In May 2002 The Guardian newspaper reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had ‘taken personal control of asylum policy’ and was considering a range of radical new options to reduce the number of asylum seekers arriving in the UK. These options included mobilising ‘Royal Navy warships to intercept people traffickers in the Mediterranean’ (The Guardian 2002a: 1) and pursuing a far more aggressive policy on deportation. Few watchers of political events in the UK since 1999 could have been completely surprised by this development. The question of how to reduce asylum applications has been a hot political issue in recent years: the focus of two comprehensive pieces of legislation (in 1999 and 2002) since the Blair government came to power in 1997, as well as a major issue in the 2001 national election.