On Monday, Britain’s Labor government introduced sweeping reforms to its asylum system. It is also in keeping with British political standards, which in the last year have moved heavily to the right on immigration, to the point that it has been opposed by some of the Labor Party parliamentary group and that the Conservative Party, in opposition, has offered to guarantee the government the votes to approve it.
These reforms are even favored by Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s sovereigntist party which has ranked first in opinion polls for months. In fact, Reform’s reaction was to argue that Labor was incapable of delivering on promises similar to their own. The party’s deputy leader Richard Tice said Home Minister Shabana Mahmood’s speech was “starting to sound like she wants to apply to join” the party. It’s an exaggeration, but not too far-fetched.
One of the main interventions announced by Mahmood concerns the length of time of refugee status: no more than five years, but applications must be resubmitted every two and a half years. The aim is to expel migrants if, in the meantime, their country of origin is deemed “safe” by the government. In addition, migrants entering the UK illegally will have to wait twenty years, rather than five, to qualify for a permanent residence permit (this would be the longest period among European countries).
Home Minister Shabana Mahmood arrives at a government meeting on November 18 (© Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire)
Asylum seekers, that is, people who have requested some form of international protection, can only appeal once if they are rejected. Access to benefits is no longer automatic, but “discretionary”, and will be cut off for people who refuse to leave the country following an expulsion order. For them, the government will increase the economic “incentive” to leave voluntarily: it is not known how much, it currently stands at 3 thousand pounds (3.4 thousand euros). These reforms facilitated the expulsion of families, including minor children, and made family reunification difficult.
BBC News He explained that this had never happened before because it changed the country’s approach to asylum seekers, no longer focusing on asylum seekers task help towards them but continued strength that he can exercise.
This new regulation has been criticized from various points of view: political, legal and economic. For example, the Refugee Council, one of the main NGOs helping migrants, estimates that the British government will have to review 1.4 million cases in the next 10 years, costing 872 million pounds (almost a billion euros).
Labour’s plan draws not only on previous Conservative proposals, but also on their slogans (this is also nothing new). Citing more than 110 thousand asylum requests made between June 2024 and June 2025, Mahmood argues that the system is “broken” and “out of control”: this is the same rhetoric as Reform. He also threatened visa retaliation against countries that would not cooperate in the expulsion, which the media compared to that of Donald Trump in the United States.
Mahmood among other things had to deny that the reforms would require confiscating jewelry from migrants, as the media hypothesized when reading the text. But it is true that this provides for the possibility of asset confiscation to pay reception fees: something that is extremely rare even in Denmark, a model that inspired the Labor Party (and before them the European right) for its extremely tough approach to immigration.
Labor’s plans must be seen in the context of their political predicament. In opinion polls, they trail the Reform Party by more than ten points, with the same percentage as the Conservatives, Lib Democrats and Greens, the other three parties vying for second place. The Reform program was largely based on the fight against immigration, with the promise of a mass expulsion plan, and other parties followed suit, including the Labor Party.
Therefore, on the one hand, the proposal was made to try to regain consensus. On the other hand, the government’s tactic, even though it is still led by a center-left party, is to deny this adapt the asylum system, by tightening it, is the only way to improve it and prevent future Reformation-led governments from taking more radical measures.
Mahmood responded that Farage could “step aside” and was not interested in what he had to say, when told about the provocative invitation to join Reform.
This is a risky narrative to maintain, as Mahmood put it in a television interview: in the short term, the impact of such a difficult plan will be to lend legitimacy to Farage’s proposals. At the same time, the plan is considered excessive by some members of the Labor Party, and has been openly criticized by around twenty of its MPs. This comes at a time of great concern about divisions within the party and persistent rumors about the possibility of replacing Keir Starmer as leader, and also as prime minister, before the next election.
– Read also: Does Labor want to replace Keir Starmer?
Starmer essentially delegated communication of the reforms to Mahmood, something rather unusual given his insistence he publicizes the government’s migrant expulsions and security policies on his social media profiles. In a Tuesday interview with Daily Mirror he practically does not touch on this issue.
Mahmood, on the other hand, was aggressive. The party considers her the most suitable representative to defend reforms, also because of her family history: she is the daughter of Pakistani parents, who immigrate regularly. On Monday, the minister responded with annoyance to the Lib Democrats accusing him of sowing division: «I would like to be able to say that there is no problem here. But I was the one who was often called ‘damn Paki’ and told to go home” (Paki is a racist nickname for Pakistanis).
