20.11.2025

Walter Crane ‘Columbia’s courtship’ (1893)

Twenty years of uncertainty

Mahmood wants to pull the rug from under Reform UK by adopting its migration agenda, writes Eddie Ford

Keir Starmer is under relentless pressure from Reform UK, with every poll consistently showing it comfortably ahead of the other parties.¹ But one of the great advantages of bourgeois government is that you can take the agenda of the opposition and make it yours by putting it into practice. This is a huge advantage and something that governments are very practised at doing - as we can see with Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, as she sets about her “moral mission” to create the most hostile environment she possibly can for migrants seeking asylum and settled status in the UK.

Of course, the Tories and Reform - whilst welcoming her new stance along with Tommy Robinson - are saying that she has not gone far enough: you have to leave the European Court of Human Rights, reinstate the Rwanda policy or something similar, etc, etc, if you really want to get tough. Mahmood is cynically using her own migrant background to justify her inhuman new asylum laws: hence her comment in parliament that “a country without secure borders is a less safe country for those who look like me” - she was born in Birmingham to parents of Urdu-speaking Pakistani origin and spent her early childhood in Saudi Arabia - she was particularly noted for being the first ever Lord Chancellor to swear her oath on The Koran.

The core idea she puts forward is that people who have been granted temporary asylum must have that status extended for 20 years before being allowed permanent settlement in the UK (as opposed to the current five years, after which people can apply for indefinite leave to remain, offering a pathway to British citizenship). This will then be reviewed every 30 months and at any point migrants could be returned to their home country if it is now deemed ‘safe’.

Denmark

If implemented as intended, Mahmood’s new policy would represent the longest wait in any European asylum system - including Demark, which is the model that has been providing her inspiration. Ten years ago, when more than a million people arrived in Europe fleeing war, repression, poverty and state failure - largely from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea - the Danish government dramatically changed the rules. Ever since then, temporary residence permits have only been granted for one to two years at a time and there is no longer any guarantee of getting permanent residence. In order for that to happen, refugees have to be fluent in Danish and are also required to have had a full-time job for several years.

There has been widespread criticism of the Danish approach, of course - especially the related law against “ghettoes” (or “parallel societies”), which allows the state to sell, convert or even demolish apartment blocks in areas where at least half of residents are considered to have a “non-western” background - Nigel Farge must be taking note.²

Unsurprisingly, this year the European Court of Justice found that the law constitutes direct discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin - ie, what most people would regard as racist.³ But the harsh and repressive approach to asylum has unfortunately proved to be effective, at least if the statistics are anything to go by, and therefore suggests that the Danish model could work for Shabana Mahmood despite the differences between the two countries.

Thus back in 2014 a total of 14,792 asylum-seekers arrived in Denmark, with the largest numbers coming from Syria and Eritrea. By 2021 that figure had dropped to 2,099. Of the nearly 100,000 residence permits that were granted in Denmark last year, just 1% were recorded as going to refugees. The 99% included 9,623 refugees from Ukraine, who are categorised separately, migrants from other parts of the European Economic Area, family reunification and people on work and study permits.

There is the US too, with the White House celebrating reports that, thanks to Donald Trump, this year could be the first year in at least 50 that the United States has experienced negative net migration - meaning more people are expected to leave the country than enter. Indeed, a few months ago the administration promoted a news segment from CNN claiming that Trump’s “hawkish” immigration policies will lead to net negative migration, down from 2.8 million in 2024 to around zero and the White House even posted a graphic on X that appeared to be saying it had already met that target. The graphic showed a border patrol agent and was emblazoned by Trump with the words, “NEGATIVE NET MIGRATION for the first time in 50 years”, and “Promises made, promises kept”.⁴ Of course, that comes with ICE, meaning widespread fear and loss of basic democratic rights.

Actually, the CNN story originally shared by the White House did not make that claim and Trump’s rejoicing about negative net migration is a bit premature.⁵ One think tank predicts there will be negative net migration this year and others estimate that, although net migration will be lower than in years past, it will not be negative - with the Census Bureau calendar showing that the net migration data will be published next month. Either way, it indicates that the president’s hostile and bellicose attitude - the US model, if you like - is working, not only to dramatically reduce or eliminate illegal migration, but also arguably contributing to America’s long-term relative decline. After all cheap, worst-paid, labour is vital for whole sectors of its economy: agriculture, construction, hospitality, etc.

