Treat them like people

Faced with an Independent Asylum Commission inquiry's exhaustively accumulated evidence, which shows that her agency is still not fit for purpose, she simply switches into denial mode.

To state baldly that she refutes the allegations against the agency and to relapse into knee-jerk recitation of Britain's "proud tradition" of offering asylum to those who need it is a prime example of self-delusion.

She should note that, with a quarter of all appeals against Home Office decisions being successful in 2006, there is clear evidence that the decision-making framework is flawed.

And the criticism of Lord Ramsbotham, a former chief inspector of prisons and asylum commission member, noting the practice of enforcing destitution on applicants and then using it as a pressure to cause them to "volunteer" for repatriation, should cause anyone with an ounce of decency to cringe with embarrassment.

It is just one step away from torturing people to get them to jump on a plane returning them to civil war, lawlessness and suffering.

Whatever proud tradition of asylum this country once had is no longer shared by our government or by the opposition.

Both parties allow their policies on asylum and immigration to be dictated by racist campaigns in the right-wing tabloid media, where asylum-seeker is yoked automatically to bogus and refugee becomes synonymous with scrounger.

Successive new Labour home secretaries have dug deep into the lexicon of racist prejudice in order to appear "tough" to the Tory tabloids.

In doing so, they have done the spadework for the racist BNP, which seeks support on the basis of persuading white people that problems of housing, employment, crime, education, health and social services are directly attributable to incomers rather than to capitalism and to new Labour's stewardship of it.

Despite rhetoric against criminal gangs and people smuggling, the government targets refugees themselves to demonstrate its toughness.

That's why former lord chief justice Lord Woolf feels moved to complain about Britain's overcrowded prisons being used to incarcerate asylum-seekers.

Prisons are necessary to lock up criminals who are a danger to the public, especially perpetrators of violent crimes.

They should not be used to bang up people whose only crime is to come to this country because life in their homeland is unbearable because of violence or poverty.

Given the experience and expertise of the members of the asylum commission inquiry, it should be impossible for the government to sweep it under the carpet. But that will indeed be its natural inclination in the face of unwelcome, no matter how justified, criticism.

The very first thing that the government should do is to stop treating asylum-seekers as though they were criminals, by releasing them from prison and allowing hard-pressed prison officers to concentrate on looking after those convicted of a crime.

It ought also to allow asylum-seekers to work for a living instead of being made to a live on a pittance. Above all, it should begin to treat people decently rather than as some kind of hostile invading army.