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Intolerance towards the persecuted is being allowed to flourish as extreme right-wing opinions increasingly set the agenda and ministers are too scared to challenge them, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Since coming to power, Tony Blair has made not one stirring speech to this nation about the reasons why so many people are displaced around the world. Not one. But in May he did seem relieved that we had substantially fewer asylum applicants now before warning refugees and desperate migrants that numbers would have to go down much further. That will have appeased his unreliable but much courted media friends on the right for whom one more asylum seeker - migrant or anybody with a swarthy complexion - means the death of Britain as they know it.

So, all you people huddled in the back of lorries and suffocating in sewers as you try to get half a chance of survival, be warned. Our tough PM will not put up with you turning up here, bothering us with your sob stories and wounded lives. Stay put and die because our targets are more important to us than your endless woes even if we have helped create them.

None of the other big names - Gordon Brown, Patricia Hewitt (an economic migrant herself), Peter Hain (ditto), Robin Cook, Clare Short - have ever made such speeches either. Jack Straw did make stirring interventions on behalf of asylum seekers when he was in opposition, but once in power he and Blunkett have turned themselves into neo-conservative bulldogs. They then have the nerve to tell us that they do this to stop the rise of the BNP which is only popular because it cleverly uses the mess, unrest and scapegoating of migrants which has been generated by New Labour and the Tories. Lib Dems, meanwhile, say as little as possible on this issue.

Now the House of Commons all-party home affairs select committee has come up with an alarmist report on asylum seekers concluding that too many of "them" are getting in and "if allowed to continue unchecked it could overwhelm the capacity of the receiving countries to cope, leading inevitably to social unrest". After seven years in power, responsibility rests with this government alone for this dangerous chaos.

Joy Gardner, a Jamaican, died in July 1993 after police and immigration officers manacled and taped her up in front of her little boy. This most abominable episode was the inevitable result of a country gone demented over "uncontrolled" immigration.

Today we are in the grip of worse fear-mongering. The Blairite Institute for Public Policy Research believes this. A new IPPR report concludes the government has not adequately persuaded and informed Britons about the causes of migration to the UK. They do nothing to stop chaos in the countries which produce outflows. They sell them arms, for example. If they carry on in this way "[they] will be responsible for allowing a political context to develop in which the rise of far right parties and public hostility towards non-white immigrants is seen as acceptable".

Then there is the media. So revolting and inaccurate is the coverage in the Mail, Express, London Evening Standard, Sun and Telegraph that Roy Greenslade, hardened one-time editor of the Mirror, has just called for the Press Complaints Commission to take action against editors who systematically lie about migrants and ferment prejudice.

I do not accept that all British governments since the Thatcher revolution have to be the inheritors of that diseased legacy. There is nothing in our collective genes which makes it impossible for electorates to vote for leaders who suggest that we have responsibilities to the dispossessed - whether as a result of violence, fear or deprivation.

The UK, still the fourth richest country in the world, is 34th in the world in terms of the refugees it supports. Half of those who arrive can prove they have a legitimate right to stay.

Economic migrants are no different from (except they are poorer and need more chances) the thousands of Britons moving to Spain, Italy, South Africa and France or the New Zealanders, white South Africans and Europeans on the move. What we need is for the public to better understand the dynamics of migration and the benefit of having new blood flowing in and out of any nation. Sure there are many costs and disadvantages, but the net gain is researched and proven.

We should let all asylum seekers and economic migrants work - which is what they want. Leaders must transform the ugly anti-immigration attitudes that have developed towards incomers and MPs need pressure put on them by the millions of decent Britons who care what happens to refugees. And they should forthwith stop buying the newspapers which dehumanise migrants.

If we think we are civilised this is the least we can do.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a writer and journalist.