Brave New World: Humanity & decency is being restored to our asylum system
It's been nearly a month since the election. In that time, we have seen a sustained and coordinated improvement in asylum policy. Day after day, we've seen serious-minded reforms, which will rationalise the system, treat people with respect and bring a semblance of structure to an otherwise chaotic area of public life.
Welcome to our brave new world: a place where the country is actually improving, where it's being run by people who are motivated by things other than division and self-interest. Honestly, it's still completely baffling to me. I keep expecting to wake up and find it was all a dream. But it isn't. It's real.
It starts with the language. That might sound superficial, but it isn't. The constant drumbeat of hostility towards asylum seekers demeans those who come to live here, corrodes our moral nature as a country and reduces our global status. It degrades the mind itself, forcing the debate into the most venal and dehumanised version of itself.
On July 22nd, the Home Office put out a tweet: "We are taking control of irregular immigration." The usual tough messaging, but this time without the grim phrasing of 'illegal immigration'.
Needless to say, it upset all the usual suspects. "Changing 'illegal migration' to 'irregular migration' will be seen an invitation to the people smugglers," James Cleverly said. Robert Jenrick tweeted: "You misspelt illegal." He's really special, that one. Like a footwear assistant in Russell and Bromley pretending to be Nigel Farage.
'Irregular immigration' is a standard term which was sometimes used by the Conservative government. But I suspect that Cleverly and Jenrick are right and there was something meaningful about the use of the phrase here: a downgrading of the emotive language around the topic. When Full Fact checked the Home Office's social media, it found that it had mentioned "illegal" migration eight times between March 2024 and the election and made no mention at all of "irregular" migration. Evidently something has changed.
We didn't always talk about 'illegal immigrants' quite so easily. Nor did we always wrongly equate that term with asylum seekers. We've been subject to a specific abuse of language through legislation.
The key moment came with Priti Patel's 2021 Nationality and Borders Act, which criminalised those who arrived in the UK without authorisation, even if they claimed asylum. Once that law was passed, the phrase 'illegal immigration' really took off. It was now used extravagantly - in legislation, press releases, tweets, ministerial speeches. And then, by virtue of that, it was distilled into popular discourse: on TV news bulletins, headlines, as a thoughtless aside by guests on current affairs programmes. After all, who could complain? That was literally a legal description.
It had two toxic effects. The first was to designate all asylum seekers who arrived in the UK outside of the Ukraine and Hong Kong safe schemes as 'illegal immigrants' - basically equivalent to someone who purposefully overstayed their visa. The second was to degrade their humanity and status. You could almost feel it. If you say the word 'refugee' certain emotional associations come to mind: struggle, horror, desperation, vulnerability. If you say 'illegal immigrant', you don't have to think about that stuff anymore. You turn them into a criminal subclass. A problem to be solved rather than a human to be saved.
It's too early to come to firm conclusions, but the subtle change in language in Home office communication suggests Labour is pursuing a policy of rhetoric deescalation, making it technical rather than condemnatory. It would be a damn good start.
On the same day as the Home Office tweet, the home secretary laid down a rather important statutory instrument. The sum effect of this instrument was to take a blow torch to the Illegal Migration Act.
The Act was a particularly pernicious bit of law. Without doubt, it was the single most reprehensible piece of immigration legislation I've ever seen, and that's honestly a pretty high bar.
It introduced two specific rules. First, it banned the home secretary from granting lawful immigration status to anyone who arrived 'illegally' under the Nationality and Borders Act definition. Second, it imposed a "duty to remove" them. Basically, it closed down the British asylum system: We won't help you, we won't assess your claim, we're going to remove you no matter what.
In the end, the Act got caught up in a wibble-wobble of administrative confusion. The duty to remove never came into force. It sat there on the statute book, ready for someone to press the button and activate it, which they never did. But the ban on granting lawful status did come into force. It turned the British asylum system into a Terry Gilliam film: illogical, internally contradictory, impossible, imprisoning. Asylum seekers were still technically admissible, but they couldn't be granted leave to remain even if they were found to be refugees.
Decision making ground to a halt completely. This is why the expense of the asylum system soared so exorbitantly. They were all still entitled to support, so insanely high accommodation costs naturally emerged. In the financial year to March 2024, the Home Office spent £4.7bn on asylum support, of which £3.1bn was due to the use of hotels. All of this was a total waste of money, as well as an affront to any sense of compassion or decency.
Yvette Cooper's statutory instrument eliminated the ban on granting lawful immigration status and moved the date for removals, basically killing it through a technicality. It would be better if they simply repealed the Illegal Migration Act in its entirety, but for the time being this allows the Home Office to put aside the concerted negligence of the previous administration and get on with one of the core tasks it is supposed to be responsible for: processing the claims.
A total of 125,385 people had been kept in permanent limbo by this law. They will now finally have their cases heard. If they are genuine refugees, which most will be, they will be allowed to remain and to create a life with dignity and security in this country.
