Britain should be proud, but never afraid of the stranger

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.

A refugee did not cause Britain’s housing crisis. An asylum seeker did not create NHS waiting lists. People fleeing persecution did not make the cost-of-living pressures facing families worse. These problems are all because of successive government failure. If we want to solve them, we need serious answers on housing supply, public services, economic growth and government capacity. Blaming refugees solves nothing.

My family’s experience also reminds me that migration is not simply about the moment someone crosses a border. My grandparents’ decision to come to Britain shaped the lives of their children and grandchildren. Their story became part of our country’s story.

People who arrive here as refugees go on to become our neighbours, colleagues and friends. They start businesses, work as doctors and teachers, raise families and grow old here.

I don’t believe the answer is to pretend the asylum system is working as it should. It isn’t. Nor is it to retreat from the state’s responsibility to control borders, process claims and enforce decisions.

The answer is to demand both competence and humanity.

We should also challenge a politics that turns legitimate concerns about borders, asylum and migration into hostility towards people who had little control over the circumstances that brought them here.

I delivered this message from the conference stage in Brighton. But speeches at conference are the easy part. The harder task is taking the same message into communities across the country, including places where it may not be so warmly received.

If we only make the argument where we know people already agree with us, we aren’t changing the debate. Changing the debate is our job.

My family once needed Britain to say that they were safe here. They were given the opportunity to build a life, and they made the most of it.

I cannot know which families arriving today will have a similar story.

I do know what I want the country they arrive in to be: secure enough to enforce its rules, competent enough to make its systems work, and liberal enough to remember the human beings those systems exist to serve.

* Anton Georgiou is the Lib Dem Group Leader in Brent