‘Core Protection’

After the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced the government’s new policies for ‘Restoring Order and Control’ in the House of Commons yesterday, one MP after another stood up to commend the British people for their ‘proud tradition’ of giving sanctuary, for their openness and toleration, before moving onto questions of ‘stopping the boats’, ‘fairness for the British taxpayer’ and whether asylum seekers might be housed near their constituents. The European Convention on Human Rights was mentioned so often that one might have imagined it to be the international treaty at the centre of refugeehood. It isn’t: that’s the Refugee Convention of 1951, largely absent from the debate.

The home secretary, while praising the tolerance of the British people, invoked her own experiences of racism, not to alert the House that racism and intolerance are a problem in the UK, but as a protective shield against her humanitarian critics. If backbenchers tried to voice concern about the effect her measures would have on the real lives of refugees, she dismissed them as defenders of a ‘broken system’.

With these policies, the Labour government – spooked by Reform, by flags flying from lamp-posts and by protests outside asylum hotels – hopes to quieten public anxiety about unauthorised migration and ‘small boats’. Mahmood and Starmer claim that people cross ‘safe countries’ to come to the UK because of ‘pull factors’ such as work, family reunion, the possibility of permanent residency after five years and, later, citizenship. As evidence that the UK provides a golden ticket that is attracting unwanted migrants, ‘Restoring Order and Control’ offers a single statistic from 2024, showing asylum claims rising by 18 per cent in the UK and falling by 13 per cent in the European Union. A longer-term view would have shown the UK lagging near the back when it comes to refugees per capita.

The government says it’s inspired by the Danish model, which makes it harder for refugees to settle permanently, limits family reunion and deports people once their countries of origin are deemed ‘safe’. Refugees can’t apply for permanent residence in Denmark until they’ve been there for eight years; the British government now proposes a twenty-year wait. During that time refugees will have to reapply for asylum every thirty months under the threat of being forcibly removed. The government’s term of art for this new status is ‘core protection’.

Refugees will have to work if they can and those with possessions of any value – though not, apparently, wedding rings – may have them seized to pay their maintenance costs, with ministers pushing far-right fantasies of affluent asylum seekers owning Audis and e-bikes. (Asylum seekers waiting for a decision on their refugee status will still be prevented from working, and the ban will be more rigorously enforced.) One Conservative former minister, Karen Bradley, floated the idea that refugee support should be treated like the student loan scheme, with refugees required to repay over the course of their lives. That isn’t part of Labour’s current plans, but Mahmood wasn’t horrified by the suggestion.

The sections of ‘Restoring Order and Control’ that mention children are chilling, suggesting that many asylum seekers bring their children not because they love and care for them but as a ‘fact’ to ‘exploit … in order to thwart removal’. Families whose asylum claims have been rejected may continue to receive financial support as long as they have children under eighteen. The government is now looking for ways to remove this support. The UK does not currently detain children, but MPs who expressed concern that this might change did not receive reassurances. Henceforth, those in ‘core protection’ will be barred from family reunification.

Refugeehood is not supposed to be like this. The ideal envisaged by the Refugee Convention is that refugee status should be a kind of substitute citizenship for people whose bond of citizenship with their country of origin has been broken by the threat of persecution. Those displaced by persecution and war may well want to return when they can, but until then they need to get on with their lives as everyone else does. That means pursuing their hopes and ambitions for education, for work, for family. These are goals that are already hard to achieve for exiles in a new country, with an unfamiliar language and customs and, often, suspicious, unsympathetic and uninformed neighbours.

If your permission to stay is limited to thirty months it is difficult to make the commitment to learning a language, to developing skills, to making friends, to forming a family and to integrating in the wider society. Such a commitment is needed not just from refugees themselves but from employers, landlords and educational institutions who will be reluctant to direct resources to someone who might be removed from the country in short order.

The government is promising ‘safe and legal routes’ as alternatives to getting on a small boat in Dunkirk. But the numbers arriving by these routes will be capped at modest levels, to be expanded only once the system is ‘under control’ and far fewer people are taking dangerous journeys to the UK. But if the number of illegal entries is to fall because a legal route exists, as the government claims, that route needs to be in place before refugees are faced with the existential decision to travel, which it won’t be. The safe routes themselves are aimed at students and skilled refugees in particular and the government seems to be suggesting that other refugees, once working, might switch to a ‘work and study visa route’ to get access to settlement after ten years.

What seems to be envisaged is a two-track system in which economically useful refugees are recruited and retained, while those in ‘core protection’ are weeded out as soon as possible. The thirty-month review system will operate alongside other measures targeting criminality and antisocial behaviour to exclude the undesirable. In this context, the government’s determination to ‘reform’ Article 3 of the ECHR also looks sinister: unreformed, it makes it more difficult to remove the sick, disabled and elderly to countries where decent healthcare is unavailable to them.

The UK’s refugee protection regime has always involved hypocrisy, as successive governments trumpet their adherence to humanitarian principles and the international order while doing their best not to incur the costs and obligations of those commitments in practice. Meanwhile, across the country, Labour activists and councillors have long supported refugees and refugee charities and promoted their cities and neighbourhoods as places of tolerance and welcome. What will now be tested is whether those core Labour supporters are willing to tolerate policies so openly hostile to their professed values.