Blog post by Dr Lucy Hovil *
For those who have watched Fawlty Towers, John Cleese plays a hotelier, Basil Fawlty, who cannot reconcile the fact that he needs guests to fill his (somewhat dysfunctional) hotel, yet has little tolerance for their presence and is rude and hostile to them as a result. The most recent asylum policy paper to come out of the UK’s Home Office feels somewhat akin to this approach, but without the humour.
It reads like a document that is reluctantly designed to appease a disgruntled electorate in the context of poor economic growth, reflecting a general sense that Labour is making a mess of things and that Reform is rising in its wake. And by its own admission, that is precisely what it is. As the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, wrote in the Guardian, it was created to stem the “dark forces [that] are stirring up anger” over migration.
Domestic politics in the UK are certainly in turmoil at the moment, and the beating drum of anti-migrant rhetoric coming from segments of the population is familiar background noise. But will the current policy appease them by achieving its stated metric of success, namely to ‘deter arrivals and speed up removals’? And, regardless of whether it ‘works’ or not, what will be the impact on both asylum seekers and the broader electorate alike – including the somewhat unhelpfully ‘othered’ dark forces?
Diagnosing the problem
We can all agree that, as the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, states in the Foreword, we need ‘social confidence that our asylum system is fair, effective and humane’. However, in order to have an asylum system that is fair (and, importantly, that is perceived to be fair), it needs to work. And in order to work, it needs to correctly diagnose the challenges and how to fix them.
Yet herein lies the problem. At its core, and in part because the policy often reads as if it is reacting to rhetoric rather than evidence, it is largely based on a misdiagnosis. It repeatedly points the finger at migrants who “asylum shop” their way to the UK with the help of “heinous smugglers”; who remain in hotels for months or years; who do not work to support themselves and therefore rely on the taxpayer; and who then wish to become British citizens in less than 20 years and have their families join them.
Yet in practice, and as laid out clearly in a Home Office report commissioned in 2022 but only made public this year, the fundamental problem lies with the asylum system, not with the asylum seeker. For instance, the reason people are staying in hotels is because their claims are taking so long to process; and the reason they are not working is because they are not allowed to. Asylum seekers therefore have no choice but to spend months or years in hotels, at great expense to the tax payer (and presumably significant profit to hotel owners), unable to support themselves and creating barriers to integration in the local areas in which they are living. Importantly, hotels then create a highly visible focal point for contention.
In addition, while there are few who would condone criminal networks that prey on people’s vulnerability, there is a lack of recognition that irregular migration, and the smugglers who facilitate it, are a symptom rather than the cause of a failed asylum system. The policy, by laying considerable emphasis on criminalising movement, fails to address the reasons that lie behind the criminality. Yet, as history has shown repeatedly, we can disrupt as many criminal networks as we like, and put asylum seekers in the most miserable of accommodation, but demand for asylum and, therefore, demand for smugglers in the absence of alternatives, will remain firmly in place.
Furthermore, the policy concludes by stating that “only by restoring order to our borders, can we be the open, tolerant and generous country that we know ourselves to be.” Yet by focusing on punitive measures for those seeking asylum, we not only fail to restore order to our borders for the reasons outlined above, but we harm those who are in need of protection. Unlike Fawlty Towers, this policy is not fiction: it has a real impact on people’s lives and, if implemented, will only increase fear and vulnerability of asylum seekers and refugees. Yes, there are those who cheat the system and they need to be dealt with; and yes, returns need to be far better and more efficient. But those who genuinely need and deserve asylum are being heavily penalised in this policy.
Fix the system not the asylum seeker
As a result of this misdiagnosis, the policy does little to address systemic challenges. For instance, while it contains some suggestions of ways to speed up the decision-making process, it remains thin on details for how this will happen or what those changes are. And while it does make brief mention of safe and legal routes in the final section, the numbers talked about when this issue was discussed in the House of Commons were in the hundreds. Given that there are currently over 46 million asylum seekers and refugees worldwide, of which the vast majority are hosted in low or middle-income countries, creating legal routes for a few hundred asylum seekers is hardly going to ‘stop the boats’.
So yes, the scale of the challenge that the Home Secretary refers to is significant, but we need to be clear where the challenge lies. We have created a crisis through a system that continues to fail taxpayers and asylum seekers alike. But we need to be really honest about where our effort should be focused in order to fix what is, without doubt, a problematic system. Instead of using up huge amounts of financial and political capital in trying to address symptoms, we need to think far more substantively about how to engage with the reasons why people are moving in the first place, why they are remaining in hotels for months on end, and why they are needing to rely on hand-outs. Otherwise, as we have seen, the boats will keep coming, the hotels will remain open and anger and frustration will grow.
Furthermore, the challenge of migration – if that’s what it is – also needs to be put into perspective. News cycles have led with this on a level of regularity that is completely out of proportion to the challenge it presents. Surely, by any metric, child poverty, homelessness and the NHS on its knees deserve more?
A different narrative
In sum, asylum seekers and the electorate alike are short-changed by the framing and approaches set out in the policy. By promoting an approach that seeks to appease anti-migrant sentiment, we are joining in the drumbeat and allowing those in public office to create and exploit xenophobia by prioritising fear over facts and blaming newcomers for the many social challenges the country is facing. And by doing this, the policy offers a negative vision, in which the only metric for success is ‘deterrence’ and ‘enforcement’. This is policy-making at the hands of public opinion, manipulated by headlines and politicians using migration as a scapegoat. While not wanting to underestimate the many challenges that lie at the heart of ensuring an asylum system that is fair to asylum seekers and communities in the UK alike, neither the framing nor the content will work.
Let’s be clear. Asylum seekers are not destabilising communities: but the rhetoric and lack of honest conversation around asylum is. Yes, for sure, the government needs to listen to voter concerns – some of which are perfectly legitimate. But the government also has a responsibility to create a better, more hopeful narrative that lives up to the values that we have sought to export across the world. Ultimately, that is the way to ensure we create an antidote to the “dark forces”, whoever they might be.
* Dr Lucy Hovil is the Migration Partner at Expectation State; a Senior Research Associate at the Refugee Law Initiative, University of London; and co-director of the Small Boats initiative (www.smallboats.org) focused on addressing misperceptions around asylum.)
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