The government's concern for human rights is bogus, argues Nick Cohen

In No One Left To Lie To, an essential study of the corruption of Bill Clinton's administration, Christopher Hitchens quotes two conservative American journalists who see the nature of Third Way politics with a clarity their squinting "progressive" colleagues cannot match. The first, David Frum, drew a precise picture of the trap set for the liberal-left:

Since 1994, Clinton has offered the Democratic Party a devilish bargain: accept and defend policies you hate (welfare reform, the Defence of Marriage Act), condone and excuse crimes (perjury, campaign finance abuses) and I'll deliver you the executive branch of government . . . Clinton has survived and even thrived by deftly balancing between right and left. He has assuaged the left by continually proposing bold new programmes . . . And he has placated the right by dropping every one of these programmes as soon as he proposed it . . . The left gets words, the right gets deeds.

The second, Daniel Casse, noted in 1996 that the right was also snared because Clinton had "learnt how the Republicans can be, at once, a steady source of new ideas and a perfect foil".

Tony Blair may be devoted to Clinton, but you may say he has never done anything as grotesque as destroying the main pharmaceutical plant in one of the poorest and most pestilential countries on earth in order to distract attention from the semen stains on a quickie lover's dress. Yet as this article goes to press, the Prime Minister is quietly pushing an asylum bill through parliament the aim of which is to dump refugees in abject poverty. The measure is built on the lie - no other word will do, I'm afraid - that penalties will be inflicted only on "bogus" asylum-seekers ("economic migrants") rather than the desperate and the genuine.

The bill was being discussed at the very moment Nato was scrambling its air forces to save the people of Kosovo. The sight of hundreds of thousands being forced to flee from Milosevic, and the canting wails of sympathy from Downing Street and the media, did not alter the government's determination to press on with what I think it is safe to say is the most degraded act of this parliament. The Kosovar Albanians are the victims of the greatest crime of postwar Europe, but as soon as they cross the Channel, they grow horns and become scrounging frauds.

If the Conservatives had introduced the Immigration and Asylum Bill 1999 at the height of the Balkan refugee crisis, the pinkish broadsheet pundits and the Parliamentary Labour Party would have fought them hard and loud. But their boys are in power and the liberal press has proved itself a black joke. Many Labour MPs are appalled. But apart from the "usual suspects" - most prominently and bravely, Diane Abbott - all are saying nothing in public because they know the cost to their careers of speaking out. I was told quite sternly by several politicians I usually respect, "not to help the Tories by going in too hard" - a perfect thrust of the foil. But a visit to the empty press bench in Committee Room Nine of the House of Commons showed that Third Way Britain is worse than Hitchens can imagine. Here, the right has become a centre of humane opposition.

David Maclean, the Conservative member for Penrith and the Borders, was on his feet. Charities, he said, were raising concerns about the persecution of strangers who had committed no crimes. He quoted from churches that said the bill would "cause great hardship and injustice"; and from Amnesty International, which added it was a breach of European and United Nations human rights laws.

Maclean was, and for all I know still is, a Thatcherite of the barking variety. When the Tories were in power, he used to make the papers for declaring "there are no genuine beggars in London", that ramblers should pay tolls if they wanted to tramp the fells, and that criminals should be driven from the streets like "vermin". I remember the vermin vividly. The quote came from a draft speech he wrote when he was a Home Office minister in 1993. He went on to praise vigilantes and condemn the justice system he presided over for being "on the side of the criminal". His sentiments were too much even for Michael Howard, who forced him to substitute more platitudinous remarks. The draft was leaked to me and I phoned Tony Blair, then the opposition home affairs spokesman, for comment. Blair went quiet for a while and then confessed his unwillingness to offer a forthright condemnation. "You see, a lot of Daily Mail readers would agree with him," he explained. At the time, I thought I had just caught him in a wet patch and he'd roll out of it. I should have paid more attention.

Answering Maclean in Committee Room Nine was Mike O'Brien, Labour's asylum minister. He is a small, trim, grey man with a bureaucrat's face so lacking in character you can imagine his wife missing him in the street. He replied in the sneering tones of the second-string speaker at a sixth-form debating society: "It comes rich from the right honourable member - who, when he was a Home Office minister in the previous government, proposed several bills on immigration and asylum - now to complain that the government are [sic] introducing draconian provisions." O'Brien laughed as if he had cracked a gag. The Conservatives, he implied, couldn't criticise because they had introduced draconian and racist legislation; Labour was simply twisting the knife and making it more draconian and more racist. I understand that new Labour sees as little as it does because it stands on the shoulders of pygmies, but here is a Third Way closure of debate even Clinton hasn't tried.

