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JOHN HUMPHRYS: And we have the Home
Secretary Jack Straw with us... to talk about Labour's heartlands and also
the fight against crime.
First, though, the big problem
he faces this week because last week a group of hijackers forced a plane
from Afghanistan to land in Britain. Now, as we've been hearing this morning,
nearly all the people who were on that plane are asking for political asylum
here. Mr Straw made a statement in the House of Commons on Thursday in
which he said he wanted to see them all "removed from this country." He
also said he personally would decide on any applications for asylum.
Mr Straw, what's to be
decided if you've already made up your mind, as you said you had in the
House of Commons?
JACK STRAW MP: Well no I didn't say I had
made up my mind and for the avoidance of doubt I have my statement before
me and I said "subject to compliance with all legal requirements I would
wish to see removed from this country all those on the plane as soon as
reasonably practicable". What we face here is a clash of two sets of international
obligations. On the one hand our obligations which are humanitarian as
well under the 1951 Convention on Refugees to provide asylum to those in
well-founded fear of persecution. On the other hand, the clearest
international obligations under what's called the Chicago Convention: to
prevent and to deter the very serious international terrorist crime of
hijacking. And I think everybody accepts and it was remarkable the degree
of unanimity in the House of Commons when I made my statement, that we
cannot have a situation where hijackers are rewarded for their hijacking
with asylum and that's the dilemma I face but as I said in the House of
Commons, it's a matter of public policy I think the need to ensure that
there is safe air travel and that this international terrorist crime is
not encouraged is very important.
HUMPHRYS: Hijackers are one thing,
innocent passengers are quite another and you have a quasi judicial role
in these proceedings, as you hardly need me to remind you, and you have
already prejudiced it. Yes, you did say I'll act in accordance with the
law, of course you did but you then went on to say I would wish to see
removed from this country all those, all those on this plane.
STRAW: Subject to compliance with
all legal requirements is what..
HUMPHRYS: Sure..
STRAW: You say sure..
HUMPHRYS: But you prejudiced it
by saying I would wish to see - you don't get a judge saying I'd like to
see him hanged subject to the jury, you know...
STRAW: John, that's a silly point
if you don't mind my saying so..
HUMPHRYS: ..well, no, no, because
you are in a quasi judicial role.
STRAW: Of course I understand that
but it was extremely important in the course of that statement for me to
explain to Parliament and to the British public and to a wider world what
the dilemma is here and this is not a straightforward situation where we
are faced with a few people seeking asylum from a particular country where
there has been political disruption and one has to make a judgement if
you like on a unilateral set of considerations which is: are they in a
well-founded fear of persecution. Here we face a serious dilemma between
that consideration and what I think is a wider consideration on the grounds
of public policy which is do you or don't you end up in a situation where
the terrorist crime of hijacking is rewarded and...
HUMPHRYS: We're not talking about
the criminals who hijacked the plane. Clearly there is a different situation
applying to those because if they are convicted they will then be criminals
and the law will take its course. But what you can't do, you cannot send..
not only have your prejudiced I would submit and I have submitted your
own position here but you have promised to do something that you cannot
do. You cannot send back - the European Commission on Human Rights says
you cannot force someone to leave if they will suffer degrading or inhuman
treatment. The Home Office itself has agreed that that is precisely what
they would face in Afghanistan because they have already had a look into
this and they have talked about precisely that happening, ninety-nine per
cent of our Afghan asylum seekers are actually given refuge in this country.
So, you can't do it, even if you want to?
STRAW: With great respect your
figures are completely wrong. I'll just tell you what the figures are..
HUMPHRYS: Go on..
STRAW: Of sixteen hundred or so
asylum applications which were considered last year from people in Afghanistan
I think thirty-five - 35 - were granted asylum. A very substantial proportion
of the rest were granted...
HUMPHRYS: They were given leave
to stay.
STRAW: Hang on..
HUMPHRYS: ..it comes down to the
same thing..
