In today’s newsletter: Shabana Mahmood is pitching radical new limits on whether asylum seekers can ever gain settled status – but it may come with political consequences
Good morning. In September, Nigel Farage floated a Reform UK policy of ending indefinite leave to remain that critics said would eject hundreds of thousands of people from the country. In October, the Conservatives began talking about deporting large numbers of people previously considered legally settled. Now, the Labour government is preparing to impose radical new limits on whether asylum seekers can ever gain settled status. The Overton window on immigration keeps marching implacably rightwards.
In a document published by the government yesterday afternoon, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, described the plans as “the most sweeping asylum reforms in modern times”. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, said that having an asylum system at all depends on “social confidence” that it is “fair, effective and humane”. A lot of Labour MPs look set to disagree with the approach, causing yet another political headache for No 10.
I spoke to Miranda Bryant, the Guardian’s Nordic correspondent, about the Danish model that appears to have inspired Mahmood’s new approach. This newsletter looks at how effective Denmark’s policy has been – and whether the political fallout there offers any lessons for Labour. First, the headlines.
“Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” according to Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Almost 80 years on, some countries seem increasingly focused on making themselves less attractive as a possible destination – including, now, the UK.
“The rhetoric in Denmark has had a big impact,” Miranda Bryant told me. “Even when policies can’t be fully implemented, they create huge uncertainty and vulnerability for people seeking asylum. And that can deter people from entering Denmark, regardless of what is legally possible for the state to do in response.”
What has the UK government announced?
Currently, refugees are given protection for five years, after which they can apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR), which offers a pathway to British citizenship. This will change.
The government will introduce “core protection” status, under which refugees get 30 months’ leave at a time, renewable only while they are judged to still need protection, with no prospect of permanent settlement for 20 years. Automatic family reunion will end, benefits will be harder to access and more closely tied to economic contribution, and a new appeals body will handle a single, faster appeal process, with tighter limits on repeated human rights and modern slavery claims.
The duty to support asylum seekers will become a discretionary power, with support withdrawn from those deemed able to work, “intentionally destitute” or non-compliant. The government also says it will restart enforced returns to countries it has largely avoided until now – specifically including Syria.
In an olive branch to potential Labour rebels, it is also promising as part of the measures a capped expansion of “safe and legal” routes, making community sponsorship the norm so that, it says: “The pace and scale of change does not exceed what a local area is willing to accept.” It will offer specific routes for refugee students and refugee skilled workers.
How have some Labour MPs reacted?
It is fair to say that the new policy proposal is not going down well across the whole of the Labour parliamentary party. Folkestone and Hythe MP Tony Vaughan said on Monday that the government proposal risked creating a kind of “perpetual limbo and alienation, which doesn’t help the refugees and it doesn’t help society”.
Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy wrote for the Guardian, saying the idea was “not just performatively cruel” but also economically misjudged: “If you can’t stabilise your status, you will always struggle to get a job, a bank account or a mortgage, making it more likely you will be dependent on state or charity support.”
On Monday, Rotherham MP Sarah Champion said: “My biggest concern is that refugees, asylum seekers and migrants become conflated, to the detriment of our reputation as a principled country that stands by the most vulnerable.” That (small) boat may very well have already sailed.
Why has Labour decided to take inspiration from Denmark?
There are about 100,000 people receiving asylum support in the UK, of whom about 8,500 are eligible to work. The rest are supported by the state.
The Home Office says it has removed or deported 48,560 people from the UK since Labour came to power – a 23% increase on the 16 months before last year’s general election. But that hasn’t dampened the noise from Reform and the rightwing press, leading Labour to look abroad for inspiration.
“Denmark’s asylum system has gradually become harsher over the past decade,” Miranda said; there was a turning point in 2015, after an increase in migration into Europe from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, among others.
Denmark – with a population of around six million – had a centre-right government at the time, and there was significant political and public concern about the 14,792 asylum seekers who arrived in 2014. The far-right Danish People’s Party was also influential, with a supporting role in Venstre’s minority government. The system began to change in reaction to these numbers and to wider political pressure around immigration.
“Until then, refugee status in Denmark wasn’t technically permanent,” Miranda said, “but people were usually granted residence permits of five to seven years, which then became permanent as a matter of course. That gave people who arrived in the country with nothing the security they needed to start again – to learn Danish, get qualifications, find work, build a life.”