The choice of the racist epithet isn't mine. In 1995 Jack Straw invited me to his office to discuss his readiness to fight the ever-present menace of squeegee merchants. As I was about to leave, he turned to his aide and said, "Shall we give this to him?". The sidekick nodded, and Straw showed me an article by Andrew Lansley, then a wonk at Tory Central Office, which said John Major could still beat Blair if the Tories harped on the public's "negative perceptions" of Labour. One negative was race. "Immigration was an issue which we raised successfully in the 1992 and in the 1994 Euro-elections," Lansley said, "and still has the potential to hurt."

Straw was furious. Michael Howard, then the Home Secretary, was the son of a Jewish refugee from Hitler; Straw had a Jewish great-grandmother. If Britain had not offered their relatives sanctuary, neither would have been born. "Like many people in Britain, Michael Howard is descended from immigrants and so am I," said Straw. "It is obscene that, of all people, Mr Howard, whose family directly benefited from refugee law, should allow asylum and immigration laws to be used in political stunts." It seemed to me then that new Labour wasn't a complete waste of DNA. Tony Blair, as shadow home secretary in 1992, had opposed an earlier Tory asylum act as an "unjustified", "bizarre" and "misguided" attempt to remove protection from people in fear of their lives.

Now consider the sequel. Labour's asylum bill modestly proposes to make it impossible for any refugee from a zone of conflict to reach Britain legally. You have to put yourself in the position of a Kosovar shivering on an Albanian mountainside to imagine its effect. Britain has imposed visa restrictions on the former Yugoslavia - as it places them on all countries from which large numbers of genuine refugees run. You can't go to the British embassy in Belgrade to ask for a visa - you'd risk being shot en route and, in any case, it is closed due to war. So you must plod off to see our mandarins in Tirana. If you tell them you want a visa because you intend to claim asylum at Heathrow, they will turn you away. The 1993 immigration rules do not include a desire to save your life as a valid reason for visiting Britain. You might well feel the need to lie and pass yourself off as a businessman or tourist. Your bedraggled appearance and terrified eyes will speak against you and, as Ann Thomas from the Refugee Council says, diplomats are under instruction to refuse visas to those they suspect might claim asylum. You are therefore faced with the difficulty of how to travel to the western edge of Fortress Europe without a visa or, as the Serbs have carefully stripped Kosovars of all their documents so that they cannot reclaim their homes, a passport.

Amazingly, 10,000 Kosovars have reached Dover, either by hitching lifts, hiding in lorries or travelling on false papers. George Robertson, the Defence Secretary, has boasted that their arrival proves Britain is doing its bit. Yet the Kosovars got here despite Home Office barriers, and the finest minds in this government are working to make the existing obstacles insuperable. The owners of lorries, cars, planes, boats and trains found carrying asylum-seekers, wittingly or unwittingly, as passengers or stowaways, will risk fines and confiscation of their vehicles if this bill becomes law. It will be no defence to say that the asylum-seeker in the back of the cab is genuine. Anne Owers, the director of Justice, warned O'Brien that there had already been cases of captains throwing refugees overboard to escape punishment and he risked creating fresh incentives for murder. He ignored her. Even if, somehow, you manage to sneak in, you will be charged with the criminal offence of travelling on false papers. ("The Secretary of State spoke about those who destroy documents . . . That is not necessarily evidence of fraud. There may be good reasons why that has happened." - Tony Blair, in the House of Commons, 2 November 1992.)

Nato hopes its campaign will remove the pressure for refuge. But if the strategy collapses, the asylum bill is there as a back-up to stop refugees from Yugoslavia or anywhere else reaching these islands.

New Labour's war against them is total. On the home front, it plans to strip them of all entitlements. They will lose access to community care and social housing, to support under the National Assistance Act, and to disability benefits (which you might have thought the victims of torture would require). The government will tell them where to live. It will be illegal for them to work. The notoriously incompetent Home Office promises to supply them with vouchers for food and clothes.