STRAW: ..it does not come down
to the same thing with great respect. A very substantial proportion of
the remainder were given what is called exceptional leave to remain. The
issue of removability is separate immediately from the question to which
country are they removed and I did not say, at any stage in the course
of the Parliamentary statement that I made, that these people if there
were not granted asylum or exceptional leave to remain, were bound to be
removed to Afghanistan. Indeed I never mentioned that at all.
HUMPHRYS: So you want them to go
somewhere else...
STRAW: There's always a question
those familiar with this area know this, of whether there are what are
called third countries, to which it is safe to return those individuals
and so far as decisions are concerned no decisions have been made in these
cases yet. There was nothing I said in the House of Commons which could
prejudice the exercise at my discretion and as well as that everybody knows
that what I do is to make the initial decision in asylum cases, but there
is a right of appeal thereafter to independent adjudicators so that's the
position..
HUMPHRYS: Some people said that
you said what you did because you actually want that right..you want that
judicial review in essence and it removes it from your hands.
STRAW: I can tell you, as someone
who is subject, as any Home Secretary is to judicial review constantly,
although happily touch wood normally the courts find in my favour, sometimes
they don't, I don't want judicial review. I think judicial review is very
important as a matter of law, but of course I don't encourage judicial
review, that's...
HUMPHRYS: Do you want them to go
to Pakistan? Is that the situation, because you can't force them to go
can you?
STRAW: Well we can if once the
processes are concluded we have every right to remove people from this
country who do not have a.right to remain and it happens every day.
HUMPHRYS: But you can't force them
to go to a third country is the point I'm making.
STRAW: With great respect, arrangements
can be made in certain circumstances to do just that......
HUMPHRYS: If they want to go......
STRAW: No... no...no. Hang on....
No. Every week we are removing from this country a very large number of
people for example to safe third European Union countries who should have
applied for asylum in those countries......
HUMPHRYS: That's different.....
STRAW: Well no it's not different.
You say to me we can't remove them but we do remove people to third countries
and that is what can follow at the conclusion of this process.
HUMPHREYS: Are you prepared to have them
removed from this country even if they face something terrible wherever
they end up, whether it's in their own country, in Afghanistan, or whether
perhaps it's in Pakistan where people have met terrible fates because of
what's happening between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I mean they may well
be killed. Are you prepared......
STRAW: Well of course..... I mean
that's an absurd proposition if you don't mind me saying so.....
HUMPHRYS: It's a very real proposition...........
STRAW: Nothing I said in the House
of Commons implied such a proposition. What I said in the House of Commons
was that I would comply with all legal requirements. The legal requirements
include our obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights and
our obligations under the United Nations Convention on Refugees but I come
back to the point that this is not as it were a unilateral issue. Here
we've, and I think even you John must accept the dilemma that faces not
just me but the whole of British society here, that on the one hand, yes
of course we have great sympathy with those who have a genuine and well
founded fear of persecution arising from political instability in the state
from which they come. On the other hand we cannot possibly be in a circumstance
where it appears that we are encouraging the international terrorist crime
of hijacking.
HUMPHRYS: Well we've already excluded
terrorists from this because we're talking about.....(both speaking at
once) We've got about a hundred odd people who are nothing to do with
terrorism at least that is the assumption we must make. They're clearly
not all terrorists.
STRAW: Well that is what you say.
As I say, during the course of one of the Commons proceedings one of the
striking features of this case was that this was an internal flight going
away from the International Airport from Kabul going to a relatively small
town with a population of one hundred and thirty thousand, Mazar-e-Sharif,
and so then the question is, well if these people were fleeing persecution,
which is a question which has to be answered during the course of their
applications if they make them. If these people were fleeing persecution
either.... It's a slightly odd situation to be in. If they thought they
were just on an internal flight to wherever they were going to go after
they'd gone to Mazar-e-Sherif or alternatively, if they were complicit
in knowing that the plane was going to be hijacked then that obviously
raises questions about their genuineness and also whether the exemptions
under what's called Article One F of the Convention ought to come into
play.
HUMPHRYS: Isn't the reality that
most of them will end up staying here?
