In government, politicians often mistake gestures for progress. It is disappointing to see British Secretary of State for the Home Department Shabana Mahmood succumb to that temptation.
The home secretary’s flurry of proposals are designed to signal purpose, but constitute a wish list of demands that her department cannot deliver.
Those fleeing persecution are given a five-year right to stay in the UK and can apply for settled status after that.
Mahmood wants refugees to stay initially only for a 30-month period and then review their status to see whether they will be allowed to remain for another 30 months.
After two decades in Britain, they could apply to stay permanently.
Denmark is held up as the model. A decade ago a center-left government there was under pressure, with a surging populist right and immigration dominating voters’ concerns. Danish Social Democrats claimed that getting tough on refugees helped the party win the election.
However, the reality was messier. Copenhagen stripped Syrians of protection, yet could not remove them, leaving people stuck in “deportation centers,” unable to work or live normally. The result was a permanently marginalized population in enforced limbo.
The British government now proposes to repeat this error, only at vastly greater scale.
Mahmood’s office aims to reassess tens of thousands of refugees every two-and-a-half years. With about 100,000 asylum claims annually — and many from countries that have a high grant rate — the system would soon need to conduct about 70,000 reviews each year.
The London-based Refugee Council says that the Home Office would need to review the status of 1.4 million people by 2035 at a cost of ￡872 million (US$1.15 billion). Yet this is the same state that cannot process the 50,000 appeals already in the line, where waits hover at about a year and tribunal judges are in short supply.
Building a new bureaucracy to adjudicate applicants’ status is not bold politics, but magical thinking.
Mahmood has said that she wants to change the European convention on human rights, not abandon it.
It is the Conservatives and Reform UK that talk of going it alone, but meaningful change cannot be made unilaterally. Any solo attempt would be self-defeating, risking Northern Ireland’s peace and undermining the post-Brexit deal with the EU.
Labour could achieve something substantial that voters care about and close the asylum hotels. Not by 2029, but by next year.
The Refugee Council says the math is simple: 40 percent of hotel residents come from five countries — Sudan, Eritrea, Iran, Afghanistan and Syria — from where between 60 and 98 percent are granted asylum. A one-off scheme to give permission to stay for a limited period, subject to security checks, would empty hotels rapidly.
Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak did just this 2023. There would be no need to engage with a damaging arms race with the far right, which would see Labour lose progressive support, but it would solve the single asylum-related issue that the public cares most about.
In post-Brexit politics, it is hard to see how one out-Farages British Member of Parliament Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK. Yet that is what the Labour government is attempting to do.
Copying Reform UK’s cruelty on asylum lets Farage own the issue, outbid Labour and drive the debate rightward at no cost. Worse, Labour increases the salience of an issue that it cannot solve on its own — and gifts right-wingers the advantage, while setting itself up to look cruel and incompetent.
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