Last week the Home Office released migration figures showing that the number of people arriving by small boat in the UK rose by 13 per cent, even as the number claiming asylum overall dropped by 4 per cent. At the same time, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, was in Denmark. She had gone to ask what she could learn from the Nordic country with a left-wing government and a hard line on asylum.
Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, leader of the Social Democrats, is the most successful centre-left prime minister in Europe. At present her confidence is such that she has called a snap election, riding high on a wave of popularity from standing up to Donald Trump over Greenland. But it wasn’t always this way.
In 2015 support for the hard-right Danish People’s Party (DPP) was surging over rising immigration and cannibalising the vote share of Denmark’s left-wing bloc. The same year Frederiksen, the daughter of a typesetter, became party leader. Her message to working-class voters who had defected to the populists was blunt: “You did not leave us. We left you.” Just four years later she became Denmark’s youngest prime minister, aged 41. Despite coming from the left of the party, she shifted firmly right on cultural and social issues, above all immigration and asylum.
Mette Frederiksen
IDA MARIE ODGAARD/RITZAU SCANPIX/AP
Mahmood is explicitly modelling her immigration reforms on the Danish system, which is how I found myself in Denmark recently with a delegation of Labour MPs for private meetings with senior Social Democrats. The Labour politicians wanted to find out more about what it meant in practice for a party of the left to get tough on immigration, an urgent question for Labour, which risks losing voter trust after inheriting a broken asylum system on taking office.
According to Kaare Dybvad, a senior Social Democrat who now serves as employment minister after overseeing one of Europe’s strictest asylum regimes, centre-left parties have no choice but to follow Denmark’s lead and harden their stance on immigration.
“Working-class communities always pay the highest price for uncontrolled migration,” he tells me one evening in a quiet café near his Copenhagen home. Without tight border control and integration, Denmark’s social model, and the solidarity on which it was founded, would not survive.
Kaare Dybvad
MADS CLAUS RASMUSSEN/RITZAU SCANPIX/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
For Denmark, the tipping point came after Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to more than a million refugees from Syria and the wider Middle East, and tens of thousands moved north into Denmark and Sweden. “We had people marching on the highways of southern Jutland. It felt like everything was running out of control,” said Dybvad. The consequences transformed Scandinavian politics.
BENJAMIN NOLTE/DPA/ALAMY LIVE NEWS
Zero asylum target
Denmark, a country of six million people, combines one of the world’s most generous welfare states with exceptionally high levels of social trust. Its social model rests on contribution and reciprocal obligations, not entitlements available to anyone who happens to reside in the country. Mahmood wants Britain to emulate the Danish model by restoring the importance of contribution and making it significantly harder for migrant workers and asylum seekers to secure permanent residence and access to benefits. In her view, those rights must be earned.
Under Frederiksen, Denmark has uncompromisingly tightened family reunion rules, made asylum claims far more difficult, capped the number of “non-western” migrant workers, and immigrant communities have been relocated from low-income urban enclaves to more affluent areas. New arrivals are required to learn Danish and complete a five-year integration programme. The state intervenes to prevent racial and religious segregation and the formation of “parallel communities” or ghettos. “I wouldn’t advise this particular policy in Britain, though, because it’s difficult to break up the kind of long-established communities you have,” Dybvad said.
Having previously pursued what he calls “the most liberal policy for refugees in the world”, Frederiksen’s Denmark in effect adopted a “zero asylum” target. The result is a 40-year low in asylum applications, severe restrictions on the right to permanent residence, and the expectation that refugees return to their home countries as soon as they are considered safe. Mahmood has taken note.
Alongside its immigration policies, Frederiksen’s government introduced a series of pro-worker reforms: early retirement schemes for non-graduates who began working as teenagers, increased pay for nurses, care workers and prison officers, and significant investment in health services, housing projects, education and the energy transition. “We got back to essentials,” Dybvard said, “protecting people from the threats of globalisation, both on migration and the labour market.”
Honest discussion
One reason for Frederiksen’s success — after a recent slump, she is once again riding high in the polls — is her willingness to acknowledge mistakes and her refusal to talk down to voters or preach righteously at them. In mid-November, the Social Democrats lost the Copenhagen mayoralty for the first time in a century and suffered sweeping losses across the country in municipal and regional elections. It was a serious shock. Frederiksen cited crime committed by “people coming from outside [the country]” as one important reason for the defeat.