Toughness

Apart from warning that “dark forces are stirring up anger” over migration, which Shabana Mahmood appears happy to feed, the home secretary has claimed that the government has failed to show the “necessary toughness” to enforce the removal of families whose asylum claims have been refused. According to a policy document released on November 17, “many families of failed asylum-seekers continue to live in this country, receiving free accommodation and financial support, for years on end” - something must be done.

One measure being planned is to trial “incentive payments” of thousands of pounds to encourage asylum seekers to leave the UK if their claims are rejected. At present, claimants are given up to £3,000 to remove themselves from the UK. The government has also announced that it will legislate to toughen up how courts apply the European Convention on Human Rights regarding family life, enabling more deportation of people with family members still in the UK.

Other key measures unveiled this week include: restricting asylum-seekers to one single appeal rather than different appeals on multiple grounds; creating a new body for fast-tracking cases for dangerous criminals and those with little hope of success; legislating to restrict last-minute modern slavery claims; joining other countries in seeking reform of ECHR article 3 rights in order to more narrowly define the risk of torture and degrading treatment; and changing the home office’s duty to provide support to asylum-seekers to a mere discretionary power and thus enabling them to potentially be removed from accommodation.

Another idea borrowed from Denmark, that manages to be both barbaric and incredibly petty at the same time, is that asylum-seekers could have jewellery or other valuables taken to pay for the costs of processing their cases - though apparently this would not involve the seizing of wedding rings, which doubtlessly the Tories or Reform will seize upon as an example of woke backsliding proving that Labour is not serious.⁶

We could have a situation under the home secretary’s new rules, for example, that, if one part of Syria is considered safe by the government, you could be sent straight back any time to torture or death. Even more to the point, are you ever going to be able to establish a normal life when you have got this Sword of Damocles hanging permanently over your head?

Judging from Mahmood’s comments this week, the draconian changes to the asylum laws could possibly include children who were born in Britain (or maybe born abroad, but raised and educated in Britain). All this obviously creates the very real danger of another Windrush scandal, if not worse, and leaves refugees in near-permanent limbo, with children liable to be uprooted from schools and adults unable to build careers, and makes integration - the supposed goal of Mahmood and her rightwing critics - a lot harder, perhaps impossible.

Trying to out-Reform Reform seems like an impossible task, as you can surely never satisfy Farage-type demands, but this is certainly an attempt by the home secretary to pull out the rug from under Reform by essentially adopting its politics on immigration, so that you can basically turn around to those crowds who have been protesting outside hotels and other such places and say - yes, we agree with you.

We have had the nauseating spectacle of Shabana Mahmood saying society is being cleaved apart - not by the anti-foreign agitation of the Tories, Reform and the far right, but by migrants: they are to blame for your crap jobs, lack of affordable housing, long wait at the NHS even to see your GP. It does not matter, of course, that if you actually go to hospital, a very large proportion of the staff are migrants - whether doing the mopping up or all the way up to the consultant that supervises your treatment.

Yes, Keir Starmer made that foul speech about “an island of strangers”, but these people are definitely not strangers to you and me.⁷ They are who we were brought up with - our friends and neighbours, who we see in the shops and down the pub, and we should fight any attempt to tear us apart.

Failure

But we should criticise the labour movement and workers’ movement for not going out and energetically integrating migrants into our structures, because we have become too bureaucratised.

Sadly, people tend to join a union now for insurance purposes rather than any notion that you can determine its direction. Most unions now are remote and distant - far from being militant organs of class struggle. The same applies, of course, to workers’ parties, not least the bourgeois workers’ party - ie, the Labour Party. That does not mean that we should fall into the opposite Socialist Workers Party-type trap of only liberalistically saying, ‘Refugees are welcome here’, which is obviously not the case in some parts of the country. What we need to do is campaign for positive assimilation, and that means by definition a two-way process - not everyone becoming some model of 1950s England, as Reform seems to imagine.

But it also means recognising why employers want migrant labour. In general, it is either because they have got specific skills, or, mainly, because they provide cheaper labour. We need a positive approach to migration, as laid out in the CPGB Draft programme, which states that migrant workers are not the problem: rather “the capitalists who use them to increase competition between workers are” (Section 3.5, ‘Migrant workers and racism’)⁸