In August 1900, a few days after Bresci's killing of King Umberto, former director of Criminal Investigations at Scotland Yard Howard Vincent was interviewed by the Daily Graphic and rebutted criticism of Britain for giving refuge to foreign revolutionaries. Vincent turned the criticism on his accusers, claiming that other governments were opportunistic: ‘The way in which foreign countries dump their objectionable characters down upon our coasts is most unfair. They are sending them every day’. Vincent considered this practice ‘very convenient to them’, and believed it would not stop ‘as long as we keep our door open’. He considered that foreign governments ‘were not greatly distressed at the inconvenience caused to the British government’ and supported the idea of an international agreement to limit the use of expulsion. As he stated in the interview: ‘Let each nation look after its own criminals and semi-criminals’.

Some of Vincent's remarks were well founded. On the one hand, the British policy of free asylum allowed anarchists from all over Europe to conduct a relatively free life in Britain; on the other hand, the concerns of foreign governments about alleged conspiracies organised by the anarchists in London mostly were proved to be groundless. Scotland Yard kept foreign anarchists under continuous surveillance, by shadowing them and by gathering information through informers. Moreover, when the British authorities believed that a dangerous action was being organised, they broke with their traditional discretion and passed information to the foreign government involved, as happened in 1891 on the occasion of May Day, when Scotland Yard alerted the Italian embassy about Malatesta's disappearance from London. Another question was that of the services provided ‘privately’ on occasion by agents of Scotland Yard, with payment, to the Italian embassy – and almost certainly to all other foreign embassies.

Vincent had good reasons for underlining the convenience for foreign governments in having revolutionary leaders living abroad and therefore not having to deal with their presence in their homelands. During the First World War, the Italian embassy asked the British authorities to stop the expulsion of Italian anarchists active in anti-war propaganda. The impediments faced by Malatesta on his return to Italy are a good example of this policy. In 1916 Malatesta put in a request to the Italian consulate in London for a passport.