Britain looks to Frederiksen’s migration plan to neutralize Farage

LONDON — Britain’s center-left government is taking direct inspiration from Denmark’s hardline treatment of migrants — and leaving some of its own MPs feeling queasy.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will face down assembled critics from refugee charities and beyond in a speech in London Thursday morning, making what she calls the “progressive,” Labour case for overhauling Britain’s asylum system.

Mahmood is fresh from a fact-finding mission to Copenhagen — and wants to import many of the policies that helped Danish premier Mette Frederiksen see off a threat from the right.

Frederiksen, head of Labour’s sister party, the Social Democrats, drove asylum claims to a forty-year low. At the 2022 election, she pushed back the radical right and bagged her party’s best result in decades.

But at the same time, she has seen losses of socially liberal voters in cities — and faces a fresh test in a snap election later this month.

Mahmood will on Thursday try to take on complaints from her own more liberal-minded colleagues, as the struggling Labour Party tries to halt the rise of the right-wing, poll-topping Nigel Farage in the U.K.

She will lay out two nightmare visions, in her eyes, of where Britain could go if left-wing Labour MPs don’t hold their noses and back her changes on an issue that animates the British public. On one side is “Farage’s nightmare pulling up the drawbridge,” and on the other is the new left-wing kids on the block: the Greens. She describes leader Zack Polanski as conjuring a “fairy-tale of open borders.”

On top of dramatic changes to only grant refugees temporary stay in Britain, Mahmood will announce harsher conditions for asylum seekers who break the law or can support themselves financially.

New legislation will make welfare payments and accommodation rights conditional “only to those who play by our rules,” as Mahmood puts it.

A senior Home Office official, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive policy details, estimates the changes could extend to thousands of individuals. They would not rule out asylum seekers deemed to have broken the law being forced into destitution and rough sleeping in the process.

Mahmood will address critics who will balk at this by arguing that if citizens don’t trust the state to fix what is one of their top priorities then “there is no space for Labour values” to be realized.

“Restoring order and control at our border is not a betrayal of Labour values, it is an embodiment of them, and it is the necessary condition for a Labour government to achieve anything it hopes to,” Mahmood is expected to tell the center-left IPPR think tank, according to extracts released in advance.

Mahmood will on Thursday try to take on complaints from her own more liberal-minded colleagues, as the struggling Labour Party tries to halt the rise of the right-wing, poll-topping Nigel Farage in the U.K. | Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images

She will add: “A loss of control breeds fear, and when fearful people turn inwards their vision of this country narrows. Their patriotism turns into something smaller, something darker, an ethno-nationalism emerges. The idea of a greater Britain gives way to the lure of a littler England. And other voices – voices to the far right – take hold.”

‘Soft-left’ jitters

But Mahmood’s pitch may fall on unreceptive ears in her own party. The bulk of Labour MPs on the party’s so-called “soft-left” have only been made more jittery by the catastrophic defeat inflicted on them from the left in the Gorton and Denton by-election last week.

In that contest, the triumphant Greens appealed to younger progressives as well as Muslim voters to overturn nearly a century of Labour representation in the south Manchester seat. Even worse, Farage’s Reform came second, pushing Keir Starmer’s ruling party into a distant third.

Some Labour MPs responded to that loss by calling for Mahmood to water down her existing policies on migration — though whether this was really a salient issue in the campaign was disputed by a senior Labour activist involved.

“The brand just isn’t in a good place at the minute. I think that was the key thing really,” was their diagnosis. “Gaza came up far more with that kind of crowd than indefinite leave to remain.”

But the same activist did offer a word of caution: “The reforms need to be done in a way that bring people with them — which a lot of progressive voters don’t necessarily feel at the minute.”

Even worse, Nigel Farage’s Reform came second, pushing Keir Starmer’s ruling party into a distant third. | Jonathan Brady/PA Images via Getty Images

Unhappy Labour MPs are increasingly making their views on Mahmood’s Danish turn known.

Former immigration barrister and leading critic of her approach Tony Vaughan wrote to Starmer this week expressing in detail his concerns that Mahmood’s settlement restrictions will damage the economy, while posing serious dangers to women, children and community cohesion. 

Vaughan has also been approaching colleagues for backing, and has received support from some senior colleagues, according to two MPs. The Unison public services union — a key funder of Labour — has been organizing another letter among parliamentarians that has grown from an initial 40 signatuories.

Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the Women and Equalities Committee, told POLITICO: “The letters are a sign of a failure of engagement from the department and the secretary of state and relevant ministers.”

Another left-wing MP fears Mahmood’s pitch is simply “another attempt to chase Reform down a cul-de-sac.” They flagged vast differences between Denmark and Britain, arguing it is far larger and more diverse, with deep appeals based on family ties and language.

Lessons to learn

Those to the right of Labour strongly disagree — and back Mahmood’s Copenhagen inspiration. “Illegal immigration continues to be a major concern in constituencies like mine,” said Jo White, who leads the Red Wall caucus representing Labour’s former heartlands in England’s North and Midlands. “I am listening to my voters and where lessons can be learnt from countries like Denmark, we should take them.”

Mahmood describes leader Zack Polanski as conjuring a “fairy-tale of open borders.” | Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images

White added: “Shabana has recently visited Denmark, and seen their immigration system operating at first hand and she is right to look at what will work on British soil.”

Indeed, Mahmood has put distance between herself and some aspects of the Frederiksen plan. The Home Office ruled out copying a jewelry law, which would see valuable items seized to cover the cost of asylum support, and will not follow Copenhagen’s “ghetto” demolition law targeting “parallel societies.”

The senior British official quoted above said internal polling suggests “we’re exactly where the vast majority of the public are.”

Luke Tryl, of the More in Common think tank, agreed on the possible success among voters for following the “Danish model.”

“I very much think it can be a winner,” he said. “When we polled on asylum reforms even Green voters tended to back most of them.”

Polling of Mahmood’s last round of hardline reforms in November, by the More in Common think tank, found that they were popular among Labour voters — and that most even went down well with Greens.

‘Save public consent’

There is one possibly uniting approach that Mahmood has touted, but is yet to outline: an expansion of Britain’s extremely limited legal routes for claiming asylum.

On top of dramatic changes to only grant refugees temporary stay in Britain, Mahmood will announce harsher conditions for asylum seekers who break the law or can support themselves financially. | Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images

“A huge part of this is to save public consent for the asylum system and to restore order and control so we can get the space to increase the number of safe and legal routes for those genuine refugees fleeing war and persecution,” said the senior official.

There are plans underway to open new community sponsorship routes, an approach that proved popular in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

Tryl said: “What we’ve found is the sponsorship models which do appear to be at the heart of their safe routes things are immensely popular — they particularly reduce opposition among conservative groups.” 

Progressive observers will watch Mahmood closely to see if she twins her Danish-style hardline approach with a softer offering.