“No one can understand why an Iraqi man convicted of brutally assaulting a helpless person with a golf club cannot be expelled,” she said. “Or why a previously convicted man from Kosovo, who was sentenced for having abused his children and spouse for several years, can be allowed to remain here.”
Denmark operates one of the strictest immigration regimes in Europe yet remains an EU member state, but Frederiksen wants to go even further. Before Christmas, Denmark, together with Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, succeeded in gathering support from 27 countries for a new interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights that, Frederiksen believes, will allow for the swifter deportations of foreign criminals. She wants to protect the victims of crime, not the rights of the perpetrators.
Her government plans to follow Norway and Sweden by banning cousin marriage. For Frederiksen, what matters above all is social cohesion and integration. “Europe needs to have an honest discussion about the limits of tolerance,” says the Social Democrat MP and ordained priest Ida Auken, author of Dansk (Danish), a book about national identity, culture and belonging.
Auken views the threats confronting Europe as civilisational and has campaigned against the influence of Islamist preachers. “We should be cautious about accepting practices justified on religious grounds that challenge fundamental norms, such as refusing to shake hands with someone of the opposite sex or insisting on strict gender segregation,” she told me.
Tough decisions
Frederiksen has many enemies on the left. To her detractors, her policies were unconscionable, even cruel, such as forcing asylum seekers with assets (in some cases confiscating jewellery and other valuables) to contribute to the cost of being in Denmark. But she knew whose side she was on. Her priorities were shared belonging, common purpose and a renewed bond with working-class voters; she was quite prepared to lose support among younger metropolitan progressives if it meant halting the rise of the populist right. And she succeeded. In the 2015 general election the DPP won 21 per cent of the vote against the Social Democrats’ 26 per cent. In 2022 the DPP’s vote share fell to just 2.6 per cent.
“It’s true we have taken some bold and sometimes tough decisions, but it has been the only logical way if we wanted to protect the welfare society that’s been created during the 20th century,” Rasmus Stoklund, the immigration and integration minister, told me. He plans to introduce reception centres for refugees outside Denmark and the EU in so-called third countries.
Culture clashes
What, then, are the lessons for Labour? Mahmood advocates far tighter immigration controls and more restrictive asylum policies, but she is largely isolated in the party. She is respected for her candour and integrity, and ferocious work ethic, yet her social conservatism is not shared by most Labour MPs.
Mahmood was close to Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, and is revered by the party’s small Blue Labour faction. She and her allies are aware of the incipient rebellion stirring on the Labour benches against her proposals to tighten family union rules and scrap the automatic right to permanent residence after five years. With the soft-left dominant and Starmer weakened by lost authority and chaotic mismanagement, her opponents may feel emboldened.
Yet the Labour MPs I met in Denmark, representative of all factions, acknowledge that unless the government gets a grip on both legal and illegal migration and their destabilising consequences, it will be crushed at the next general election. Net migration fell to 204,000 last year in Britain (down from 944,000 in 2023, the high point of the so-called Boriswave) and could fall further by the end of this year if Mahmood’s proposals are enacted.
Shabana Mahmood was shown around a centre where illegal migrants in Denmark are held for up to three months
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
“Acting on immigration is not a tactic or device to win elections in Denmark — they believe it, and therefore it works,” said Lord Evans of Sealand, Labour’s general secretary from 2020 to 2024, and a longstanding ally of Starmer, who led the delegation to Denmark.
“As Labour people, we believe in intervening in markets and the same applies to the immigration system when it is felt not to be fair. We are reflecting on what we learned in Denmark, but it would be very dangerous to swallow it whole. It’s clear that the cost of living and the security of national borders are connected. Yet immigration control is an issue we are not yet comfortable with.”
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No such doubts trouble Denmark’s Social Democrat leadership. Bolstered by her hard-headed realism and defence of Danish sovereignty, Frederiksen is well-placed to win a third term as prime minister. For her, it is always a matter of country before party.
“It’s not sustainable just to accept mass migration and not consider the cultural clashes that come with it, what kind of costs, both economically and culturally,” Stoklund, the immigration minister, said. “A party can very fast become irrelevant if you aren’t able to take decisions that protect the country you are responsible for.”
A final lesson — and warning — for Labour from Denmark, if one were needed.