Author Archives: Anton Georgiou

Photo credit: John Russell

More than 50 years ago, my grandparents, mother and aunts came to Britain as refugees from Cyprus. They arrived in London with just £20.

My grandfather took whatever job he could find. My grandmother spent long days in front of a sewing machine. They worked, saved, bought a home and raised their daughters.

Britain gave my family something they could not take for granted: the chance to be safe and build a future.

That history is personal to me. It also shapes how I think about the debate around refugees and asylum today.

The asylum system needs to be faster and more effective. Claims should be processed more quickly. Decisions cannot be allowed to drift for years. Public money should not be wasted through delay. Criminal gangs exploiting vulnerable people must face the full force of the law. Where someone has no right to remain, the state must be capable of enforcing its decisions.

A functioning asylum system should be able to do these things. Saying so isn’t hostility towards refugees.

The latest Home Office figures show that 85,891 people claimed asylum in the year to June 2026. At the end of June, more than 40,000 people were still waiting for an initial decision on their application. Those figures show the scale of the challenge. But they tell us very little about the people behind them.

It’s easy, in political debate, for a family to become a “case” and a person arriving here to become a statistic. We should resist a politics that turns administrative failure into an excuse to blame people who had little control over the circumstances that forced them to flee their homeland.

There are legitimate questions about immigration that liberals should be willing to answer.

The state has a responsibility to control its borders, and not every asylum claim can succeed. A liberal society should be able to enforce its rules without abandoning the principle that the people subject to them still deserve dignity.

For me, that is what liberalism should mean in practice.

Individual freedom and human rights are easy to defend when everyone agrees with you. The harder test is what you do when the politics becomes divisive and uncomfortable.

This is why Liberal Democrats should be willing to lead this debate. We shouldn’t leave questions of borders, asylum and migration to the far right. If people are worried that the state has lost control, liberals should be willing to address that concern. We shouldn’t retreat from the conversation, but neither should we abandon our values.

Communities are understandably frustrated when basic systems aren’t working. But directing that frustration at refugees does not fix these failures.