Tony blair is so worried about asylum-seekers that he spent most of a Sunday in January combing through the asylum rules with officials, looking for new ideas. Last year, 110,000 new asylum-seekers arrived in Britain, 20% more than in 2001. The Treasury has just promised the Home Office an extra ￡785m ($1.3 billion) to help with the bill for processing and supporting would-be refugees. That is more than the entire budget last year of UNHCR, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (see pages 45-47).
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