No wonder Britain's immigration policies shock the rest of Europe: Jack Straw won't even spend special EU money to help asylum-seekers, reveals Nick Cohen

Britain won't help asylum-seekers at any price. Neither love nor money can move it. For all the screams of "bloody foreigners" - which met the Council of Europe's assertion that Britain was among the most racist of European nations - we stand alone in the European Union. We prefer to risk millions of pounds than do anything that might alleviate the suffering of asylum-seekers.

The "Equal" initiative is an EU programme to address discrimination at work. Britain is entitled to £233m under its terms. However, the EU insists that 5 per cent must be matched by Britain and spent on asylum-seekers. The Department for Education and Employment was happy to oblige. Then the Home Office intervened. Spending a modest £23m on asylum-seekers was inconceivable. Word would creep back down the smuggling routes to Tehran and Kabul that Britain was indeed the "soft touch" of Ann Widdecombe's and Jack Straw's delusions.

The smooth-talking Home Office doesn't quite put it like that. A spokeswoman assured me that the EU funds will go to people who have exceptional leave to remain in Britain - but these are those who have sought and found asylum already. Other monies will go to refugees who have been brought here for humanitarian reasons - these will soon be few in number, because Straw has ordered the Kosovars who came during the war to get out. Finally, she said that asylum-seekers waiting for the 14 months it takes the shambolic Home Office to reach an initial decision on their claims will also be helped.

"The problem with the spin is that they just want to spend a few pounds on laughably inadequate classes on life in the UK, and hang on to what's left over," said Andy Gregg from the World University Service, which finds work for refugees. "This money is meant to be for serious job training for people who may get permission to live here; for medical, book-keeping and IT courses." The Refugee Council was warned by the European Commission that the Home Office's spending plans were an abuse of the programme and would lead to its cancellation. British members of the European Parliament are astonished by their government. They have every right to be shocked. More than the tickings-off from the Council of Europe, the dispute shows how British political culture has moved to the far right.

When the grants were discussed in the European Parliament, Ursula Stenzel, a member of the Austrian conservatives who share power with Jorg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party (the FPO), intervened. She demanded that aid should be denied to asylum-seekers. Stenzel was opposed by Fiorella Ghilardotti, the spokeswoman for the European Socialist group of which new Labour MEPs are members. Ghilardotti said the Austrian right was the enemy of democratic forces in Europe. The socialists, greens and liberals would have nothing to do with it, and Ghilardotti insisted, successfully, that asylum-seekers must receive their 5 per cent. The friends of Haider were defeated, only to see their standard lifted by Jack Straw. The affinity between Britain and Austria has not been lost on Haider. Writing about himself in the third person in the Daily Telegraph last year, he noted:

The once dogmatic, leftist Labour Party and the Right-nationalist FPO of old have both undergone an ideological metamorphosis . . . As Tony Blair said: "We have thrown away the worst of our past and discovered the best." The FPO, with a new party programme, has done the same and adheres to a Christian, western tradition of thought . . . Are Blair and Labour on the extreme Right because . . . they advocate stricter rules on immigration? If Blair is not extreme, then nor is Haider. (The latter is arguably less tough on asylum-seekers and immigrants than Labour and Blair!)

The comparison is always greeted with incredulity. Haider is outrageous. The Council of Europe description of a"xenophobic and intolerant" culture in which racism against asylum-seekers is "particularly acute" is a slander. Britain doesn't have a mass neo-fascist party. The ideals of fair play, tolerance and decency are the very foundations of Britishness. In new Labour circles, an accusation of racism is as insulting as the capital crime of socialism.

Yet Haider's only fault is modesty. "Labour and Blair" are not "arguably" tougher on asylum-seekers than Haider. They are tougher. Precisely because we did not experience invasion and collaboration, ideas that would be tainted with memories of Nazism on the Continent are passed around polite society like canapes at a drinks party.

