Commentators have differed over the degree to which the European Union (EU) has influenced UK policy making. Some have suggested the EU has had only a marginal impact on policy – Marsh et al (2000, pp 223, 230) record the EU's effect on the Home Office as ‘minimal’, for instance. The central question of this chapter is therefore: to what extent has the European Union influenced policy?

Asylum

Member States have agreed to create a Common European Asylum System by 2010. This is an area of ‘binding’ regulation, so Member States must implement the agreed measures into national law. As discussed in Chapter 4, the UK has opted into the asylum harmonisation process by signing various directives. However, it has done so reluctantly, neither obstructing nor leading the process of asylum harmonisation, but viewing it with ambivalence.

Interviewees described Labour's approach on European asylum policy as reticent. The UK was ambivalent at the most important summit on asylum harmonisation in Tampere (1999) during the Finnish Presidency of the EU, when the first programme to develop a common approach and increase joint working on asylum policy was agreed. Similarly, the UK stayed in the background at the Hague summit (2004), which included asylum but also other issues, such as a joint approach to integration policy and agreement on Common Basic Principles of integration. The UK nonetheless signed up to these measures, usually in return for diplomatic support for other measures. Thus, while the UK was never to the fore in agreeing such measures, it did agree them, despite the fact that they have occasionally gone against the national policy direction set by Labour (see for example European Directive 2003/9/EC on asylum seeker employment).

Economic migration

Seen through the lens of history, the EU was conceived, first and foremost, as an economic union (Hantrais, 2000), committed to facilitating freedom of movement (European Union Committee, 2005). However, the unrestricted European labour market is generally characterised by ‘stickiness’. Europeans have the right to freedom of movement but, even after successive waves of enlargement, have not exercised it in significant numbers. The turning point for the UK was in May 2004: the ‘big bang’ enlargement that took in more states than ever before and when the potential of free movement turned to reality. The accession of eight Eastern European countries led to major flows of migrants to the UK.