Here’s what you may have missed from Labour’s new asylum seeker reform policy

On 17 November, Labour published its proposed reforms to asylum seeker policy. This met with widespread derision from refugee support charities, human rights watchdogs, left-wing media and the few remaining examples of Red Labour in the backbenches.

The policy document proudly bears the title:

Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy

Because nothing says ‘we’re doing far-right policies now’ quite like calling your policies “order and control”. You’ll already have seen a good deal of the headline policies: removing the right to family reunion, removing the duty to support asylum seekers, removing jewellery and valuables from asylum seekers.

Today, however, the Canary is taking a look at some of the other bits of the document. Despite being less outstandingly deplorable than ‘we’ll keep refugee families apart’, we think these less-reported policies also deserve your protest, outrage, and contempt.

The policy paper is broken down into three sections. The first, at six pages in length, deals with reducing arrivals from new asylum seekers. The second deals with increasing returns of failed asylum seekers, taking up ten pages. The final section deals with creating new “safe and legal” routes for asylum seekers to get to the UK. It’s just two pages long, giving us an early illustration of Labour’s priorities here.

Foreword and Introduction

Every section mentions something along these lines, but it’s particularly rife in the preamble:

Nor were our rules designed for the situation that sees asylum seekers travelling through multiple safe countries before seeking to cross the English Channel by boat.

The UK, last we checked, is a fucking island. Of course people are passing through other countries to get here. What’s more, the UK was an island when our immigration laws were written. Now, as it was then, complaining about people passing through other countries to get here is a pathetic attempt to weasel out of doing our duty to the international community.

The ten countries that took in the greatest number of asylum seekers over 2025 were Iran, Turkey, Germany, Uganda, Pakistan, Chad, Poland, Ethiopia, Bangladesh ,and Sudan. Of these, the only country which doesn’t border the site of a major active conflict is Germany. However, expecting these countries to do their duty while we fail in ours is an utter failure of human decency.

Speaking of derelictions of basic human decency, both Mahmood’s Foreword and the introduction mock the Tory Rwanda scheme, stating:

As the last government focused its attention on the unsuccessful introduction of its Rwanda scheme, asylum decision-making fell as cases were put on hold.

However, the Increasing Removals section then slips this little subsection in:

We will continue to explore the use of “return hubs” which are safe third countries that failed asylum seekers can be sent to instead of their country of origin. Negotiations with a number of countries are ongoing.

How the fuck is this any different to the Rwanda scheme? One that the document itself derided, twice, not twenty pages ago? This is desperation on display, pure and simple.

Part 1 – Reducing Arrivals

The policy document bangs on about the “pulls” that are drawing asylum seekers to the UK. It tries to paint of system as an easy ticket replete with benefits – despite most asylum seekers living on around £7 a day. As part of this narrative-building, the paper ties itself in knots over asylum seekers and refugees working in the UK:

The ability to enter the UK as an asylum seeker, or live as a failed asylum seeker, should offer little reward. Save for very few exceptions, neither is allowed to work in this country. But this is not the reality. In practice, it is far too easy for people without the right to work to disappear into the UK’s illegal economy.

That’s probably related to the fact that they’re trying to live on £7 a day and don’t have a right to work. However, at the same time:

The government expects those who are arriving or returning to the UK to seek work. To encourage this, we are now exploring a change to taxpayer-funded benefits to prioritise access for those who are making an economic contribution to the UK.

Refugees are expected to work in the UK. However, they aren’t permitted to work whilst seeking asylum. Likewise, even refugee status is now temporary (per the new policy document). We don’t know about you, but trying to seek work after years of unemployment – and with the promise that you’ll be deported in a few years anyway – sounds extraordinarily difficult to us.

Part 2 – Increasing Returns

The document, over the course of just over 30 pages, makes nine references to asylum seekers “frustrating” removals. We’ll leave aside for the moment the issue of this framing and the assumptions behind it to point out that over 40% of appeals are successful. That isn’t ‘frustrating a removal’ – it’s ‘we got the decision wrong in the first place’, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The document also states:

The government has already increased judicial sitting days in the First Tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber. […] We will expand the capacity of the appeals system by creating a new appeals body. Decisions on appeals will remain fully independent. The new body will be staffed by professionally trained adjudicators, with safeguards to ensure high standards.

OK, so the courts are overwhelmed and the asylum claims process takes too long. How the fuck we got to ‘maybe we should expand court capacity’ after we got to ‘maybe we should nick asylum seekers’ jewellery’ is a mystery.

Likewise, the government cites Denmark as a model for siloing asylum appeals into a separate judiciary. A few pages later, it complains about “relying on the courts to remake Home Office decisions”. The thing about a court is that it’s presided over by a judge – it’s notable that the new appeals body is meant to be staffed by “professionally trained adjudicators”. That sounds an awful lot like Labour plans to segregate asylum seekers into a process where they have no easy access to independent judges.

Part 3 – Safe and Legal Routes

Finally, we get to section three: safe and legal routes. Given that the document repeatedly talks about the horrors of small-boat crossings, we’d hope to see robust examples of new ‘safe and legal’ routes here, right? Take for example Starmer’s foreword:

That there is nothing compassionate about allowing the vile trade in people-smuggling that perpetuates illegal migration to persist.

Unfortunately and predictably, that was never going to be the case. The paper states that:

The Immigration White Paper set out that refugee sponsorship would become the framework for most of the UK government’s refugee resettlement efforts. There is emerging evidence from around the world that sponsorship can lead to better integration outcomes and at lower cost compared to government supported models of resettlement.

Sponsorship is a route for asylum seekers that involves members of civil society funding the resettlement of refugees in the UK. Essentially, Labour is stating here that it wants the main route for refugees to enter the UK to be funded not by the government, but by members of the public.

It goes on to state that:

The new model will give greater say to communities and support refugees as they settle, become self-sufficient, and contribute to their local areas. This new model will be based on local capacity to support refugees, and arrival numbers will be tightly controlled by the government. This will not affect our existing commitments.

The process will begin with the Home Secretary setting an annual cap on the number of arrivals that will be accepted through safe and legal routes. This will be based on the capacity and ability of communities to welcome refugees.

‘Giving communities a greater say’ sounds like a very pretty soundbite, until you give it a moment’s thought. Labour, the Conservatives, Reform and the mainstream media have spent years whipping up anti-asylum sentiment. Now, if a community wants to reject asylum seekers, they’re incentivised to be as vocal about it as possible. Depending on the mechanism to determine the ‘community’s say’, they could even be encouraged to vote for far-right anti-asylum parties by this policy.

‘Safe and legal’, every time

None of this is to mention the fact that ‘caps’ on safe and legal routes is pure posturing. The safe and legal routes are desperately few and far between. Often, they focus on very specific groups of refugees, such as Ukrainians, who are predominantly white, whilst neglecting others, who are predominantly people of colour.

Without a massive expansion of safe routes, asylum seekers are left with no option but dangerous channel crossings. If asylum seekers have no right to work or other decent income, they will be forced to work illegally. Without adequate housing alternatives, the UK will have to use hotels to accommodate asylum seekers.

These are problems, certainly. But they are problems that our government has caused. Labour’s new policy document contains no real answers to – only racist posturing and rhetoric that’s designed to stoke anti-asylum sentiment in this country.

Forget the papers asking if Mahmood and her ilk embody the new Blue Labour. This document, for all its feigned compassion, is explicitly far-right in its attitude and its policy formation. This new breed is firmly Teal Labour – it’s indistinguishable from the bile spewed by Farage and Reform. It should at least have the decency to wear its colours with pride.

Featured image via the Canary