Several positive things follow from this. For a start, we'll see an end to the grotesque spectacle of punishment accommodation. Labour announced that the contract on the Bibby Stockholm barge will not be renewed when it ends in January. It's gone.
We'll also see the end of the Rwanda scheme. The Tory government insisted that processing was frozen until the legal hurdles had been passed and people could be sent to the country. But of course, this was always nonsense. Rwanda never had the capacity for more than a few hundred. Now the whole scheme has been scrapped. As Cooper told the Commons, it constituted the "most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen". One day there really should be an inquiry into how it was allowed to happen. The degree of waste - in terms of time, attention, money and human potential - is off the scale.
Oh, and one more final bit of good news, concerning Afghan refugees.
After Britain's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the government promised that it would try to reunite families who'd been separated in the havoc of those weeks. They consequently did nothing about it. But the new government is now fulfilling the promise made by its predecessor.
On July 30th, legal migration minister Seema Malhotra announced a plan to reunite families. Those who were evacuated without their immediate family members can submit an application, including spouses or unmarried partners, children, parents, or siblings. People who love each other will now be together rather than purposefully kept apart.
I just want to present three tentative conclusions from all this.
Firstly: Fuck yeah. Seriously. Fucking yes.
You know what it's been like. Fourteen years of abysmal horror, cruelty piled upon cruelty, watching these feckless moral delinquents lash out at the most vulnerable people on earth, introduce punishment measures against them, have the system collapse into total chaos because of the ineffectiveness of this approach, seeing the costs consequently soar, and then having to hear them cite those costs as the reason that they need to introduce even more punishment measures, which then do not work, starting the whole abysmal cycle all over again.
Utter cunts. Unfeeling, uncaring, unthinking, without a heart to care with nor a mind to reason with. Just a complete bottoming-out of the most basic operational standards of government and the most rudimentary performance expectations of individual secretaries of state.
So yeah, it feels pretty damn good to finally see a group of people come in and apply reason and humanity to this area. It's an uncomplicated, uncaveated pleasure to watch it happen. A goddamn fucking delight.
Secondly: Note the way that rationality and liberalism go hand-in-hand.
The Labour approach is not ideological. It is practical: What is required to reduce costs? Which systems are working and which are not? Which have to be dropped and which can be changed? What are the financial consequences of adopting certain approaches?
And yet the impact of that approach is towards one wing: greater liberty. People who are processed so they can have a status, even if it's a negative one. People are reunited with their families, if they wish to be.
You see this again and again, in history, philosophy and politics. Liberalism and reason are entwined. Once you adopt the latter you often get the former. This is not a coincidence. It speaks to a profound resonance at the core of our political assumptions.
Finally: Moral purity is a fatuous, self-indulgent cul-de-sac.
We all saw the left-wingers who demanded people reject Keir Starmer's Labour party this election: calling for them to vote for independents over Gaza, or Greens where they couldn't win, or any of the other assorted socialist parties who can achieve nothing except rob the left of electoral victory. We saw their repeated arguments - you can vote how you like because Labour's going to win anyway.
Well, here's the thing. Labour won because people ignored those voices in sufficient numbers to secure it victory. If the hard left had their way, it would not have happened.
Now we can see the moral consequence of their demand for political purity. They claim to care about the marginalised. But if they had their way, those Afghan families would not be reunited. Those asylum seekers would still be trapped in administrative limbo.
If you give a damn about the vulnerable and the marginalised, if you actually give a single solitary shit about them rather than your own precious conscience, you do the fucking work. You make compromises, you get elected, you take control, you make the changes. You struggle to protect those who need it, not constantly affirm your own spotless moral superiority.
The last month is a reminder, which we should never forget, that meaningful idealism can only ever be secured through realism. That's why we get to write articles like this today, rather than another torrent of despair at what a Conservative government is doing.
As you say, Ian, the perfect is the enemy of the good and politics is about trying to do the best you can in power, not about achieving nothing by being in opposition.
Ah but the two children cap, cry the nay sayers. We told you so, they shout.
Am I personally disappointed about this? Yes. Ditto the winter fuel payment and not only for purely selfish reasons. But am I immediately going to say that I was wrong and they’ll be out within a year? (Both of which I have read recently). No, I recognise that I am not going to agree with everything they do or say, but it is the overall journey that matters, not the odd tiny cobble you might stumble over along the way.
As ever, perfect is the enemy of good. I find it sad how many people still don’t get that after all these years. They want a political purity that will never come. So they’d rather Labour lose as some kind of absurd proof that they’d have won had they taken the purity option. It’s the left-wing twin of the journey the Tories have been on.
Coupled with the points about rationality in policy, it was also interesting to see glimmers of something else recently. In the Commons, Streeting noted he had 72 pen pals regarding the NHS, and that he and Libs had worked together well in opposition – and would continue to do so.
I’m not naive enough to think we’ve seen the end of us vs them politics in this country. But that exchange felt like a crack in the dam.