LONDON: Improvements in British race relations over the last 20 years are being jeopardized by negative public attitudes to asylum seekers, a report said on Thursday. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) study found that vilifying and degrading asylum seekers was popular with sections of the public and the media.

“Hostility towards asylum seekers is getting deeper and asylum is becoming the lens through which immigration and race are viewed,” said Miranda Lewis, a senior research fellow at the IPPR.

“Negative attitudes to asylum seekers are potentially very damaging to the progress in race relations that has been made over the last 20 years,” she said.

The report said hostility was strongest among people with little contact with asylum seekers, and often based on fear they were competing for scarce local resources such as housing, healthcare and jobs.

It found that people aged over 50 were the most hostile, least well informed and most likely to use racist language and express worries over the loss of British identity.

The report said press reporting varied enormously according to type and area, but noted a rise in the use of stereotypical terms and a lack of differentiation between asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants.

Britain brought in laws in the 1970s to provide protection from race discrimination, but immigration became one of the key battlegrounds in the 2005 general election after an increase in asylum seeker applications.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the country’s ethnic diversity is one of its great strengths, but opposition Conservatives have argued that the numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers should be more closely controlled.

The IPPR’s research involved 32 focus groups in five cities and showed that opinions were heavily shaped by experiences in local areas, and by access to accurate information.

People were using the term asylum seeker interchangeably for genuine refugees, immigrants and people from ethnic minorities who have settled in Britain, the report found.

While a majority still believed the UK had a moral duty to protect refugees, attitudes varied according to background.

People in deprived areas often felt asylum seekers competed for housing, healthcare and jobs, while wealthier people were more tolerant.—Reuters