Is this Labour’s hostile environment?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, Labour's Tommy Robinson approved asylum overhaul.

0:20Just before we start, quick warning, there is some racist language in this episode.

0:28here's the thing we weren't actually planning on making an episode today about Labour's asylum overhaul we kind of felt that we'd covered that in Monday's episode about how the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood had drawn inspiration from Denmark where a centre-left government has implemented some of Europe's toughest immigration policies and then we listened to Mahmood's speech in Parliament on Monday night and thought, wow, this is even more extreme than we were expecting. Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker, with your permission. I will make a statement about how we restore order and control to our borders.

1:05I do so as this government publishes the most significant reform to our migration system in modern times. She wasn't wrong. To the British public who foot the bill, the system feels out of control and unfair. It feels that way because it is. Mahmood announced what she headlined, Restoring Order and Control, a new approach to migration. Its goals are twofold. Firstly, to reduce illegal arrivals into this country, and secondly, to increase removals of those with no right to be here. Her hardline approach horrified some in her party. If we're being frank, isn't this just a desperate attempt to triangulate with reform?

1:51But she received praise from unwelcome quarters. Tommy Robinson welcomed her shift to the right. The Overton window has been obliterated, he wrote. Well done, patriots.

2:11You're never going to hear me say this very often, but I think that Tom Mervynson's right to say the Overton windows well and truly shifted. I think it's extraordinary that something like this can get the support of Keir Starmer, the former human rights lawyer, and actually a significant chunk of Labour MPs because they think tensions are so high in the country that radical action like this, thinking the unthinkable, is necessary. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus. Is this Labour's hostile environment?

2:47Jessica Elgert, you're The Guardian's Deputy Political Editor. Welcome back to Today in Focus. Nice to see you in the studio. Nice to be here. So we all knew something big was brewing in the Home Office when it comes to asylum and immigration. And, oh God, boy, was it big. What was your instant reaction to what Shabana Mahmood announced on Monday night? so shabana mahoud always said that when she went into the home office she was kind of given the brief to think the unthinkable when it comes to asylum and refugee policy given the kind of febrile atmosphere that there is over this issue across the country and you know the way that reform but also the conservatives have been announcing some you know really quite radical hardline policies on it and she i think feels very very strongly that unless this issue is grasped and there is what is seen to be very serious reform of refugees and asylum seekers in the way that they are given access to permanent settlement in this country, that the whole consensus for us ever giving people who are fleeing war any sanctuary will just break down.

3:47That's what she believes. And I think for, you know, most Labour MPs, many of them do agree that something needs to be done about this issue. It's quite comparable to welfare in that sense. But I think seeing what she proposed on Monday, there is no way that a Labour MP isn't going to look at that. progressives of any stripes and just balk at it. And so give us the top lines. What exactly has she proposed? So the main and the most controversial measure, which will probably have the biggest effect, is modelled on what Denmark did, which is ending the permanent status of refugees. So refugees are usually given five years once they arrive here.

4:23There's easier ways to apply to permanent settlement. That won't now happen. They'll have to be reassessed every 30 months and they could be returned if their country is now deemed safe. I think the sort of key country which is in mind for this reform is Syria. So Syria, obviously Britain took a large number of Syrian refugees. Now the country is deemed safer by a lot of European countries, although the Foreign Office still strongly advises Brits against visiting Syria because it's so dangerous. But returning people to those, inverted commas, safe countries, making it discretionary for the government to support asylum seekers at the moment it's an obligation.

4:59We will now also remove the 2005 legislation that created a duty to support asylum seekers, reverting to a legal power to do so instead. While we will continue to support those who play by the rules, those who do not, be that through criminality or antisocial behaviour, can have their support removed. And this is very explicit that she means to increase the deportation of families. So people who have got children here, who have close family links here, are often able to avoid being deported even if their country is safe. She specifically said that she wants to increase that. Right. And let's talk a little bit more about this central proposal, which abolishes the permanent settlement status of refugees.

5:45Mahmoud has said that refugees would have to wait up to 20 years for indefinite leave to remain, up from five at the moment. And the government is saying, well, you know, refugees can settle permanently sooner if they meet certain requirements. I'm just going to read this. They say, we want to encourage refugees to integrate more fully into the communities, providing them sanctuary. What do they actually mean with that? And are they really going to make people wait 20 years? So of course there might be, you know, speaking to people in the Home Office yesterday, there might be ways that people can move off that faster.

