A few days ago, the Appeals Court ruled in favour of the Labour Government, allowing asylum seekers to remain at The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex. Despite this new precedent, all twelve Reform-controlled councils have announced that they will still pursue legal challenges against asylum hotels, with some Conservative-controlled councils indicating that they will follow suit.
Immigration and asylum. Those are Reform UK’s top priorities. They have announced Operation Restoring Justice, a pledge to deport 600,000 foreign nationals over five years of a Reform government. Conflating immigrants and asylum seekers, these plans would incur harm to the UK’s international reputation through withdrawal from the ECHR and the Refugee Convention, giving aid to hostile regimes such as the Taliban Emirate to reclaim asylum seekers, the unbudgeted creation of prison-like infrastructure to house migrants, and criminalising desires to avoid persecution and death. Their focus on migration is helping to provide carte blanche for any unpopular policies that Reform may wish to include in their 2029 manifesto, such as fracking and non-dom-exempting ‘Britannia cards’.
Sadly, focus on migration is proving an effective campaign issue. In challenging Reform’s poll leads, the Conservatives and Labour decided that the best course of action was to ape their positions on migration. After the Bell Hotel ruling, Keir Starmer and Border Security and Asylum Minister Angela Eagle felt the need to emphasise that the use of ‘asylum hotels’ would end by the conclusion of this Parliament. Rather than taking the wind out of their sails, their anti-migration stances have justified Reform’s positions, likely encouraging people to support the genuine article rather than a pale imitation.
Recent YouGov polling found that a significant percentage of Britons believed that Reform UK were the best party to deal with immigration and asylum (36%), Brexit (23%) and law and order (24%), albeit outpolling ‘Don’t Know’ and ‘None’ combined (35%). It is a sad indictment that Reform could form the next government – assisted by a distortive voting system and an enabling media environment – despite more people disapproving of them than approving.
We Liberal Democrats are unapologetically in favour of policies that protect and advance the rights of asylum seekers, promote international development and seek to repair UK-EU relations. We have stayed true to our principles. As voters shift their support away from the major parties, we are finding ourselves in a position to challenge Reform, as has been demonstrated in local elections and by-elections characterised as LD vs. Reform races.
National politics have an impact on local elections. While local government has no say over immigration policy, the protests and legal challenges we have witnessed suggest that they can exercise influence. Reform will likely use these shortcomings in local government to argue that they need to be in national government to be effective. I have previously written about how our party needs to provide support for UK nationals and emphasise public interests in international development to counter backlash against our party’s foreign policy platform, as well as to publicise Reform’s failings in local government and holding them accountable. Building on these, we need to challenge Reform’s credentials on migration policy.
In the EU, the UK was party to its asylum mechanisms, whereby the rejection of an asylum application in one member state meant that it was rejected in every other state. With Brexit touted as an opportunity for the UK to restore its sovereignty, it removed the mechanisms that UK’s asylum system had been reliant upon, particularly the returns policy under the Dublin Agreement. With the rejection of a post-Brexit equivalent, UK governments have had to negotiate bilateral deals, such as the UK-France ‘one-in, one-out’ scheme. Because of this change, Reform’s claims that the UK could legally send migrants back to France were wrong.
As leader of UKIP, Farage was the chief proponent of Brexit. However, neither he nor his parties (UKIP, Brexit and Reform) have had to shoulder the responsibility of implementing IT, achieving their successes by pressuring Conservative governments into following their lead. With the – at best – lacklustre outcomes of Brexit and more Britons favouring ‘Brejoining’ than sticking with Brexit, Brexit-championing Reform somehow came through unscathed. With the major parties committed to working around Brexit and not criticising it, Reform have been able to advocate their ‘solutions’ to migration despite the failures of their predecessor party’s key plank of Brexit and its role in bringing about the UK’s current problems concerning migration.
While emphasising the humanity and cost-effectiveness of our asylum platform, we need to take every opportunity possible to remind voters that Reform and Farage are the cause of the current migration mess, not the solution.
* Samuel James Jackson is the Chair of the Policy Committee of the Yorkshire and the Humber Liberal Democrats and had served as the Liberal Democratic candidate in Halifax during the 2024 general election.
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30 Comments
I think we need a better line than this if we are to beat Reform. It is not true to claim that “ Reform and Farage are the cause of the current migration mess” and voters will not believe it. Part of the reason the UK voted to leave the EU was due to a feeling that the number of immigrants coming to the UK was excessive – the issue of immigration has not just become a political concern post-Brexit. People voted to leave, partly, to regain control of the level of immigration, and many of these voters are now incensed to see that the UK government is refusing to take real action. Reform is leading in the polls because it appears to be listening to the concerns of a major proportion of the UK population in a way that other parties are not.
So what should the response of the Liberal Democrats be? Competing with Reform by taking a firm anti-immigration stance is off the table, so we must compete for those voters who are not concerned by the level of immigration or who positive welcome immigration. The field should be open to us since Labour and the Tories are both trying to talk tough against immigration.
Reform is effectively the Nigel Farage party. Any populist right-wing party without him at the helm is likely to go downhill quickly.
