Tomorrow, Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will make out that she has found the holy grail of migration policy. She will announce a suite of initiatives, which she will claim will drastically reduce illegal migration without requiring Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The inspiration, as The Mail on Sunday reported last week, comes from Denmark, where a centre-Left coalition has succeeded in reducing asylum applications to their lowest level in 40 years.
The Danes, apparently, have held the secret all along. However, all is not as it seems with their admittedly impressive record on illegal immigration. And predictably Keir Starmer‘s ham-fisted Labour Government is set to try to replicate it in a way that is as flaky as the country’s pastries.
Ten years ago, Denmark was a magnet for asylum seekers, as Britain is now. Yet from a peak of 37 asylum applications per 10,000 residents in 2015 it plummeted to four per 10,000 last year – just a fifth of the EU average.
How? From 2016, Denmark started to introduce temporary residence permits, which allowed refugees to stay in the country only as long as their home countries were deemed by the government to be dangerous.
A version of this will be announced by Mahmood tomorrow, but as the centrepiece of her grand plan it falls flat. Does she really think migrants won’t be enticed by the UK’s buffet of free accommodation, health care and a weekly allowance, if they can only enjoy it for the years their country remains at war?
What will not pass Mahmood’s lips is any attempt to copy Denmark’s draconian ‘anti-ghetto’ laws. To assimilate new arrivals, the Danish government can rehouse migrants away from estates where more than 50 per cent of the population is made up of non-Westerners.
They can also break up existing estates in which ‘parallel communities’ – as the Danes call them – have emerged, where migrants live only among their own kind.
Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood (pictured) will make out that she has found the holy grail of migration policy
Migrants wade into the sea in an attempt to board a small boat on August 12, 2025 in Gravelines
Given that Labour backbenchers require smelling salts whenever the words ‘welfare’ and ‘reform’ are mentioned, it seems unlikely they would sanction a law that allows the Government to rip up council estates in the likes of Birmingham, Bradford or London’s Tower Hamlets.
Nor would the party countenance the confiscation of assets from migrants to – horror – pay for their own food and accommodation. In Denmark, those who arrive with more than £1,200 worth of personal possessions do just that. Or at least they are supposed to – in six years there have been just 17 cases of people actually handing over their valuables.
Far more of an effective deterrent for the Danes has been the requirement for migrants and their dependants to learn Danish. Once settled in Denmark, if you want to bring a spouse to the country, you both must have passed a Danish language test.
Of course, Danish is not widely spoken while English has become the world’s ‘default’ language, meaning that Britain would struggle to deter asylum seekers in this way.
Though, it has to be said, there are still more than a million people in the UK who cannot speak English well or at all, according to the last census.
Further obligations on spouses are that they should be aged over 24, and the original migrant must have been living in Denmark without claiming benefits for at least three years, nor can they have had a criminal conviction in the past ten years.
That is a high bar that I dare the Home Secretary to set, for the need for a drastic turnaround in UK immigration policy could not be clearer.
The cost of housing asylum seekers and illegal migrants in hotels, we recently found out, has risen to £15.3 billion over ten years.
The claim that migration is helping boost our economy has been fatally undermined by figures revealing that there are 1.2 million foreign-born claimants living on Universal Credit, at an annual cost to the taxpayer of £7.5 billion.
Some nationalities, such as migrants from Congo, Iraq and Afghanistan, are four times more likely to be claiming Universal Credit than UK nationals.
As we have seen on taxes and benefits, when Labour backbenchers threaten to rebel, Starmer rapidly beats a retreat
Iranian Amin Abedi Mofrad, who after arriving in Britain by small boat, was sentenced to nine years and six months for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Oxford, where he was staying in an asylum hotel
And seemingly every week we learn of a new crime committed by those the country has offered free shelter to – the latest being 35-year-old Iranian Amin Abedi Mofrad, who after arriving in Britain by small boat, was sentenced to nine years and six months for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Oxford, where he was staying in an asylum hotel.
But it would be foolish to think that Labour really has the stomach to carry out Denmark’s harder-edged policies.
Its backbenchers have already damned Mahmood’s change of direction. According to Nottingham East MP Nadia Whittome, Denmark’s policies are ‘undeniably racist’ and ‘are more at home on the far-Right than in any centre-Left government’.
As we have seen on taxes and benefits, when Labour backbenchers threaten to rebel, Starmer rapidly beats a retreat.
Even if our own government could discover the will to carry out Danish policies, it doesn’t mean that they would be as successful here as they have apparently been in Denmark. Copenhagen has reduced the numbers applying for asylum mostly by deflecting them to other European countries.
And it is wrong to think that the Danish system does not fall foul of the ECHR. When illegal migrants challenge their ruling, they often win, just as they do in Britain.
In 2022, the Danish government decided that areas around the Syrian capital Damascus were safe enough for refugees to return to, and withdrew their permits to stay in Denmark.
Some went, in many cases to claim asylum in other European countries, but others remain stuck in limbo. They are no longer allowed to work, rent housing or send their children to school in Denmark, yet they remain, supported by Danish taxpayers in ‘departure centres’.
The ECHR has also watered down Denmark’s restrictions on asylum seekers bringing family members to join them, and has prevented the deportation of foreign criminals, just as in Britain. In one case, an Afghan who had come to Denmark as a child with his parents was given an expulsion order after being jailed for two years for violent offences.
However, the ECHR blocked his deportation, partly on the grounds that he had managed to get a woman pregnant during his pre-trial detention. The ‘right to a family life’ rules in Denmark apply just as in Britain.
Mahmood and Starmer might like to think that they can sort out Britain’s acute illegal migration problem without withdrawing from the ECHR, a body which has almost sacred significance for the Prime Minister, given his background as a human rights lawyer. But they are fooling themselves.
This ‘Danish lite’ approach will be no more effective than the much mocked ‘One In, One Out’ deal with France. A gimmick that grabs headlines but does nothing to move the dial.
If it was serious about reducing illegal migration, Labour would withdraw from the ECHR, repeal the Human Rights Act and finally put Britons where they belong, which is first.
