In a move praised by both Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced on Monday a slew of policies aimed at making life in the UK more unwelcoming, hostile and precarious for refugees.
The stand-out announcements include making refugee status more temporary, requiring people to reapply for the right to stay and its resulting assessment every 30 months on a 20-year wait to obtain permanent settlement, replacing the current five-year pathway. Refugees will have their right to be joined by their spouse and children severely curtailed, with family reunification denied to anyone not earning enough. Accommodation and subsistence support for asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute will be made discretionary, allowing the Home Office to threaten to inflict homelessness on those it chooses. Perhaps the most viscerally objectionable policy involves confiscating valuables from refugees.
These policies, while shocking, are not in fact largely new ideas – and none of them will work, either to satisfy anti-migrant politics, or to reduce the number of people in need of protection or the cost and social impact of the asylum system. We have seen these approaches play out in other countries, without success, but there are alternative models available for Labour politicians thinking this may finally represent their line in the sand.
The Labour government has aped its disastrous predecessors on immigration since the start, and this is no different. The proposal to make refugee status last just 30 months was floated by the last government when Priti Patel was Home Secretary, as part of her own doomed attempts to make refugees disappear. In fact, the five-year term we currently grant was introduced in 2005 as a supposed deterrent under Tony Blair, replacing the previous system that granted immediate settlement to any recognised refugee. Clearly, that didn’t work.
Numerous European states have experimented with policies to refuse accommodation and subsistence support to some categories of asylum seekers – predictably resulting in high levels of destitution among those cohorts, creating tent cities of homeless in places like Paris and Brussels, but no reduction in asylum seeker numbers.
Meanwhile, limiting rights to family reunification and the confiscation of valuables are policies based on the hardline “Danish model” – a fascination for the Labour right for some time. This is the Labour version of the Tories’ fascination with the uncompromising Australian approach that we heard so much about under the last administration. In Denmark and Australia, both the traditional parties of the left and right share a common, hostile approach to refugees and have introduced a variety of harsh policies to curtail rights. Australia proved to be a poor pattern for the Tories to replicate in a UK context – disgraceful ideas like dangerous pushbacks at sea and offshoring imploded, contributing to the last government’s collapse. Now Mahmood is going to find that Denmark is no better an example.
In neither Denmark, nor Australia, nor for that matter other countries where politicians of the anti-immigrant hard right have been elected, like Italy, has the debate about immigration been put to bed. This is important, as these countries are too often portrayed as having “solved the problem” by the politicians aiming to emulate them. But it isn’t true.
Hostility to immigration, and the demands from ever more extreme right-wingers for further attacks on refugee rights, dominate discourse in those countries still. The lesson politicians should draw is that cruel policies do not make people seeking protection disappear, and do not placate the anti-migrant politicians, media, or racist elements in society. There will always be another step to take down deeper into the abyss and Reform, the Conservatives, and GB News will shift to meet the new ground opened up. Sadly, therefore, this latest set of Labour proposals – coming as they do before the last lot have even completed the legislative process to become law – are likely to just be another stepping stone on the way into the gutter.
Labour politicians who believe they must simply hold their nose and pass these latest morally degrading policies in order to stem the rise of racism are deluding themselves. There is no evidence whatsoever from any other country that appeasing the far right on anti-migrant politics damages their appeal, and in fact a lot of evidence of the opposite. Aside from the political, there’s the fact this draconian approach is harmful both to refugees themselves and to our society, costing far more to administer and hampering yet further the possibility for people to rebuild their lives and independently achieve their potential.
Costly re-examination of claims every 30 months, trapping refugees in misery apart from their families and denying them stable status that would allow them to get a good job and progress in their lives will only make the asylum system more of a drain on resources, public confidence and community cohesion. Nobody really believes that snatching a few family heirlooms off of people escaping war is going to make up for the cost of these additional hurdles to integration, do they?
It isn’t easy in the current climate to speak up for an alternative, humane and evidence-based approach to refugee protection, but it is the only path out of the doom spiral that we and so many other countries are caught in. There are other examples Labour politicians could draw on, most notably Spain. The left-wing Spanish Prime Minister is forcefully bucking the European trend of anti-migrant politics: speaking up clearly and consistently about Spain’s need for immigrants and its moral obligation to combat prejudice and racism. By investing in the opposite approach to that being put forward by our Labour Party – a focus on integration, providing language and employment support to asylum seekers from an early stage, with relatively swift and affordable pathways to citizenship – Spain is reaping the rewards. In contrast to the countries our politicians are copying, there is a fairly strong pro-immigration consensus in Spanish politics, and the Spanish economy is growing at a faster rate than any other European country, attributed by economists in large part to successful integration of immigrants.
The same benefits could be found in the UK too, as a new study from the London School of Economics, commissioned by the Public and Commercial Services union that represents Home Office workers and Border Force Officials, has found. It found that if the government were to reduce the length of time taken to make decisions on asylum claims, ensure comprehensive legal support to asylum seekers, and provide both language and employment support from the point of arrival, refugees would make a net contribution to the economy.
And it is fixing the economy that should really be concerning Labour politicians, instead of hiding their failure to do so behind another cowardly attack on immigrants. The cost of living and the state of public services matter most to erstwhile Labour voters. If the rank and file of the party has any sense, it will forcefully cut off this death spiral leadership now, fight back against the latest capitulation to Nigel Farage and stand up for its principles to build a fairer, more equal society.
[Further reading: Tracked: The Labour MPs criticising their own immigration policy]
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