One simple figure gives a glimpse of their future. Income support is the official poverty line, the absolute minimum that our parsimonious state deems necessary for survival. Yet asylum-seekers will have to live on goods and cash worth 30 per cent less. Their ready cash will consist of £1 a day if they are adults and 50p if they are children. With these princely sums, they will be unable to get buses into town to take their children to school, or to phone or travel to visit the lawyers they will most certainly need to fight their cases. Children will be placed outside the Children's Act 1989, which Labour supported, so their families cannot receive child benefit or ask local authorities to protect them. A few months ago, Blair promised to remove all children from poverty, but then, as the man said, "the left gets words, the right gets deeds".

Some refugees will turn to begging and petty crime. What else are they meant to do? A few single men who have experienced the new regime have already done so and allowed the Mail and London Evening Standard to expose them as "crooks", "aggressive beggars" and - for what goes around comes around - "squeegee merchants". The government is privately creating what it publicly deplores. In order to get here, refugees will have to be criminals, travelling with the help of smugglers and forged papers and, when they arrive, they will be forced to live outside lawful society or on its edge.

Even the pleasures of love will come at a price. Registrars will be told to keep watch for - and refer to the authorities - those brides and grooms who look as if they might be trying to get residence rights in marriages of convenience. Thus, while the private lives of Robin Cook and Chris Woodhead are their own business, the intimate details of refugees' lives (and, indeed, those of members of British ethnic minorities who may look like refugees) will be opened to official inspection.

Beneath the poorest of the British poor will lie a new class of Untermenschen. Yet I could see no sign that the introduction of what are, in intention and effect, racial laws bothered O'Brien or diluted his ability to put the most absurd spin on his bill. He told the Commons committee last week that his plans were "good for family rights and good for human rights" - and once again confirmed the wisdom of Hannah Arendt's link between banal men and evil deeds.

Home Office press officers say that penury will be purely temporary, because all cases will be heard within six months. They add that asylum-seekers - people without furniture, clothes or relatives to help them - need less money than the rest of us. Labour MPs mutter that there are too many foreigners hanging around in their constituencies waiting for the right to work when and if they are accepted as refugees.

The unacknowledged truth is that the blame for the asylum crisis lies with the Immigration and Nationality Department of the Home Office, which has degenerated into a bureaucratic shambles. A promised computer system has failed to materialise. Its supplier, Siemens, has missed deadline after deadline and demanded ever larger wheelbarrows of public money. At the same time as their information technology has vanished, genius managers have decided to uproot the department's headquarters and move it to new premises. The result of the chaos is a backlog of 70,000 uninvestigated cases. Instead of confronting the administrative disaster for which he is responsible, O'Brien, with the support of 10 Downing Street, is engaging in the old sport of victim-blaming.

Many Labour MPs I spoke to were ashamed of their leaders and disgusted by what they were being asked to do to refugees in general and their children in particular. They are agitating, but quietly. Human rights groups and children's charities have also criticised the bill in muted language. In a telling exchange, O'Brien bullied Hope Hanlan, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, into confessing that her written evidence showed she was, on the whole, happy with his bill. She admitted under cross-examination from David Maclean that her statement was "a sop to the government". She had decided that the best tactic was to go along with the project by pretending O'Brien "met international standards". If she was not "too critical at first", she thought, she might "tear the bill apart later on". I have no wish and less right to scold Hanlan or the coy dissidents on the back benches too harshly, but I must warn them that they have fallen into the final Third Way pit. By talking the cod language of "inclusiveness" and consultation, by emphasising that only quiet persuasion will work, our listening government has tricked decent men and women into a kind of complicity. They are in a trap and I would suggest the sensible strategy is to fight their way out.

We have heard many foolish comparisons between Milosevic and Hitler in recent weeks. There has been much chatter about genocide and appeasement. It is as if we cannot see modern horrors for what they are and must look back with ignorance to the second world war. But as this shameful measure slips into law, those who refuse to raise their voices should remember Primo Levi's question from the Nazi camps: if not now, when?

Nick Cohen is an "Observer" columnist and, like the Home Secretary, the great-grandchild of refugees who found safety in a more honourable Britain. A collection of his essays and journalism, "Cruel Britannia: reports on the sinister and the preposterous", will be published by Verso in June

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