STRAW: It remains to be seen what
number are granted asylum and what number are granted exceptional leave
to remain. Palpably, as I made clear in the House of Commons, this is
not an easy situation but I come back to the point and in a sense put it
back to others, it's a very difficult set of decisions which I have to
make and which they'll be invigilated I'm quite sure by the adjudicators
but if we want to see some kind of international order we have to make
ensure that the clearest messages are sent out against those who not only
commit hijacking but also are complicit in hijacking.
HUMPHRYS: Just a very quick thought
- it's reported this morning that you want to see a change in the law,
international law so it would make it more difficult to seek asylum. Is
that true?
STRAW: I was asked that actually
by the Labour Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Robin Corbett
in the House
saying 'didn't this raise the question of whether the 1951 Convention
ought to be reviewed and my view is that it should. We ought to be able
to continue to provide haven for people but what has happened, and it's
a dilemma faced by all Western countries, all European Union countries
and indeed by the United States is that the 1951 Convention is now used
in circumstances never anticipated by its drafters, that's compounded by
the use of air travel and in the United Kingdom it's also compounded by
what I should describe as a very generous interpretation of the terms of
that Convention by our courts.
HUMPHRYS: Right, crime. The latest
crime figures show a rising trend for some crimes, not all crimes but for
some crimes, some important crimes and you have announced, you are announcing
this week new targets for police forces. Is that because you believe that
many police forces, some police forces aren't doing a good enough job compared
with the others?
STRAW: Well, let's first of all
put the situation into perspective: Since the election, crime has fallen
by seven percentage points, it went up in the last period but overall it's
fallen by seven points. Some crimes that worry people a huge amount like
domestic burglary have fallen twenty percentage points in that period,
others, as you say have gone up. What we are seeking to do is to get on
top of the long term trend in crime. Crime has risen with some changes
but on average by about five percentage points per year every year this
century - we want to try and get on top of this with the most substantial
co-ordinated attack on crime and disorder we believe this country has ever
seen. Now this doesn't mean that in any one year the figures are always
going to go down but it means that we're trying to get right on top of
it. So what are we doing? We're trying to reform the process end to end.
I'll come back to the police in a second but we've got this major reform
of the Crown Prosecution Service so you've now got a named, known, Chief
Crown Prosecutor in each area, more resources going into streamline what
the Crown Prosecution Service are doing. We're trying, it's been controversial
but we are in the process of streamlining the way the courts operate.
We're providing a much greater emphasis on the needs and the rights of
victims, increasing the aid to victim support by fifty per cent, providing
a victims and witness services in the courts, providing special protection
for the women victims of serious sexual crimes like rape. We're changing
the way in which the courts can sentence people, for example, by bringing
into force the minimum mandatory sentences for domestic burglary and drug
dealing and we've got the whole of the Crime and Disorder arrangements
with these new partnerships and we've got the major reforms of youth justice
which are coming into play and are beginning to be very successful indeed.
Now let's come back to the issue with the police:
HUMPHRYS: Yeah. You're not happy
with the way some of them are doing their job.
STRAW: I want to see the performance
of the police service raised to the best and the parallel I draw is of
my experience, personal experience, in dealing with the education service,
because I've been involved, usually at a local level but as Deputy Leader
of the old Inner London Education Authority at the beginning of the seventies
and then as Education spokesman before David Blunkett at a national level.
Twenty years ago people were saying, and it's a received wisdom not least
in the Labour Party by the way that what happened in schools couldn't
really effect the education of the children, that it was as much to do
with where they came from, the kind of areas they lived in and basically
schools are there to kind of warehouse kids. It was a very condescending
approach. What we then learned from good research and peoples' sort of
sense was that similar schools in similar areas with similar kinds of either
easy kids or difficult kids, with similar teachers with similar amounts
of money could do vastly different things. So what I want to do, and this
is part of the process we're announcing tomorrow, is translate that same
kind of rigorous performance culture into the police service. And we're
doing that - and the police service are on board for this by the way because
most of them are very keen indeed on all this.....
HUMPHRYS: And be consistent?
