Sooner or later, the heady days of the early Andy Burnham bounce and summer of “money off now” remedies on bus fares, pub business tax caps and some energy bill VAT relief give way to more trying questions.
A refreshed government which has run so far on upbeat, can-do “vibes” must tackle a thorny subject where the political dopamine rewards are scanty and the risks of failure and backlash high – how to settle asylum seekers to ensure, as the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, puts it, that “no one type of community is bearing the brunt”.
This is code for anger the government aims to address about the housing of asylum seekers in poorer areas – including Mahmood’s own Birmingham Ladywood. The proposal is to disperse incomers in “mixed mode” accommodation – Whitehall-speak for a hodge-podge of old student apartments, multiple-occupancy homes and former army facilities – and move away from the reliance on cheap hotels, which has proved a flashpoint for anger in areas from Essex to Falkirk.
Burnham and Mahmood want to reframe arguments about asylum as being about fairness. Many Labour MPs in poorer areas have been pressing ministers to address dissatisfaction in poorer communities across the country, which take the lion’s share of asylum applicants – the gap between settlement in the most deprived areas and the least deprived is a ratio of around 5:1, fertile ground for the kind of aggressive outbursts seen in August in Thetford, Norfolk. That was in a poor part of the market town.
But middle-class dissatisfaction can also make its voice heard, and protests in the tiny village of Piddington showed up in a mock “independence referendum” over plans to house 1,000 asylum seekers at a disused MoD base. While the forms of protest may be politer than setting fire to wheelie bins or shouting outside asylum seekers’ homes, there is still jeopardy for Labour as it faces the creep of Reform UK from hardscrabble parts of the country into more well-heeled areas – or risks appearing to discard voters’ concerns in small towns and local areas, which are already an Achilles heel for Labour electorally.
Mahmood acknowledged this when she said in an interview that, regardless of the nature of a community, the arrival of a significant number of asylum seekers did have impacts which could disquiet communities – and especially so when linked to the question of illegal arrival routes, which make it harder for the authorities to tell local people much about who their new neighbours are.
That is easily turned into panic-driving messages from Reform UK and further-right voices about “largely male, undocumented” incomers and the implication that they represent a risk. But that is also acknowledged in the Home Office “Respect in Public” guide published this week, explaining the law on rape, assault and harassment in words and pictures. While much parodied, it is clear enough to undermine the defence that a perpetrator of sex offences did not know what was legal or not in the UK – and that cultural or religious excuses cannot be indulged.
For all the present woes of Reform and Nigel Farage, migration is one of the biggest drivers of Labour losing traction rightwards. The worst habit of progressives dealing with anxieties about small-boat arrivals and asylum settlement in general has been to preach rather than listen. This seems like a hard habit to break. A Unison trade union organiser, Karen Morrison, declared of recent protests in Falkirk that demonstrators “are angry at the wrong people. Asylum seekers are not to blame for the ills of our society… we need to go back into communities to help people understand that.”
That presumption that people don’t know what they want to express, and the idea that “helping people understand” what you want them to think while ignoring what they are loudly saying, is a neat encapsulation of why so many working-class voters have turned their backs on Labour and towards the more sweeping rhetoric and deportation promises of Farage and Restore Britain. Telling people that the rise in irregular small boats does not matter because the numbers were small and only coastal hotspots were affected costs Labour dear in credibility.
And while this summer has seen a drop to 2022 levels, a year-on-year arrivals total of 40,000 is going to be noticed. It also builds up a system which has to support just under 100,000 people with accommodation and basic welfare. Burnham has long argued that the existing dispersal system disproportionately places asylum seekers in areas with cheap housing – as mayor of Greater Manchester, he highlighted that the North West had a disproportionately large share of asylum seekers. Yet this will not make a “fairness first” policy easy to enact. For a start, it relies on the conviction that people may be more willing to accept asylum accommodation if they believe the system is more equitable. How to judge that is, however, harder than it might seem when put to the test in specific circumstances.
One is that the present distribution, lopsided as it is, reflects the availability of cheap housing stock. And the Piddington example – a military base in a network of sleepy villages – means that areas of the country can suddenly find themselves hosting a large number of incomers. Expect, too, an argument about cost – both real and amplified by those hostile to any largesse towards refugees. If housing people in a more distributed way ends up costing more per person than the old system because property prices are higher, Middle England’s taxpayers – already anxious about what the first Burnham Budget has in store – will have questions.
Also, it is unclear in raw volumes what the Burnham-Mahmood plan would mean: is it largely symbolic, to show us that this is a moral matter and all parts of the country should play a part? Or how are numbers of asylum seekers to be calibrated so that individual towns and villages do not object that they are disproportionately affected in comparison with other similar places? Asylum seekers themselves, who are far from feather-bedded and live on tiny subsistence payments, tend to be keener to be in places where they have networks and often do not relish being stuck in leafy isolation where community facilities for people without transport are scant.
As Mahmood surely knows from her own experience in Birmingham, distribution changes alone will not restore public confidence in the asylum system and, in particular, control of irregular migration. The Government, scorched by the “Stop the Boats” failures of its Tory predecessor, stopped making hard promises on that score, beyond announcing a downward trend over summer.
So conversation with middle-class voters about asylum will rightly engage some sympathies and have us ask what greater fairness should look like. The answers might not be entirely what the Government wants to hear.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and co-host of the “Politics at Sam and Anne’s” podcast
Hence then, the article about the asylum policy that sounds fair until it reaches your town was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The asylum policy that sounds fair – until it reaches your town )
Also on site :
- I’m an immigrant in limbo. Uni in the UK will cost me £250,000
- Iran-US war latest: Tehran warns of ‘earthquake-like’ retaliation over Trump’s ‘economic D-Day’ threats
- 1967 Rock Song, a No. 1 Hit by a 16-Year-Old Box Tops Member, Ranked Among ‘Greatest Songs of All Time’