If I had a penny for every time I heard about Britain’s “long tradition of providing sanctuary”, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a right-wing government in four years’ time.
No Home Secretary, except Theresa May, has survived more than two years in the past two decades. It is the political equivalent of the graveyard shift. And the job itself is morbid. Like her fifteen predecessors, Shabana Mahmood, my sixteenth Home Secretary no less, has wasted no time performing the familiar contortions: tough talk on immigration for the ‘anxious middle’, punishment for people seeking protection, reassurance for a right wing that will never be satisfied.
Her “significant new reforms,” announced on 17th November 2025, are simply the Hostile Environment 3.0, this time wrapped in Danish packaging, after Suella Braverman’s own 2.0 version crashed with the illegal Rwanda Plan.
The “Restoring Order and Control” policy paper was trailed on Sunday and released to the press on Monday morning.
At Migrants Organise, we were dealing with something far more real: a 21-year-old refugee who had just received a refusal, took an overdose of prescribed sedatives, medication meant to help them cope with trauma. We waited anxiously on the floor in our office for an hour until the ambulance arrived. Thankfully they survived. But, we are still grieving a friend and member who died last August, after two decades of being broken by this country’s relentlessly cruel anti-migrant policies.
These are the real-life consequences of a policy that is now so normalised it barely gets mentioned by name. People subjected to these painful policies are simply erased from the narrative, even as the country debates them incessantly. Yes, the Hostile Environment policy is all around us.
The government’s latest proposal is again full of contradictions and paradoxes. Britain, we are told, must be harsher to remain humane; more exclusive to be generous; more punitive to be welcoming. Protection becomes an unattainable privilege, and somehow this is spun as the restoration of compassion. It makes me almost miss the honesty of Theresa May’s open hostility.
For more than 30 pages, the document promises to punish, deter, detain and deport. Almost nowhere does it address why people move, who benefits from their precarity, or what these policies are doing to the fabric of our society. Context matters.
The Global picture
So here is the missing context, because too many journalists will not bother to report it.
The government paper claims that since 2021, over 400,000 people have claimed asylum in the UK, compared with 150,000 a decade earlier. But zooming out, by the end of 2024, according to the UNHCR, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, a number that has tripled since 2011.
The surge in claims for protection has everything to do with the surge in global conflict.
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 2015 saw 50 state-based armed conflicts, the highest since 1992. By 2024, UCDP/PRIO recorded 61 state-based conflicts across 36 countries, the highest since the Second World War. By today, the Geneva Academy now monitors more than 110 armed conflicts globally under its classification system.
These figures exclude climate refugees, as this issue has not entered mainstream discourse.
The government insists this is about “restoring order,” when in reality it is about making life so intolerable that people either stop coming or give up and leave. Self-deportation by design is a true hallmark of the Hostile Environment policy.
The ‘newly’ announced measures are also very familiar: asylum hotel closures, increased enforcement raids, digital IDs to decide who can work, and renewed deportation drives backed by new powers and threats of “return hubs” in third countries. Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Namibia are told ‘take your people back’ or else.
Silence, meanwhile, surrounds the causes of forced migration, the intentional hostility of the system, and the structural racism baked into both. Nowhere does the government mention the sheer number of people trapped in limbo.
As of March 2025, 78,745 applications representing 109,536 people were still waiting for an initial decision, with average waiting time of 14 months. This is not an administrative failure of the system; it is a system, hostile by design.
Refugee status itself is being reengineered from a five-year route to permanence into a precarious cycle of 30-month permits stretched over 20 years. People constantly told to “integrate” will instead be kept in permanent suspension, never allowed to belong.
The journey from arriving in the UK to being legally recognised as a refugee, and then applying for Indefinite Leave to Remain has never been an easy or a straightforward process. This culture of disbelief has been a tool of trauma for migrant communities of all nationalities, from Syrians, Afghans and beyond.
And here is the quiet absurdity: a Home Office already drowning in backlogs will be expected to process 350% more paperwork per refugee over two decades. Each person will be forced to reapply at least nine times just to remain safe. An institution that cannot handle its workload now will be asked to reproduce the same paperwork again and again. It is not unlikely that some people will wait 30 months for their papers to be processed and then have to re-apply immediately.
