The irony, it seems, was lost on her. In a Liverpool bar, the Society of Labour Lawyers had gathered a panel on the fringe of Labour conference to discuss “the coast of utopia” and asylum law. Zoe Bantleman, a migration lawyer, framed her opening remarks around a metaphor for “utopia” based on Thomas More’s original coinage.
The famous city in Utopia was, she noted, “defended by high, thick walls and ditches”. To the enlightened utopian, she suggested, the walls ought to be understood not as a defence against invaders but as a barrage of legal protections for asylum seekers. To call this a form of mental gymnastics does a disservice to gymnasts.
Still, it’s important context. The people at that event represented the party’s considered, default position: the more refugees we let in, the fewer questions we ask and the more generous we are, the more righteous we must be. Conversely, anything else is cruelty and racism.
Back on planet Earth, the home secretary recognises we have a serious problem. Asylum claims in the UK are rocketing as they fall across Europe. Years of increasingly generous legal and financial support are combining with cheap logistics and political stupidity to turn Britain, for the first time, into the destination of choice for displaced populations bordering Europe. More than 100,000 foreigners are being put up for free, with petty cash, taxis and dental and healthcare thrown in, courtesy of British taxpayers, and more are arriving every week.
Since 2019, nearly 400 hotels, the sites of Christmas parties, wakes and weddings, have been transformed into halfway houses for strangers. The guests, mostly single males raised in patriarchal and religious cultures, arrive after weeks navigating the hard-nosed world of people-smuggling. They are bussed from dinghy to Holiday Inn and housed, without restriction or cultural education, among atomised communities of freeborn women and girls. If you wanted to conduct an experiment designed to generate civic unrest and ethnic conflict, it’s hard to see how you could do better.
Shabana Mahmood can see this state of affairs poses a danger both to Labour’s electoral prospects and to keeping the peace across the country. At impressive speed, she has come up with a set of measures, many cribbed from Denmark’s migration clampdown, to make Britain less of an asylum-shoppers’ utopia.
In a nutshell, she proposes to turn asylum into a “temporary” status, reviewed every 30 months; to make refugees wait 20 years for permanent residence; to remove the automatic right to bring over family; to require those with wealth to pay some of their way; and to evict from free housing anyone who breaks the law, works when they shouldn’t or fails to work when they should. To enforce all this she has promised more badass officials smashing down doors, digital IDs, visa bans for countries that don’t take back deportees, a shorter, sharper appeals process, bribes to make people leave and, er, a “consultation” on removing families, like the 700 Albanian households who have lost their asylum appeals but are still living in the UK with all expenses paid by the state.
At face value, most of these measures sound sensible, blindingly obvious, even. But the UK, with our dysfunctional administrative and legal systems, widely spoken language, free public services and open economy, is not Denmark.
Take the proposal to regularly review asylum status in case a person’s homeland has become safer. It’s caveated: those refugees who find a job or enrol in “appropriate” study will be moved off the temporary visa on to what’s called the “work and study route”. With this status, they will be able to bring family members over and gain residence faster.
As several Labour MPs pointed out, the Home Office is already drowning in asylum cases. The easiest method for “clearing backlogs” is the wave-through. How is it going to manage to review every refugee’s status and deal with any legal and logistical blowback? The answer is obvious. It will just find a way to shift people en masse into the “work and study route”, and hey presto, you’re back at square one.
Mahmood is also promising to change how our courts apply Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the provision on “private and family life” whose purpose was to stop states spying on their own citizens but which is now used to argue that an asylum seeker who has spent years appealing against deportation should get to stay because he has a close bond with his ex who kicked him out last year. This sort of reform has been tried before, in the 2014 Immigration Act and in the Nationality and Borders Act of 2022 (the latter, naturally, opposed by Labour). Each time the new law makes a bit of headway and then asylum tribunals and courts go back to inventing new rights that expand upon Strasbourg case law, making the problem even worse.
So it will be with any new legislation Mahmood manages to pass (and based on abortive welfare reform, passing it is not a given). The same thing will happen with her attempt to allow for only narrow exemptions (the word “exception” appears five times in 25 pages). “Exceptional” protections designed for children or “the vulnerable” will be quickly expanded and applied to people with “anxiety” or “trauma”, to parents, grandparents and so on. This is because nothing Mahmood is proposing will change the defective “human rights” legal culture that got us into this mess.
Despite these huge risks to her plan, the home secretary nonetheless finds it necessary to give a sop to the inverse utopianists who dominate her party in the form of more “safe legal routes” into Britain for the world’s refugees. She’s proposing to invent three new ways to claim asylum, which she claims will be strictly capped and introduced slowly. Does anyone want to predict how that is going to go? Even before ministers have shored up the castle walls, they’re thinking of ways to blast new holes in them.
At the heart of Mahmood’s attempt to fix the problem of illegal migration is an unresolvable lie, repeated several times throughout her policy document because it’s what Labour lawyers need to hear: “The UK will always remain a place where those who are truly fleeing danger can find safety.” The problem is that it won’t — it can’t — because there are simply too many needy people in the world for Britain to take in.
Mahmood deserves credit for at least taking this problem seriously enough to come up with measures that might help, at the margin. But the barriers to change are much more deeply embedded than she will admit. For all the perversity of Bantleman’s metaphor, she was right. The impregnably fortified walls and ditches do belong to the status quo legal establishment — but it’s no utopia inside.