Letwin: faith in rational debate

Question: Your proposals to detain and screen all asylum seekers are drastic. Are they not simply a reaction to the tabloid hysteria?

Oliver Letwin: The problem with which I have been levelling and wrestling for the last three or four months is that we have the prime minister saying, and I think with some real justification, that the level of terrorist threat that we face in the United Kingdom at present is unprecedented.

And I think I know what that means. I was in the Grand Hotel in Brighton when it was bombed, I know what terrorism has been before, but we now face a level of threat that is quite above what it was before.

We have the prime minister telling us that the likelihood of something actually happening that is pretty bad is so great that he's willing to describe it as inevitable. That's one side of the picture.

On the other side, I've had to wrestle with the fact that although I gave David Blunkett's proposals, when he first came into office and tried, as he said, to put right the chaos in our immigration and asylum system that Jack Straw had left him, I gave his proposals a fair wind . In fact I got criticised by many people on my own side for giving him too much benefit of the doubt.

And I, from September onwards, had to wrestle with the fact that the evidence has been increasing that terrorists have been entering this country using the fact that our border controls are vastly too weak. We've therefore urged the government to tighten this up dramatically. They are abusing the chaos in the asylum system to disappear into the woodwork - as we saw in the Manchester case.

I have to find some means of making sure that you don't want to give me an interview a few months from now, when something dreadful has happened and you could legitimately ask me, 'what have you, Oliver Letwin', or 'what have you, the Conservative party' done to fulfil the role of an opposition and a shadow home secretary to make sure that you put pressure on the government to do everything that needs to be done to protect us against such a thing.

And I have come reluctantly to the conclusion the only way we can act responsibly is by taking the steps which I have identified.

Question: Given that there are 90 million people coming through Britain's ports and airports every year, isn't it to oversimplify the issue to say that by dealing with asylum seekers you will deal with terrorism?

Oliver Letwin: First of all, that is why we have laid such emphasis on making the ports of entry secure.

Airports, which are fairly secure, contain a very large number of people who are entering this country, and of course many of them are pre-clear on the basis of having entry visas.

But we have ports of entry that are not properly surveyed, and we have ports of entry which we're not checking all the vehicles with the machinery that exists, and we have urgently recommended the government do something to tighten that up.

But secondly, the fact that what we're proposing will not be foolproof, and I freely admit it will not, is not an argument against doing it.

When a bank has a bank vault, it closes it and locks it. Now this does not mean that it's totally protected against burglary. Some burglars will be good enough to get through the locks. But you don't use that as an argument for leaving the bank vault open and what I'm saying to David Blunkett is 'shut the bank vault'.

Question: Following Tony Blair's intervention and your latest announcement, aren't both parties guilty of running with tabloid pack?

Oliver Letwin: Absolutely not. As it will have been evident to anybody who looked at the and heard the full announcements that Iain and I made - and the documentation we produced - this is something we have been studying for the last three or four months and which I started rolling the ball on at that time.

Also, 12 months ago, I alerted people to the need to enter a reservation against article three of the European Convention on Human Rights as the prime minister belatedly, 12 months later, caught up with on Sunday.

The prime minister has tried, I think, in a rather cack-handed way, to provide a spoiler for our activities because he got wind of what we were doing.

The fact is that we're driving the agenda on this and we're driving it because I have been attending, very seriously, to this moral question: "How can we be sure that we are doing everything we need to do in order to make sure that the country is properly protected?"

And beyond that: "How can we engage in rational, honest, and calm and sensible debate about how to have a better asylum system in the future, where we are actually spending the money on genuine refugees instead of spending £1,200 million with very little of it going to genuine refugees and only £34 million, a tiny fraction of that sum, actually on refugees, the 15 million of them, in camps around the world".

If you were a Martian and you came to Britain today, and you looked at the system, you would conclude we are all crazy and that's because it's a system which is founded on a set of international agreements, which unlike the prime minister, I've actually gone through in detail, which were formulated in the 50s and 60s and were suitable to the system.

When you get to grips with the Geneva convention and with the '67 protocol and with the Dublin convention and with the interactions between them, and you see how that system is designed to deal with the post-holocaust world rather than the world we now face, you begin to realise that you've got to tackle the underlying agreements. If the prime minister is beginning to egg up to that fact, and if he starts getting his conventions straight, so to speak, then actually we begin to make some progress.

Question: Regardless of the motivations behind the policy, given the current climate within the tabloid press, aren't you simply reinforcing the view that there is a direct link between asylum seekers and terrorism?