STRAW: Yes,. Well, we're doing
this by saying to the service: yes, we want to put more resources into
what you're doing. Yes, we want to turn the police numbers graph round
so you do get back on a rising curve of police numbers, but we're publishing
the data for what are called the basic command units for each police service,
which are basic divisions, I mean - classic one Blackburn in Lancashire
if I may name that, (INTERRUPTION) but it could be Cardiff, or to name
another one or Sedgefield to name a third or Maidstone to name a fourth
so that's what you do. You then can start to compare not only the performance
of the police services as a whole, but also of similar towns and see how
those services in each town are doing. But crucially what we've also done
is said to the police service: You're not on your own in fighting crime.
You are also working in partnership with all the other authorities in
the area to get crime down, and that's where these targets come into play..
HUMPHRYS: But the danger with targets
obviously is you can't have targets for absolutely everything. You'll
have targets for certain things. and the danger is that they will concentrate
on those things and other crimes may rise because they're concentrating
on those that you are telling them.
STRAW: Yes, that's what used to
be said. Now when the debate was going on about whether schools should
be set clear targets say on....
HUMPHRYS: Slightly different though.
STRAW: Well, it's slightly different,
but also exactly the same. Of course it's different in one sense, but
it's ..
HUMPHRYS: ... to struggle with
that concept, .do you?
STRAW: No, no, but of course it
meets. We're talking about the education - police service, not the education
service, but what is interesting is that teachers in classroom are unsupervised
while they're teaching just as police officers on patrol are unsupervised
directly while they're on patrol. There's a high degree of discretion
given to each of these key professionals in our society.
HUMPHRYS: And the Chief Constable
would say quite right too.
STRAW: Well, of course, and ditto
for teachers, but there are similarities, and in the old days it was -
just remind me of that point again.
HUMPHRYS: What I'm saying that
some crimes will rise because they can't ..
STRAW: Sure, just coming up. In
the old days it was said that if you concentrate on reading or maths and
things like that the rest of the children's education will go by the board,
or you won't have time to concentrate on behaviour. What we found was
that schools which are good in concentrating on reading and maths
are also good in everything else, and my judgement is that of course we
should name some specific crimes is what we are doing which is burglary
and car crime and robbery in the areas which account for seventy per cent
of robberies, but those forces which are raising their game in this area
will also find that they will be able to raise their game in other areas.
HUMPHRYS: You say that they're
going to have more resources. Obviously they'll need more resources to
do this. The problem is that they won't be getting more of what they most
need and that is extra police officers. You promised more recruits. You
promised another five thousand recruits in addition to all the others that
would normally come in over the next three years. The difficulty with
that is that every year six thousand or so police officers leave the force,
so that by the time you've done the sums, you've added your extra five
thousand to the thirteen thousand or so that would normally come in over
the next few years, you're actually going to end up at the end of those
three years with probably slightly fewer police officers than you began
with. Now, that isn't what you were promising originally, certainly not
you were promising in your manifesto.
STRAW: Well, as far as the manifesto
is concerned we didn't promise any change in the number of police officers
either up or down.
HUMPHRYS: There was a very clear
implication there would be more bobbies on the beat.....
STRAW: No, no. we said we would
release officers for operational duties, and we're doing that, and some
of......
HUMPHRYS: I mean. you made great
play at the Party Conference, you made great play about there being more
police officers.,
STRAW: May I say John, I went into
the election against the background of a reduction in police numbers under
the Conservatives from ninety-three onwards of about fifteen hundred, and
I was very anxious not to make promises which I couldn't deliver, and so
.....
HUMPHRYS: And they've fallen since
you came in.
STRAW: I'm aware of that, but I
say I didn't promise at the election that police numbers would rise. I
would like them to rise let me say, but I didn't promise that. We've not
broken any promise. We did say we would release more officers for operational
duties, and that's exactly what we're doing, for example by the...and the
court processes and that is happening, and the mode of trial changes will
also....
HUMPHRYS: Yes, but how are they
going to meet these targets, these tougher targets without more police
officers.
STRAW: Let me just say that what
you need is to back what the police service has at the moment with for
example new technology, with the new orders we're providing with the four
hundred million pounds we're putting into close circuit television, and
all sorts of other crime prevention.
