Tony Blair's government wanted to house asylum seekers on Isle of Mull
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Tony Blair’s government discussed plans to house asylum seekers at a camp on the Isle of Mull as part of a “nuclear option” to drive down numbers entering the UK.
Government documents released by the National Archives show the Labour government even thought about sending people to the Falkland Islands, in a forerunner of the current debate around the Conservatives’ plans to remove small boat migrants to Rwanda.
The former Labour prime minister – now Sir Tony – is reportedly meeting the current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer on a regular basis, and earlier this month it emerged that Sir Keir is chewing over detailed plans for an offshoring scheme that would be Labour’s alternative to Rwanda.
Mr Blair’s closest aides were enthusiastic about the idea of building a holding camp in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides for asylum seekers after admiring the success of a similar idea in Australia, the archives reveal.
Asylum claims had reached a new monthly high of 8,800 in October 2002 and Mr Blair scribbled “we must search out even more radical measures” in the margins of one official document on the issue.
In another memo from January 2003 headed Asylum: The Nuclear Option, Jonathan Powell, the then Downing Street chief of staff, informed the then prime minister that the office of the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, had explored the possibility of using the Isle of Mull.
He wrote: “One of the great successes of the Australians has been to hold asylum seekers in one place before they can be returned. This has driven the number of new applications down enormously and many in the camps are asking to return to their country of origin.
“The AG’s office suggested we set up a camp in the Isle of Mull and detain people there till they could work.”
Earlier this year Lee Anderson, the Tory deputy chairman, was ridiculed by some on the left after he suggested sending asylum seekers to the Orkney Islands if the Rwanda plan fell through.
It appears the 2003 proposal did not go much beyond a feasibility study, with No 10 officials fearing the response of the Scottish island’s population, which stood at around 2,700 at the time.
Mr Powell also questioned whether the UK needed an asylum system at all, arguing that people who arrived from France had already passed through safe countries and could not therefore be classed as genuine asylum seekers.
He wrote: “As an island, people who come here by sea have by definition already passed through a safe country. And very few of those who apply at airports are genuine refugees.
“So in fact what we should be looking at is a very simple system that immediately returns people who arrive here illegally. Uttering the word ‘asylum’ should not allow people to opt out of this system and give them the right to remain here for months or years while their cases are heard.”
Mr Powell said that it should form part of “a big bang solution that would send a shock through the system”.
At one point in the discussions there was a suggestion that asylum seekers could be moved to the Falklands – another idea the Left has pilloried in recent months after it emerged the Home Office had carried out a feasibility study earlier this year on sending people there.
A confidential No 10 memo from 2003 laid out the options for “taking asylum seekers to other jurisdictions, e.g. Falkland Islands for consideration, to restrict free movement” and “tighten up the border”, as well as “speed up removal”.
Among the other solutions discussed was that of returning Iraqi asylum seekers to a camp in Turkey and Somalis to one in Kenya.
No 10 officials wrote in a memo to the prime minister on Jan 31 2003 that “it seems mad” that the UK has “less straightforward safe third country return arrangements for asylum applicants with the EU than with non-EU countries”.
In a handwritten note in the margin of the memo Mr Blair had written: “It is mad. The system is mad.”
Mr Powell said they should also legislate ”to return any illegal immigrant regardless of the risk that they might suffer human or degrading treatment”.
He added: “We would almost certainly lose this case when it got to Strasbourg. But we would have two to three years in the meantime when we could send a strong message into the system about our new tough stance.”
Home Office lawyers warned that the measures would fall foul of the Geneva Convention on refugees.
An exasperated prime minister scrawled “just return them”, adding: “This is precisely the point. We must not allow the ECHR to stop us dealing with it.”
