William Wallis, Anna Gross and Jim Pickard in London
Friday December 29, 2023
Plans to open a detention centre on Mull were judged to be unworkable because of the expected local opposition © JasperImage/Alamy
The Labour government in 2003 discussed setting up a detention centre for asylum seekers on the Isle of Mull in Scotland or forcibly removing them to a “safe third country” to curb clandestine migration.
The Mull proposal, first mooted by the attorney-general’s office, was quickly quashed, according to cabinet papers released by the National Archives on Friday. But it formed part of wider discussions within the government of then prime minister Tony Blair about the use of “nuclear options” to reduce the record numbers of people seeking asylum in the UK at the time.
Other proposals from Blair’s home affairs adviser Emily Miles included sending asylum seekers to overseas territories, such as the Falkland Islands, or “forced removal to a safe third country”, the latter foreshadowing the current Conservative government’s Rwanda policy.
Among “blue skies” ideas listed in an earlier 2002 memo from Miles were the creation of internationally run safe havens in war-torn regions, “off territory processing of asylum claims”, and “renegotiating” the 1951 UN convention on refugees.
Official papers from the time, when there had been a huge spike in the number of people claiming asylum after they had arrived by irregular means, show the Labour government’s appetite to test the boundaries of international human rights law.
In a note to Blair, his chief of staff Jonathan Powell argued that Australia had successfully reduced the number of asylum seekers reaching its coast because it was detaining people offshore — in Papua New Guinea and Nauru — before their removal elsewhere.
“The AG’s office suggested we set up a camp in the Isle of Mull and detain people there until they could be returned,” Powell wrote, adding that he expected local opposition would make the idea unworkable.
But he said the government had commissioned research into “tagging and detention” as a means of deterring people from seeking asylum in the UK and ensuring they could be returned to where they came from should their applications fail.
Debates within the current Tory government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has made stopping small boat crossings via the Channel one of his five priorities, echo the discussions taking place within the Blair administration at the time.
However, Sunak has got further with his plan to send asylum seekers to a third country than the Blair administration did. The prime minister is currently seeking to introduce legislation that would enable the UK to send asylum seekers to Kigali in spite of the UK Supreme Court’s ruling in November that the policy is unlawful.
Blair’s frustration with the number of asylum claimants is clear from notes he penned on updates he received after total claims hit a monthly high of 8,800 in October 2002. “We must search out ever more radical measures,” he wrote in one, and “not good enough” in another when the numbers had fallen.
Powell’s note on “nuclear options” also discusses the pros and cons of legislating to enable Britain to remove people from countries such as Iraq, Somalia and China “despite the risk that they might subsequently be persecuted”.
He wrote that although such a move might be blocked by the European Court of Human Rights, it would take two or three years for proceedings to conclude, during which time “we could send a strong message into the system about our new tough stance”.
He added: “And we would make it clear that if we lost in Strasbourg we would denounce the ECHR.”