6:19You know, for example, they could move on to a work visa or a study visa, especially for things like shortage occupations. But all of that is very unclear at the moment exactly how that will work and there'll be a consultation on it. But yes, ultimately, you could have your status reassessed every two and a half years. So you're living in limbo. And living in total limit. And what many will argue, and you heard Labour and Peace talk about it yesterday, is that on the one hand, you're saying you want refugees to integrate, to become part of the community to become as British as they can, take part in schools, join the PTA, volunteer.

6:52And at the same time, you're saying when you live with this permanent kind of instability, which makes it incredibly difficult to, for example, get a mortgage or get stable rent or to start a small business or anything that you might do that might help you put down roots in a community. And I think this is one of the things that has been already, we've seen as the problem in the Danish model, where yes, they have rapidly increased the number of refugees that they deport to safe countries, but the numbers of refugees who remain are more likely to be on state benefits because of the instability that they experience.

7:25And it's probably worth us just spelling out before we go any further that asylum seekers are really quite a small proportion of immigrants in the UK. So if you look at the year to June 2025, 850 ,000 visas were granted, and most of them for people who are coming here to work or study, but also for people who are being reunited with their families. And in that period, there were 111 ,000 asylum claims. And of those 11 ,000, about 42 ,000 of those people arrived on small boats. Actually, most people claiming asylum have overstayed a visa. They've come here as a student and then they'd say, right, oh, I'm frightened to go back wherever I came from.

8:04And we know that most asylum seekers are men and many of them want to come here. They take incredible risks to be here, whether that's drowning in the channel or hiding in the back of a truck. and then they come here and then they want to bring their family and their children to safety. They don't want them to make that perilous route. But the government wants to make that much harder, don't they? Yes, they do. So there is going to be a really significant clamp down on the rights to family reunification. Outside of the most exceptional circumstances, family reunion will not be possible. With a refugee only able to bring family over if they have joined a work and study route and if qualifying tests are met.

8:42And in terms of the feasibility of all of this, the Home Office is always described as a place where prime ministerial ambition goes to die because it's just such a basket case, the Home Office. The backlogs are immense. And it seems to me that these proposals, particularly the 20-year thing, and the fact that everybody's going to have to apply every 30 months, every two and a half years, to be allowed to stay, that's going to add an enormous amount of bureaucracy to all this. Yes, I mean, Sabana Mubel was challenged on this quite a lot. you know the home office doesn't have a great record for bureaucracy for processing and that's one of the main reasons we're in the mess that we're in and you know to add this additional burden she just says it's my job to make it work and it certainly is and of course if what it ends up doing is adding to the bureaucracy and the backlog that will be that will be on her

9:39And many of these proposals have been lifted from the Danish approach to asylum seekers, which we explored on Monday's episode of Today in Focus. And the one that really jumped out to me, and I think a lot of our listeners, is this idea of potentially seizing the assets, maybe even the jewellery, the valuables of asylum seekers to help pay for the costs of their bed and board and processing their claims. people who come across on a small boat have usually sold everything they have in order to pay these people traffickers and they arrive with the clothes on their back and nothing more than that is that really going to happen that was something that was clearly briefed out by home office officials which was walked back over the course of the day and you know the way that they explained it to me was that you will on rare occasions have people who have clearly got significant assets my own car or my own valuable items and yet be sort of living off the state, be living in sort of free accommodation, having meals provided for them, and that they could be challenged about that and potentially have that asset.

10:41It's not actually talking about grabbing people's wedding rings at the border. But, you know, Shibana Mahmood had to basically deny over and over again in the chamber on Monday. So what evidence does the Secretary of State have that taking personal belongings, such as jewellery from refugees and selling it off actually works as a deterrent. Does she acknowledge that many British people will see it as unnecessary and cruel? State-sponsored robbery... The lots of Labour MPs agree that there needs to be something to restructure the asylum system, that it's currently chaotic and it's not benefiting anyone, including asylum seekers.

11:15But they are not into the idea of performative cruelty. And among the announcements that Shabana Mahmood made, there were also some proposed legal changes, including how courts will apply the European Convention on Human Rights. Then the ECHR has become such a sort of political hot potato in the past year or so thanks largely to people on the right of politics. What is Labour trying to change on that front? There are two aspects of the ECHR which Shabana Ramuda's got in her sights. The first is Article 3 which is the right to family life and it's long been the view of almost everybody in government including sort of people like Richard Hermer, the Attorney General, who's a human rights lawyer, that the lower courts are interpreting it this too widely.

