An act of parliament changing the UK’s immigration and asylum system has been passed every year since 2022. This activity has not increased public confidence that the nation’s borders are well managed, nor has it stopped the rise of radical rightwing parties running anti-immigrant campaigns.
There is no reason to expect yet another law to buck that trend, but the Home Office is giving it a try. Measures contained in a bill published this week include a new body to handle asylum decision appeals outside the existing court system; a means-tested scheme to charge asylum seekers for state-provided support they receive; narrowing the terms under which claims can be made under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which guarantees the right to private and family life.
There is more performance than remedy in this package. Setting up a new appeals body could be a costly distraction from the task of making the existing process for judging claims work better. Billing claimants for state support will raise negligible sums because very few will have resources to meet the threshold for payment. Narrowing the purview of the ECHR might sway decisions in a handful of cases, but it will not – and should not – revoke the underlying humanitarian protection. It does, however, give political succour to those who see human rights law as a liberal scam and want it all repealed.
This is the familiar problem with legislation that is designed to send a signal. The last Conservative government tested this method to destruction, leading to the absurdity of the 2024 Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act, giving ministers the power to declare that country fit to receive deportees regardless of whether that view was supported by facts.
Sir Keir Starmer repealed that act and scrapped the unworkable scheme it was supposed to be facilitating, dismissing it as a“gimmick”. Two years on, Labour is caught in the same trap, hoping another law will prove the government’s toughness credentials when it comes to immigration control. Precedent points to a different dynamic. Each turn of the dial in a draconian direction reinforces voters’ conviction that the system is out of control, encouraging support for opposition parties that pledge increasingly extreme measures.
Public attitudes on this issue are more responsive to campaign rhetoric and selective media coverage than data. Net migration to the UK has been falling since the general election. It is now at the lowest level since the 2010s, but the numbers only make headlines when the trend is moving the other way.
Meanwhile, the right of British politics is in a vortex of radicalisation. The focus has moved on from demands to limit new arrivals to a more sinister agenda of deporting people who have already settled in the country.
A Labour government should be doing everything in its power to stop those attitudes encroaching further into the mainstream. Britain doesn’t need another law that will only confirm beliefs that immigration is out of control. It needs more courageous arguments for a system that is robust, but also humane. It needs a period of quietly effective management at the Home Office, coupled with a campaign of persuasion to mobilise the portion of public opinion – a majority, in all likelihood – that rejects the paranoid politics of turning neighbours into strangers and strangers into enemies.
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