UNABLE to attack Labour on law and order, the Tories have once again chosen to play politics with the issue of asylum and immigration.

In a letter to the BEN, Paul Brierley alleges that Britain has become a soft-touch for unfounded asylum seekers. This is patently untrue. Britain's experience of asylum seeking is comparable to the rest of Western Europe. In 1998, the UK ranked 11th out of 17 European states in terms of asylum applications per head of population behind countries like Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Every country in Europe is experiencing growing pressures. Belgium, for example, saw a doubling of asylum applications in 1998.

Over the 1990s, the number of asylum applications has always varied from year to year according to regional political instabilities in eastern Europe and the developing world. Under the Tories, for example, the number of applications for asylum rocketed from 38,200 in 1990 to 73,400 in 1991 - far higher than it was under Labour in 1997 or 1998. What is more, for all of their tough talk, it now emerges that the Tories themselves secretly wrote off thousands of cases in the backlog they had allowed to build up in the early 1990s.

Taken as a whole, Labour has already put together the most ambitious package of reform of our immigration and asylum system for decades. While Labour delivers, the Tories have come up with no concrete proposals at all. At a time when the country needs a serious and informed debate all they offer is name-calling and cheap political point scoring.

Nick Peel

Exeter Avenue

Tonge Moor

Bolton

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.