
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Starmer's new asylum plan is a carbon copy of Denmark's failure that will not only harm lives, but cost an absolute fortune too. Right, so the government is out here telling people it wants to “fix” the asylum system, and then the moment you look at what they’re actually doing, you realise they’re building something that doesn’t fix anything. It just makes fear permanent. They say this is modernisation, but all they’ve done is lift Denmark’s temporary-protection model — the same one that shredded integration, dragged people through review cycles and led to Syrians being told parts of Damascus were “safe” when UN bodies were saying the complete opposite. They say it’s fairness, but every real migration route stays wide open while the smallest, weakest group – the asylum seekers - gets turned into a political prop. And they say it’s moral, which is the part that really tells you they think the country isn’t paying attention, because you don’t make a moral case by putting refugees on a countdown. You do that when the optics matter more than the people and what they’ve been through do. Right, so the government is standing in front of the country telling people it wants to fix the asylum system, wants to restore confidence, wants to take the heat out of the debate, and then, as you look at what they’re actually doing, you can see they’ve built a structure that takes the single most vulnerable group of people entering the UK and puts them under a form of permanent review. Disabled people can relate to that I’m sure. They say this is modernisation. They say it’s fairness. They say it’s control. But the moment you put any of that next to the facts, the system collapses under its own contradictions. Because what’s being built isn’t stability. It isn’t order. It isn’t a humane or effective framework that treats refugees as people rebuilding their lives. It’s a temporary-protection machine copied straight from Denmark, and Denmark is the one place in Europe where the model has already shown you exactly how it fails. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and her department are preparing an asylum overhaul where successful asylum seekers will be granted temporary protection, not a secure path to permanent settlement. That’s the core shift. You receive protection, but not the stability that used to come with it. Your life is safe, but only until your next review.
By Damien WilleyStarmer's new asylum plan is a carbon copy of Denmark's failure that will not only harm lives, but cost an absolute fortune too. Right, so the government is out here telling people it wants to “fix” the asylum system, and then the moment you look at what they’re actually doing, you realise they’re building something that doesn’t fix anything. It just makes fear permanent. They say this is modernisation, but all they’ve done is lift Denmark’s temporary-protection model — the same one that shredded integration, dragged people through review cycles and led to Syrians being told parts of Damascus were “safe” when UN bodies were saying the complete opposite. They say it’s fairness, but every real migration route stays wide open while the smallest, weakest group – the asylum seekers - gets turned into a political prop. And they say it’s moral, which is the part that really tells you they think the country isn’t paying attention, because you don’t make a moral case by putting refugees on a countdown. You do that when the optics matter more than the people and what they’ve been through do. Right, so the government is standing in front of the country telling people it wants to fix the asylum system, wants to restore confidence, wants to take the heat out of the debate, and then, as you look at what they’re actually doing, you can see they’ve built a structure that takes the single most vulnerable group of people entering the UK and puts them under a form of permanent review. Disabled people can relate to that I’m sure. They say this is modernisation. They say it’s fairness. They say it’s control. But the moment you put any of that next to the facts, the system collapses under its own contradictions. Because what’s being built isn’t stability. It isn’t order. It isn’t a humane or effective framework that treats refugees as people rebuilding their lives. It’s a temporary-protection machine copied straight from Denmark, and Denmark is the one place in Europe where the model has already shown you exactly how it fails. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and her department are preparing an asylum overhaul where successful asylum seekers will be granted temporary protection, not a secure path to permanent settlement. That’s the core shift. You receive protection, but not the stability that used to come with it. Your life is safe, but only until your next review.