Right-wing social media accounts went to town this week on Cat Eccles, a Labour MP who, they said, had accused the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, of “trying to appease the electorate” with this week’s policy blitz against “illegal migrants”. Yes Eccles did say that, but she also later attacked Mahmood for “pandering to populist opinion”.
“Populist opinion” is potentially a very different category from “the electorate”, just as “asylum seekers” can’t fairly be termed “illegal migrants” when so many of them are given refugee status once they are processed, rendering their claims for asylum perfectly legal.
But no matter. Both the Tories and Labour argue that the numbers are large and out of control. In the year to this June alone, 43,309 asylum seekers arrived in small boats. Over 187,000 have entered Britain by this route since 2018, which is more than the entire population of the city of Oxford. All the while governments, Conservative and now Labour, have said that the small boats shouldn’t be coming and that they will stop them.
So I wouldn’t fault Mahmood (who announced her package of immigration reforms on Monday) for talking in populist English. As she put it bluntly to the Lib Dem MP who accused her of stoking division: “Unlike him, unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a fucking Paki and told to go back home.”
However, Mahmood’s words alone aren’t going to stop the small boats. The question is whether this week’s Danish-inspired policies will actually help address either the immigration numbers or the dissatisfaction of voters who think these numbers are too high—or will embolden Farage and the populists with still more broken promises.
It is hard to be optimistic. I’m not an expert on Denmark, so can’t be sure precisely why their social democrat government successfully slashed asylum seeker numbers from nearly 15,000 a decade ago to 2,219 last year, according to UN figures. But I doubt we will repeat the trick by simply applying to Britain the policy of periodically reviewing the granting of asylum status and not granting “settled status” to refugees for 20 years, which is the policy meat of this week’s announcement.
Whether you like the idea or not, it is implausible that mass deportations of refugees, among them numerous families and many children—as mooted by Reform UK—will take place in the next five or even 10 years’ time. Look at the small print and it turns out that, in Denmark, few refugees have lost refugee status once granted.
Reducing the benefits and housing entitlements of refugees—as also proposed this week by Mahmood—may make some difference. But the biggest “pull” factors to the UK appear to be the scale of illegal working, the English language, and the size of existing migrant communities which the asylum seekers come to join. None of these will be affected by the Danish measures.
Notably absent this week was the proposal for a national digital identity system, floated only two months ago by Keir Starmer as critical to tackling illegal working. Nigel Farage attacked the idea as expensive and bureaucratic, and it appears to have been immediately discarded.
We also didn’t hear much this week about France. Remember Starmer and Yvette Cooper’s much vaunted “one in one out” returns agreement with Macron, only four months old, which appears to have resulted in 113 returns? Or the nearly £500m Rishi Sunak paid to the French for more border staff to stop the small boats from setting off, also to no obvious effect?
I suspect the same will happen with this week’s Danish initiative. It will be much vaunted in some quarters and then rapidly superseded as small boat numbers prove impervious. It has become a merry-go-round, year by year, of new prime ministers and new home secretaries, constantly producing new initiatives to tackle the small boats, but none of them working. Expect another turn of the wheel in a few months’ time.
Meanwhile, Farage is out there with a long list of snake oil products he will try to sell ever more flamboyantly. Leaving the ECHR. Scrapping the Human Rights Act. Sending the Royal Navy to police the Channel. Deporting “illegals” to countries however unsafe, or sending them to somewhere like Ascension Island or the Falklands. Reform UK’s leader is never knowingly outsold in “appeasing populist opinion”. More failed policies from this government will only give the likes of Farage more grist for the mill.