Oliver Letwin: I think the British public is more mature, more tolerant, more decent, than that implies. Of course there have been excesses in some quarters.

But we need to assume what I think is true, which is that most people in this country are entirely sensible and rational and tolerant and humane, but they are genuinely worried. And they're worried on two scores - they're worried about their security, that's the first half of what we're saying.

They're also worried about the whole asylum system, meaning that our immigration controls are not operating properly and that we're not looking after refugees properly.

I want to get back to a Britain in which we do welcome, as Iain Duncan Smith was saying, genuine refugees. genuinely welcome them because we know there's an orderly system for admitting them into this country.

That's a fine tradition we want to get back to that. What we can't do as serious politicians, and I think the prime minister has been forced into recognising this too, is just sit here and ignore these legitimate concerns of decent sensible people, because if we do we give ground to the extremists, and they have nothing to offer us, the BNP has nothing to offer this country.

We have to make sure in the mainstream parties that we're answering the legitimate concerns so that those extremists can't get a purchase.

Question: Should the media be more restrained on this issue?

Oliver Letwin: Yes. The media has a job to do, alongside those of us who are in politics. It's a job of two kinds. We've got to be willing to debate these tough issues, but we've also got to be willing to debate them in a calm and rational fashion and I've tried throughout, and I shall go on trying. When we're saying these things and we're talking about these matters, to do so in a calm and rational tone, that is very important.

Question: Don't you run the risk to resurrecting the nasty tag?

Oliver Letwin: Well, you always run all sorts of risks. I hope we won't, I hope we won't be castigated as nasty for saying these things, partly because I think people know that what we're saying is true, partly because the tone of voice in which we're saying it is calculatedly low key, we're trying to make it clear that we're earnest and we're rational and we're not trying to stir.

But, you know, in the end you've got to stop worrying too much about how people see you and try and say the things you think are necessary and true. Otherwise, what's the point of being in politics?

Question: Given the when not if sense about terror attacks, do you think there is a case for a national campaign to alert the public on how they should respond?

Oliver Letwin: I think much more than alerting the public to a response, what we need to do is to increase significantly our level of preparedness to deal with the after-effects of an outrage if it occurs and to contain it.

I've been rabbitting on about this for the past six or seven months because I'm increasingly concerned that there is lethargy in Whitehall and I don't mean that they're not trying to do the right things, they are, but I think there is inertia and they're doing them much too slowly, and there isn't the sense of urgency, there isn't the sense of coordination which is required, which is why I called some while ago for a coordinating cabinet minister.

There are nine government departments involved, I get a stream of information coming into my office about things that aren't happening on the ground.

I discovered recently through a parliamentary question that one third of all the protocols that should have been signed a year ago between various parts of the emergency services in each locality hadn't been signed and that could cost precious minutes or hours at times of emergency, so there is a desperate need for urgent attention to increasing our level of preparedness.

Question: On the issue of honest debate, issues such as black-on-black crime often fall foul of political correctness - the charge of racism - how would you get round that?

Oliver Letwin: I'm actually quite optimistic about the opportunities for rational debate. I've spent the last 15 months trying to debate everything calmly and trying not to exaggerate, trying to accept where I agreed with David Blunkett, with the government, trying to make it clear that we could have a rational debate.

And I was recently on a programme with Diane Abbot, a black Labour MP, indeed who was my opponent a long time ago in Hackney North, and I found that she and I were agreeing about the need to discuss and resolve black-on-black gun crime.

And that gives me hope. I think we can get to the point where we can discuss these tricky issues as long as we continue to do so in a sensible tone of voice.

Question: Are you worried about losing your liberal image?

Oliver Letwin: I'm always worried about all the things that will be said about me. Some people will say that I'm too tough, some people will say I'm too weak, some will say I'm too liberal, others will say I'm not liberal enough, but in the end, you have to sort of take all those worries and put them to one side and ask yourself, what is the right course of action?

What is the right tone of voice in which to be announcing your intention to follow that course of action? And then you have to follow those instincts.

Question: Are you really in driving seat on home affairs? No pressure from the leader?

Oliver Letwin: I believe that I am in the driving seat on home affairs so far as the Conservative Party is concerned, my problem is that I'm not in the driving seat so far as the country is concerned because, alas, the government is still running the country and so far as these matters are concerned, both crime and the asylum system, I'm afraid it's not doing a very good job at the moment.