‘This is not triangulation, it is capitulation’

This week, the Home Secretary announced a programme of migration and asylum reforms, taking inspiration from Denmark’s immigration system.

That the centre left is also tipped to lose Copenhagen for the first time in the city’s electoral history should be a flashing warning sign for Labour. In Denmark, years of tightening immigration rules and ceding rhetorical ground to the far right did not neutralise the issue – it normalised it. In the process, it hollowed out the moral core of social democracy and left voters questioning what the centre left was for. Labour now risks repeating the same mistake.

When a Labour government begins to sound indistinguishable from the hard right on immigration, when its spokespeople parrot phrases like “golden ticket” and boast about making life harder for refugees – this is not triangulation, it is capitulation, and it represents a profound betrayal of Labour values. More dangerously still, these actions drag the entire political conversation into territory from which only the far right can ever truly win. In doing so, we are handing them the keys to Number 10.

READ MORE: ‘The politics of security – when ‘for the many’ politics becomes uncomfortable for Labour’

The fixation on so-called ‘pull factors’ is one of the most persistent myths in the migration debate. The idea that refugees risk their lives crossing seas because Britain’s asylum system is too generous has been repeatedly disproven by researchers, refugee agencies, and even the Government’s own evidence. People flee because of the push factors of war, persecution, famine, state collapse – not because of marginal differences in welfare entitlements or processing rules. No parent puts their child in a dinghy because of a generous British welfare system. For those escaping the Taliban, Assad, or Russian bombardment, the “choice” is not between hardship abroad and comfort in the UK; it is between danger and survival. The pull-factor narrative is not only false, it is a convenient distraction used to justify ever-harsher policies that do nothing to reduce crossings, succeeding only in dehumanising the people it affects. This is why so-called ‘deterrent’ policies always fail.

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The UK has seen an increase in asylum applications in recent years compared to our EU neighbours, but it is worth considering this in context. Germany (250,550), Spain (166,145), Italy (158,605) and France (157,460) all received more applications than the UK (108,138) in 2024. Adjusted per capita, the UK still trends behind other EU nations, ranking 14th among the EU27 plus UK.

A humane system is possible: one built on safe routes that prevent dangerous crossings; on integration rather than exclusion; on tackling the backlog; where asylum seekers have the right to work and can contribute through taxation.

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To build this system requires moral courage. It is about saying that the far-right don’t have the answers, but we on the left do. Above all, it requires honesty about the real source of deprivation in our communities: those who spent 14 years stripping public services to the bone while profiting from division, not people seeking safety.

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