Cabinet Office files, released by the National Archives, have revealed Sir Tony Blair and the Polish prime minister had a spat in 1999 over the issue of people from the Roma community in Poland claiming asylum in Britain.
On Sep. 21, 1999 Sir Tony wrote to Poland’s Prime Minister, Jerzy Buzek, telling him: “I am writing to share with you my concern at the increase in the number of asylum seekers from Poland ... I am sure you find it as frustrating as I do that we should have to face this problem.”
In his letter, Sir Tony noted his home secretary, Jack Straw, had written to Mr. Buzek on Aug. 26 to say the figures were coming down, but the prime minister added, “the latest statistics now show that they have doubled since June.”
Sir Tony said Britain was on target to accept 1,000 asylum seekers and their dependents from Poland alone by the end of 1999.
Sir Tony, who had come to power after a landslide election victory in May 1997, wrote: “As you can imagine their presence here is a considerable extra burden on many local services and a source of great concern to the communities involved—who have had to cope with a tenfold increase in the flow of asylum seekers from around the world over the past decade.”
The British prime minister went on to talk about Britain’s “proud record” in offering sanctuary to those fleeing persecution but he goes on to tell Mr. Buzek: “Experience shows that almost all claimants from your country are refused asylum on initial examination and the overwhelming majority of decisions are upheld on appeal.”
Sir Tony Admits to ‘Abuses of the System’
Sir Tony wrote: “At our end, we are taking measures to speed up the processing of claimants. We hope to receive Parliamentary approval for a new Immigration and Asylum Bill which will provide further disincentives for those seeking to abuse the asylum system.”After a number of platitudes, Sir Tony ended the letter by stating boldly: “We need to stop abuses of the system. And we need to make early progress.”
Mr. Buzek replied indignantly, saying the “phenomenon” of Polish Roma applying for asylum in Britain was “absolutely incomprehensible” to the Warsaw authorities.
He lays out a number of steps the Polish government had taken to tackle poverty among the Roma community and then said: “The basis for this greatly disturbing phenomenon of asylum-seeking in Great Britain by the Polish Roma are almost exclusively economic and their applications are treated as such by the British immigration authorities.”
“I would like to stress here that the reasons of migrations of [sic] the Roma from different countries of central and eastern Europe vary and they should be investigated and considered with reference to each country individually,” added Mr. Buzek.
Poland Blames ‘Liberal’ Procedure in UK
“They came to a common conclusion that the problem has its sources in the United Kingdom—in general because of a very liberal procedure of dealing with asylum-seekers and, consequently, of possibilities of abusing procedure,” he added.Mr. Buzek then explains that “prolonged asylum procedures” in the UK, combined with the provision of welfare benefits for applicants while they are awaiting an outcome, had “encouraged” many to seek asylum even when their chances of success are “doomed to failure.”
Mr. Buzek pointed out Poland had no right to, “impose on her citizens any limits in their right to free travel ... especially on the basis of some ethnic criteria.”
At the time Poland was not a member of the European Union—it joined in 2004, and Sir Tony was later heavily criticised for failing to set transitional quotas for immigrants from new EU member countries like Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