11:58So people will be able to claim rights to family life or because there are various things that their children wouldn't be happy with in other countries or tenuous links to extended family. So they're changing the guidance to say that it should only apply to immediate family. So it should only be about separating parents and children rather than, you know, anything to do with extended family. and she can do that unilaterally. So she can legislate for that. But the other aspect of change she needs to work with other European countries with to try and change how this is applied because it's Article 3, which is the right to not be tortured or degrading treatment.

12:35That is the one that makes Labour and Peace go, because that feels like we shouldn't be sending people back to be tortured or have degrading treatment. And that is an absolute right, slightly different to the right to family life, which means that she can't sort of legislate about the way that it's applied. But what she will argue is that people have successfully argued Article 3 when they don't want to be returned to places like Brazil, which has prisons which are overcrowded. Or Albania, for example. Or Albania, where they might not be able to access the right medical treatment. Right. And I guess the counterpoint to all of this is that Mahmoud says she wants to bring in new safe and legal routes.

13:12And she seems to be taking inspiration from the Homes for Ukraine scheme, where many British people, of course, opened up their homes very generously, their spare rooms to Ukrainians after Russia's full-scale invasion. What could these new routes look like? So there are three schemes which are going to be opened up, which the Home Office describes as modest, so I think we can interpret that as small, which will be for countries currently in conflict. You know, places like Sudan, Eritrea would probably count amongst that. They could apply for study visas via that route. They could be able to apply for various work visas via that route.

13:46And they can also apply for community sponsorship. So to be taken on by a charity, a local association, a church could sponsor individuals to come over here if they're, you know, imminent risk. But again, they still have the same temporary status attached to them. All of those legal routes do because they will still have to go through the process of reapplying every 30 months. if their country becomes safe, they still become liable to be returned. I just wonder how feasible in reality it is to replicate the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Because we're talking at a time where terms like fighting age men have become common parlance.

14:26And of course, not everybody has bought into that rhetoric, but it is pretty pervasive. And I wonder how many people in reality are going to open their spare rooms to people, often young men from Sudan, from Eritrea. I think it depends how the scheme works and it doesn't necessarily mean people having to host them. It could mean that churches sponsor some accommodation for people to come and then they're not dependent on the state. But they're effectively dependent on a charitable organisation or individuals. And we expect the numbers, as you say, to be very small. I suspect there will be initially some interest in uptake and then things fall away.

15:05But it doesn't, you know, ultimately, I think the idea is to try and rebalance it towards the kind of people who can make these very dangerous journeys and the people who can't, who can't afford them, who are not, you know, able enough to afford them. But, you know, the numbers will be very small. I guess it's also an attempt from the Home Office to try to find alternatives to hotels. currently 100 ,000 people in asylum accommodation. Not all of them are in hotels, but it's such a toxic issue, isn't it, and such an expensive policy at the moment? It is a toxic issue, and I think when you talk to voters, as I know that you do a lot, and when we talk to MPs about what their constituents are saying, you know, actually, most people are sympathetic to refugees, but I think there's a perception about particularly small boats that these people are not doing it in the right way, in the fair way, and they are angry about that.

15:53they're angry about the feeling of impotence there is that this this can't be stopped with the same with hotels people see them being put in a hotel being like well i'm struggling every day yeah and these people are you know waited on hand and foot in a hotel and given three meals a day now obviously we know that is not true and that is not the experience that that people have in those hotels and they're desperate to leave the hotels to leave the hotels it's a totally grim experience for people in the hotels you know asylum seekers you know get barely anything to live on a week but she wants there to remain consent in the country for immigration for refugees and she says she feels that the best way to restore that is to restore control for people to feel like there is an immigration and refugee system that works and that is controlled right and this is something that i find really interesting in the language that shabana mahoud has been using the rhetoric, if you like.

16:48And she's talked in the past couple of days about immigration tearing our communities apart. And there was this moment in the debate in the House of Commons on Monday night, which I thought was really quite astonishing. And it came after the Lib Dems immigration spokesman was having a bit of a pop at her and calling out the confiscation policy, saying that it was state-sponsored robbery. So let's listen to exactly what she said to him. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have to say to the Honourable Gentleman, I wish I had the privilege of walking around this country and not seeing the division that the issue of migration and asylum system is creating across this country.

17:24Unlike him, unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a fucking paki and told to go back home. It is I who knows through my personal experience and that of my constituents just how divisive the issue of asylum has become in our country. It's really quite stark, isn't it? What do you make about how she brings in her personal experience, the colour of her skin, to make these arguments? I don't actually think it's cynical. I think it's really integral to who she is and what she believes. You know, Shabana Mood is quite a social conservative. She believes in playing by the rules, that people should abide by them.