HUMPHRYS It's not the same as having
extra police officers.
STRAW: And the other point I'd
make is again to draw the parallel with education. If you look at the
good educational services, the good schools and the not-so-good schools,
there is no direct relationship between the inputs and outputs.
HUMPHRYS: Well.....
STRAW: Well, you may say well,
and that's ...
HUMPHRYS: Well, I say well because
I don't know anybody who doesn't say that the more police officers you
have the better able Chief Constables are to fight crime. I mean it's
been an article of faith.....
STRAW: : It may have been
an article of faith, but if you....
HUMPHRYS But you're telling us
that's wrong.
STRAW: If you've got the police
service running at optimum efficiency then of course additional officers
will make a difference, but if you look at your history of the last twenty
years you see that the number of police officers were rising quite rapidly
during the nineteen-eighties during the period when crime doubled. The
number of police officers fell from nineteen-ninety-three to - and it's
still falling at the moment, during a period when crime has fallen, There's
no necessary relationship here, and...
HUMPHRYS: Well, you accepted the
applause at the Party conference when you said we're going to have more
police officers, and now you seem to be saying that doesn't actually matter
now that the sun's gone down.
STRAW: No, with great respect it's
a more subtle point than the one you're putting to me.
HUMPHRYS: No, I do understand.
What you're saying is that if you can increase the efficiency - but people
have been trying to do that for donkey's years, increase the efficiency
of the police.
STRAW: And we're doing it some
more you see. And - look, you look at the latest crime statistics. They
went up in the Metropolitan Police Service, and that accounted for the
bulk of the increase,. They also went up for reasons to do with the statistics,
not to do with the real level of crime in the West Midlands. In many other
areas they went down.
HUMPHRYS: A lot of people say -
the Police Federation says it's because of fewer police officers.
STRAW: Well, hang on. In that
case how does the Police Federation answer what's happened in Lancashire.
Now Lancashire had a very poor financial settlement last year. It's got
a better one this year, I'm sorry about that, at least it proved I wasn't
biased. Under the average alright, police numbers have been broadly stable
there. The Chief Constable and her colleagues in that force have been
able to get crime in Lancashire down by ten percentage points, and my challenge
in Lancashire, it's a quite difficult area - leave aside the .... Blackburn,
quite a difficult area, and despite all that, limited resources, they've
done it, so why can't other forces?
HUMPHRYS; So anybody who's expecting
that there will be many more police officers or even more police officers
by the end of this term of government of the Labour Party is going to be
disappointed.
STRAW: Well, I.....
HUMPHRYS: You cannot guarantee
it, and you're saying actually it probably doesn't matter very much.
STRAW: No, I didn't say that.
What I said was indeed, with great respect,......
HUMPHRYS: Perilously close to it.
STRAW: No, what I said was, if
you've got the police service working at optimum efficiency then additional
officers make a difference, and that's what we need to do. So what we're
doing ...
HUMPHRYS: But you're not guaranteeing
it, that there will be more of them.
STRAW: Well, I'm guaranteeing that
there will be more than would otherwise have been the case. And if you
want me to make a political point more than certainly would have happened
under the Conservatives. (INTERRUPTION) We saw that the police numbers
had been going down since nineteen-ninety-three. They were going down
more quickly than we'd anticipated, indeed I got a settlement for them
two years ago which was due to keep police numbers level, we've now got
this additional new money, new money to ensure that there are five thousand
extra recruits over and above, over and above those the police service
are planning to recruit. Now it's a matter for speculation as to where
the numbers end in three years time, but it's my hope and belief if you
are asking me this that the numbers should be above the level certainly
that they are now.
HUMPHRYS: Okay, right well we are
using you to maximum efficiency today because if you stay with us, I'd
like to talk to you about something else.
STRAW: And my fee is a lot less
than yours.
HUMPHRYS: We could argue about
that but probably yes, probably not, it wouldn't be too wise.
STRAW: Zero.
HUMPHRYS: Zero, absolutely, Government
Ministry, don't pay Government Ministers.
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