a ‘get tough’ campaign against asylum seekers. Now he’s the new immigration minister.

Sometimes you can see someone on the up and up in public life, and really wish they were on the down and down. Or hope they would, crab-like, scuttle off sideways into obscurity. But you know that they just tick too many of the right boxes with the wrong people to be stopped. What do you call these kind of people? A reader of my Morning Star column suggested ‘rising starseholes’.

Liam Byrne, the new minister for immigration is definitely a rising ‘starsehole’. The Labour government is getting ready for some serious right-wing policies on immigration, and Byrne, who only became an MP two years ago, in a 2004 by-election, was given the ministerial job to carry them out

Byrne fought his Birmingham seat by attacking the Lib Dems from the right. His election leaflets promised voters he would be ‘someone who is tough and on your side’. In particular his leaflets accused the Lib Dems of being soft on asylum. Byrne told voters: ‘I know that people here are worried about fraudulent asylum claims and illegal immigration. Yet the Lib Dems ignore what people say. They ignore what local people really want. The Lib Dems want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money – and mine – to go to failed asylum seekers.’ You can tell from his Good Samaritan attitudes that he is a proud member of the Christian Socialist Movement.

Byrne issued a Fabian pamphlet after the election warning that Labour would lose the next election if it shifted left. He said the party needed to win what he called ‘right-wing’ voters on ‘crime, anti-social behaviour and asylum’.

True Blairites are few and far between. Blair owes his position to Labour MPs who were not fully signed up to the project, but were prepared to keep quiet as long as Tony won elections. So a real Blair believer like Byrne has a good chance of early promotion. That chance became a certainty when he received the mark of Murdoch.

Tim Allen, a Labour spin doctor who went on to work for Murdoch’s Sky television, wrote a memo containing plans for Sky to keep up the ‘interplay’ between the Murdoch machine and the Labour government. The plan included a set of ‘rising star’ dinners with the men Allen thinks are tomorrow’s people; Liam Byrne was singled out as a thrusting young MP. Byrne got the immigration job soon after Allen’s memo was written. A campaign by the Sun against his predecessor, Tony McNulty, helped him to win it.

For all his tough talk, Byrne is not really a street politician. He got into Labour politics by the traditional route of, er, a job as a management consultant with Accenture. In 1996 Byrne moved into Tony Blair’s office to help the future PM make good relations with (and presumably raise funds from) big business. Byrne first went to work for Blair ‘on secondment’, so was simultaneously an employee of Accenture and the Labour Party. In 1997 he became a banker, working for NM Rothschild in the City while also helping out at the Fabian Society. He still holds the interest-free loan Rothschilds gave him to fund his Harvard MBA.

Byrne keeps up the corporate contacts. At the last Labour conference he was a prominent business-backed speaker, appearing on platforms sponsored by BUPA and catering and cleaning firm Compass.

Byrne’s fans hope his business background will help him sort out the Home Office. These hopes are misplaced. Byrne was briefly a health minister. While at the Department of Health, he claimed the national NHS IT strategy was ‘within budget, ahead of schedule in some areas, and, in the context of a 10-year programme, broadly on track in others’. In fact it was wildly over budget and behind schedule.

The Home Office has already been plagued by a combination of draconian announcements and failed business support. On the one hand, a series of Blair-inspired ‘eye catching initiatives’ have led to more oppressive measures against asylum seekers. On the other, a series of corporate contracts for IT systems and asylum centres have spectacularly failed. The new minister combines a pro-business approach and enthusiasm for playing the right-wing tough guy, so his appointment promises a lot more of the same old rubbish.

Solomon Hughes’ column appears in the Morning Star every Friday
Sol.Hughes[AT]btinternet.com