Austria has been forced grudgingly to accept European aid for asylum-seekers. Britain will lose it because of the myth of the soft touch. Our softness includes forcing asylum-seekers to live 30 per cent below the income support level - the official poverty line. A single adult receives £36.50 a week - £25 of which comes in vouchers. Since shops can pocket the change from a £1voucher (if, for example, a purchase comes to 57p), their real income is even lower.

This vindictiveness was too much even for new Labour. At its party conference in 2000 the colleagues revolted and forced Straw to promise a review. The review consisted of the Home Secretary moving further to the right. He denounced Oxfam for sticking to its principles by refusing to accept vouchers that defrauded the poor in its shops.

Crueller than vouchers is the dispersal programme. The state has assumed the power to tell asylum-seekers where to live. They are shunted out of London, where there are exile communities to support them, to provincial cities with no experience of dealing with immigrants. You have to meet the victims to grasp the utter bleakness of their lives. I saw a young West African woman in a terraced house which was ready for slum clearance. She was pregnant but did not know if her child's father had been shot by his political enemies. Her furniture consisted of a sofa and a bed. She knew only two people in the city: another asylum-seeker and a worker from the Refugee Council. I wondered if she would be insulted if I slipped her fifty quid. She was pathetically grateful - it was ten days' money to waste on nappies and other luxuries. Because she took the cash, I can't use her name or say where she is living. The Home Office would dock her allowance.

The arrival of strangers has provoked a predictable response. Asylum-seekers have been assaulted and battered across the North. When about a thousand Iraqi Kurds were dumped in Hull, racially motivated violence rose to one attack a day. The beatings, inevitably, spilt over into the settled black community. "Almost every Kurd I have spoken to in Hull," said a member of the Hull Asylum-Seekers' Support Group, "has experienced an assault."

Not much decency and tolerance on the Humber, then. Why should we expect them when William Hague and Jack Straw have worked so hard to incite violence? By forcing vouchers on asylum-seekers, Straw was making them carry a ghetto currency which marked them as Untermenschen. Hague has gone further - he had to, really, if he was going to stop new Labour wooing his skinhead constituency - and proposed the internment of all asylum-seekers.

The easy ride Hague gets from the media is a marvel. If you ask Tory Central Office where tens of thousands of people who have committed no crime are going to be imprisoned, it replies that it can't possibly answer until it is in power and discovers what secret camps are lying about the country. Hague wants journalists to believe that there are hundreds of empty prisons out there, whose location is known only to the Civil Service.

This is the soft Britain Straw doesn't want the Europeans to mollycoddle. Its cruelties have in no way deterred asylum-seekers. Vouchers and forced dispersal were introduced in 1999 when 71,160 asylum claims were made. In 2000, the total rose to 76,040. The policy has made many thousands of people miserable - and led to several suicides - but failed to stop refugees from the dictatorships of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan running for their lives.

I've used the word "racism" but perhaps it isn't quite right. Racism is specific. Blacks are muggers. Asians are cheats. Jews are plotting global domination. The hatred of asylum-seekers is general - directed at any and every foreigner. If it is racism, it is the racism of the respectable, the rage of the politically correct. Modern manners prevent them from having a go at the niggers and the yids, so they must redirect their frustration.

Politicians say they want to help the genuine refugees while prosecuting illegal immigrants, but do not mention that their visa system turns all genuine refugees into illegal aliens. The press tell us we are overcrowded. But when ministers announced that Britain would need mass immigration because we haven't bred enough children to keep the economy going, the Daily Mail decided that profits trumped prejudice any day and applauded. London hospitals are poaching Nelson Mandela's best brains while there are idle refugee surgeons sitting yards away from their doors. The embrace of racist populism, begun by Michael Howard, the son of a refugee, and accelerated by Jack Straw, the great-grandson of a refugee, has reached a climax. Britain has nothing against economic migrants. It's genuine refugees we can't stand.

See Irwin Stelzer: A tide that cannot be turned, this week's issue

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