17:59I think she believes very strongly that when her own parents came here, that's what they did. And she wants there to remain consent in the country for immigration, for refugees. And she says she feels, And I think she felt very keenly in her own seat during the election, you know, a sense of kind of community breakdown, the breakdown of kind of communities able to live happily, safely alongside each other to kind of celebrate the kind of diversity of Britain that that is crumbling.

18:37and there's there's been a lot of talk of labor panicking to the the threat from reform do you think that shibana mahmoud actually believes this because she is a politician who visited refugee camps in greece has talked so compassionately in the past about the need to offer sanctuary for people fleeing war and persecution and yet here she is announcing such radical policies. I don't think Shabana Mahmood sees those two things as being at odds. Lots of people would but she doesn't because she believes that what she's trying to do is save a system that will give sanctuary to people who are genuine refugees.

19:16She talks about her experiences in her own constituency surgery where people will come to her and talk in really angry terms about people they believe are gaming the system and are getting away with it and not just white people right not just absolutely not just white her constituency is Birmingham and yeah and it's a you know it's a very sort of um there's a very very large Muslim population there in her constituency lots of those people she will say are people who feel like they're playing by the rules and there the asylum system is in chaos and you have to bring order to it. But of course, what people will say to her is the logical extension of lots of the things that you are proposing leads to what some people would just think is intolerable cruelty.

20:02So the idea that a refugee family can be here for 10 years, bring small children, have the children be in school for 10 years, be about to take their GCSEs and be sent back to a country that they can barely remember. That is the logical extension of some of the things that they're... barely remember. Maybe they were born in the UK. And it's still unclear whether children were born here. And in practice, of course, that's probably only going to be a small number of people because people will find if they're working, there will probably be ways for them to regularise their status here faster than that.

20:33But those incidents will happen and when they're public, no Labour MP wants to have that happening in their constituency. I guess I see all of this through the lens of my former lodger, Syrian guy called Yasser. Some listeners will remember we made an episode with him last year when he was celebrating the fall of Assad and I was saying, are you going to go back home, Yasser? And he was like, well, I've made my life here. He's got Mancunian children now. He's got a job. And Syria isn't a safe place. And everything he had there has been destroyed. And he came, he hid in the back of a truck and then his wife and disabled daughter, they were able to fly over safely.

21:06And in future, people like Yasser and his lovely wife Malik and the little girls, that's going to be impossible and much more difficult. Yeah, much more difficult for them really impossible and i think one of the um syrians is is obviously one that you know a lot of british people have spent a lot of time with syrians and known syrian refugees in their communities but the other group of people that people know well is ukrainian refugees it's a slightly different system but it's also a temporary system i think there is still very unclear what will happen to um ukrainian refugees once that conflict ends and politicians will say well of course we know that most of these ukrainians do want to go back to ukraine and we and help rebuild the country and the polling actually suggests that that's not the majority of them because as you say people build lives here they start small businesses they get a job that they're happy in they've learned the language their children are happy at school they've fallen in love fallen in love there's lots of reasons why people you know once you've been in a place for years you might then not want to uproot yourself again especially if you've already done it once

22:12coming up will labor mps actually vote for this

22:29so many people listening to this it might feel reminiscent of what the tories called the hostile environment, or maybe even worse than that, not only to sort of make Britain unwelcome, but also just to treat people this way who are fleeing just terrible acts of torture, potentially fleeing war. What are Labour MPs saying about all of this? I think there are lots of Labour MPs, especially those in reform-voting seats, who feel this is a really big existential question for the country, for their own seats, for ways that you kind of guard against the potential far-right government. And, you know, Shibana Mahmood says to them, if you don't like this, then you won't like what comes next.

23:12Which is what? Which is a Farage government. So there are people who are convinced of the seriousness of needing to do something like this. And people who just cannot countenance the idea of a thing we've talked about before, you know, ripping children out of school who have been here for maybe a decade. And there was also a number of people who think, we should be the ones challenging this suffering reform. We should be the ones saying it is not refugees who are responsible for the cost of living crisis. Yeah. It should be the government's job to stand up and challenge these things rather than play into it.

23:45Jess, thank you very much. Thank you.

23:51That was Jessica Elgert. You can read all of her coverage of the immigration proposals at theguardian.com. And that is all for today. This episode was produced by Eli Block, Ruth Abrahams and Charlie West and was presented by me, Helen Pidd. Sound design was by Ross Burns and the executive producer was Khmer Kalini. We'll be back tomorrow.