Meanwhile, the Home Secretary’s speech in the Commons about people “not working” rests on convenient amnesia. It was her own party, 25 years ago, that stripped people seeking protection of the right to work, forcing destitution and social isolation into law. After years of enforced poverty, trauma, and skill loss, finding work becomes nearly impossible. Denmark allows those waiting for a decision to work after six months; I did so myself while seeking protection in 1994 after arriving here from Bosnia. But that part of the Danish model has not been imported. It does not fit in the narrative. And the fact that people were allowed to work in the UK while waiting for asylum claims to be decided has been completely erased from our history. These days people are forced to wait at least 12 months without the right to work, but in our experience, even after applying for permission to work most aren’t able to find work due to tight restrictions placed on the jobs they can apply for. In addition, the legal duty to provide accommodation and support will be revoked. Help becomes discretionary, conditional on behaviour, ability to work, and further arbitrary rules. People seeking asylum however will already understand that ‘asylum support’ comes with layers of conditions and proof of destitutions.
The magic money tree, however, always blossoms for enforcement. Never for dignity.
Even the proposal to seize people’s assets, spun as Danish and “new”, isn’t new at all. The Guardian headline put it starkly: “Asylum seekers’ jewellery could be seized to pay for processing costs, says Home Office minister”
The Home Secretary tried to clarify that this “jewellery” policy applied only to people buying “expensive Audis.” But already when people arrive in the UK, they are asked to declare their assets and this impacts the level of support, if any, they receive. Some of our caseworkers have even supported people whose jewellery and other belongings have been seized from them upon arrival for no clear reason.
Again, for context, this idea predates Denmark and goes back to Labour’s Blair government. In 1999, MP Diane Abbott challenged the government on the suggestion that refugees should sell their jewellery to live.
This extract is taken from a 1999 Guardian article:
“While debating their first immigration act in the 90s, in the exchange, Diane Abott MP, asked Mike O’Brien, the then Undersecretary of State and QC (or KC now):
Diane Abbott: ‘Is the Minister suggesting that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their wedding rings, as an alternative to the Government meeting its moral and international responsibilities to provide a reasonable level of support?’
O’Brien: ‘I certainly am suggesting that’
Unidentified Tory: ‘You’ll be wanting the gold fillings out of their teeth next.’
Abbott: ‘Is the Minister going to strip the rings from their fingers?’
(From the transactions of the Commons Standing Committee on the Asylum Bill, 11 May 1999)”
Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jun/13/balkans8
Racist by design
And then there is the silence on structural racism. While presenting her ‘new’ plan in the House of Commons on Monday, the Home Secretary was forced to apologise for using the P-word while recounting her own experience of racism.
Parliament revealed its priorities. Mahmood wasn’t using the slur; she was naming the violence she endured. But the institution treated her testimony, not the racism behind it, as the offence.
This is how structural racism sustains itself, by disciplining those who speak its name more harshly than those who reproduce its policies. And the sad irony is that in this case, it was done by the same person at the same time.
Britain tolerates abstract racism, historical racism, and racism softened by euphemism. What it cannot bear is the plain truth uttered by someone who has lived it. That the Home Secretary now deploys the machinery of the Home Office against people targeted by racists reveals a deeper paradox, one that MPs mostly missed, apart from Reform MP Richard Tice, who joked she was applying to join his party. Tommy Robinson endorsed her reforms. That tells it all.
It was challenging to find any positive signs, and one may lie in the revival of Community Sponsorship, but until we see details and numbers, hope is at bay.
This proposal will fail as others have, because it misdiagnoses the problem. Importing models does not work. Cruelty does not deter. If President Obama regrets anything, it will not be that he failed to build higher walls or deport more immigrants.
People will continue to take dangerous routes until safe alternatives are available. Stripping migrants of rights will not stop the far right; it only reinforces their lie that migrants are the problem.
Fix the NHS. Reduce poverty. Build homes. Tax the obscene wealth. These are the problems that we all share and worry about.
The British Medical Association estimates that giving doctors on strike a pay rise they deserve would cost £920 million. In comparison, the previous government did not have problems finding £700 million for the Rwanda Deportation Plan and £2.1 billion in the last year for so-called hotel accommodation alone, with private contractors due to receive £15.3 billion over ten years.
Imagine if that money funded communities of welcome and solidarity around the country? Imagine the youth clubs we could reopen with some of that money, or homes we could build, and NHS treatments we could all have.
Nothing is ever truly “out of control.” Governments make choices. This “new” asylum plan is a choice, and its consequences will be brutal not just for migrants and refugees, but for all of us.
Unless we organise. Unless we demand a world built on dignity and solidarity. Remember:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand” (Frederick Douglass) and “It always seems impossible until it’s done” (Nelson Mandela).
I’d also like to add a new one, the one that we need to reclaim from the far-right warped notion of what belongs to whom. Because, regardless of where we came from and when, it is also about what belongs to us. It is not about “contributing” to some imaginary patriotic idea of cultural integration or tax system; it is about the communities we build and we now must protect, as well as our right to have rights as humans, and the late poet Benjamin Zephaniah reclaimed all of it in his poetry and in his equally powerful statement: “I love this country enough to tell it the truth”.