“After 2015, residents’ permits were reduced to just one or two years at a time, and there was no guarantee of ever securing permanent status. And then a second big shift – known as the ‘paradigm shift’ – came in 2019. It marked a move away from integration towards repatriation, and ushered in a series of very tough policies.”
Has the Danish policy ended debate on asylum seekers?
In 2019, the Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen campaigned to be prime minister on a platform explicitly tough on immigration, going as far as to say she wanted zero asylum seekers arriving.
“The Social Democrats retained progressive positions on many issues, but became right-wing on immigration. That helped them take votes from the far right, and support for the Danish People’s Party fell away sharply,” Miranda said.
“But now the far right is climbing in popularity again, making even more extreme demands, including so-called ‘remigration’ – the mass deportation of people with immigrant backgrounds living in Denmark. Given that, it doesn’t look as if the Social Democrats’ shift to the right has ‘solved’ immigration as a political issue for them. If anything, there are concerns that the party will move further right again.”
Has the Danish system faced legal hurdles?
If you ask Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives or Reform, they will tell you that one reason successive administrations have struggled to deport people is the UK’s membership of the European convention on human rights (ECHR) and the Strasbourg court that enforces it.
Denmark is also an ECHR signatory, and I asked Miranda if there had been legal obstacles to enacting the asylum seeker policy there. She told me: “A lot of the hardline rhetoric hasn’t translated into action.”
Denmark’s own legal system has blocked some of the most controversial measures. Miranda said that hundreds of Syrian refugees had their residence permits revoked and were told they had to return to Syria as it was now deemed safe by the Danish state – but the country’s appeals court prevented anyone actually being forced back.
“So while the rhetoric seems to have helped bring down the number of asylum seekers choosing to attempt to settle in Denmark, much of the policy hasn’t been enforceable.”
What lessons might Labour take from Denmark?
The border security and asylum minister, Alex Norris, was fooling absolutely nobody when he said on BBC Breakfast on Monday morning: “The one thing I can assure you is that political considerations don’t come into this.”
As Miranda said: “It’s interesting that Labour is looking at the Danish Social Democrats as a model. They’re a centre-left party that has adopted a harsh immigration stance, but it’s not clear if it has worked politically – the government is very unpopular for a range of reasons, and the full electoral impact won’t play out until next year’s election.
“It’s also worth remembering that Denmark has a coalition-based political system. That makes its politics very different from the UK. It’s not obvious that some of Denmark’s system can be straightforwardly replicated in the UK.”
There may be one lesson of caution for Labour about to emerge from the state of Denmark, though. In today’s municipal elections, the Social Democrats appear likely to lose the Copenhagen mayoralty for the first time ever, partly because of discontent with Frederiksen’s immigration policies. “Copenhagen is a super cosmopolitan city that doesn’t reflect her views when it comes to immigration.”
“Voters are turning to left-wing and green parties instead,” she said. That might be music to Zack Polanski’s ears, the recently installed leader of the Green party in England and Wales, who last month came out to declare “migration is Britain’s superpower.”
Badenoch has also spotted a political opportunity. She said her party will support the plans as “steps in the right direction”, adding: “We can see that their Labour backbenchers don’t like this, so I have offered that we will support the government.”
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“Starmer faces Labour revolt over hardline asylum plans” says the Guardian, while the Mirror has the prime minister saying “I’ll lead Labour at the next election”. The Times splashes with “Families face deportation in asylum law shake-up”, the Telegraph has “Mahmood turns air blue in blast at liberals” and the i paper leads on “Tories pledge to help the Home Secretary get her migration crackdown past angry Labour rebels”. On Shabana Mahmood’s plans, the Mail says “Racist abuse that means I know broken asylum system must be fixed” and the Sun has “It just doesn’t add up”. The FT’s top story says “Ban on resale of tickets over face value in crackdown on industrial-scale touts”.
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A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
With more than half of all bird species in decline globally, some heartwarming news from France: insect-eating bird populations are showing tentative signs of recovery, after a ban on bee-harming pesticides.
Phoebe Weston spoke to researchers who reported a 2-3% increase in France’s population of insect-eating birds, including chaffinches and blackbirds (above), in 2022. The increase was noted four years after the EU ban on the most common class of insecticide, neonicotinoids, which are used in agriculture and to control fleas in pets.
Researchers said even such a small increase shows the impact of the ban as an effective conservation measure for such species.
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