For those floating voters considering voting Reform for the sake of change, we need to highlight how Reform’s migration plans will harm the vulnerable, incur unknown financial burdens and provide financial aid to hostile regimes. For good measure, we need to remind people of the role that Farage played in bringing about Brexit but abdicating all responsibility for it.
While we should by all means try to pick up support from would-be Labour and Conservative voters, we should consider reminding floating pro-change voters of Farage’s role in bringing about Brexit and by extension the current migration situation and the financial, diplomatic and human cost of Reform’s migration plans.
@Brenda Will
But it is true. Researchers are finding that among the reasons potential small boat crossers give for wanting to come to Britain is that Britain is not in the Dublin system and so if they reach Britain they will not be sent back. An even more important reason they now give is that Britain is outside the fingerprint sharing system Eurodac, which means that if they get to Britain they get a fresh chance to be accepted as a refugee. Within the EU, if an applicant is rejected, the Dublin system (and soon the Pact on Migration and Asylum) means that the application cannot be renewed in a different EU member state. Eurodac is how that rule is enforced.
Britain’s isolation is itself a pull factor, a point only we seem to be in a position to make, and so Ed is absolutely right to have made it.
For the evidence for this, see https://mixedmigration.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/279_Northern-France-Belgium-Report.pdf and https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jtboZDEwqcxesqiKKFTVGfd8kuvTaUPO/view?pli=1.
(For more, see https://drhow.substack.com/p/liberals-and-the-small-boats?r=2feid8)
The major pull factor is that it’s very easy to find a job here in the gig economy here, using whatever name anyone chooses to use.
It’s a long standing problem. Many years ago, in my younger days, I used to work casually in the building industry. There was a reliance on undocumented labour, mainly from Ireland. It suited the Irish workers because they paid little or no tax but it caused resentment from the local workers. The push to outlaw the practice came from the unions. The Government couldn’t care less that taxes were being dodged.
I’m not sure if ‘the lump’ still persists in the building industry but it looks like our free and easy approach to employment isn’t confined to that sector. Lib Dems don’t like the idea of identity cards but there needs to be some way of establishing the identity of everyone in the workplace to avoid abuse of the system.
https://labourhub.org.uk/2022/10/20/the-1972-building-workers-strike/
Regarding Reform’s influence….
Yesterday I was in my local ‘Vision Express’.. An elderly man (probably a bit younger than my 81 years) and his wife were asking for attention.. His words “I’m here because won’t use the Spec Savers store from now on as they’ve been taken over by two Pakistanis”, had me biting my lip to stop me creating a ‘situation’ in the store.
.
When we’d left my wife said, “I really thought you’d start an argument and it wouldn’t have changed his attitude or made the assistant refuse to serve him”.
I’m not naive and I know such people have always been around but when did it become so NORMAL to say such things in so casual a manner?
@Peter Martin
The situation in your younger days is long gone. Photo ID (usually a passport) is already needed legally to become an employee and ‘right to work’ checks are part of firms’ usual HR bureaucracy. The problem with the gig economy is that employers have been claiming to be exempt from that requirement because they have been saying their riders etc are self-employed. So the answer is not ID cards, which will make absolutely no difference whatsoever, since photo ID is already required and employers determined to offer work illegally will carry on doing so, but (1) extending the requirement for photo ID to gig workers, which the government claims the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill now before Parliament will do, and (2) proper enforcement, which we certainly don’t have at the moment.
BTW the informal economy in France is probably bigger than that in the UK. The Oxford Migration Observatory recently said: “In fact, data from the World Bank suggest that the informal economy – which includes many undeclared activities and is likely to rely on the employment of people without work authorisation – is smaller in the UK than in France, relative to the economy.”
“We must compete for those voters who are not concerned by the level of immigration or who positive welcome immigration.”
Simply continuing to hoover up from a diminishing pool of voters who welcome high net immigration is unambitious. Also, it does nothing to fight off the looming threat Farage poses.
Pulling up the drawbridge is one thing. Creating an ICE-style press-gang to round up 600,000 ethnic minority people who maybe can’t prove how they got here, drag them off the streets, and dump them onto deportation planes, is quite another. It’s evil.
In five years, the UK and Europe could degenerate to the Putin / Trump / Xi level of barbarism. The threat is real. Just re-electing a few Lib Dem MPs won’t meet it.
One effective Farage strategy is to madden the liberal-left. Then, when lib-lefties make intemperate or naive comments, Farage will claim that he alone is telling it like it is. So let’s make sure we can tell it like it is.
The mass migration of ambitious young men from poor to rich countries is a global racket. It is funded by better-off families, who want their children to go and earn good money in the rich West, and then send remittances back. Western employers like it, because migrants are cheap labour. It’s a lousy form of foreign aid. Rather than help a few people from poor countries get rich, we should help poor countries escape poverty.
Many migrants effectively carry a Golden Ticket which states “well-founded fear of persecution”, and use it to claim asylum in the rich West. Sure, they deserve asylum. But they don’t need to travel halfway around the world, or to get asylum wherever they see their best job opportunities.
Mass migration wasn’t dreamed of when the 1951 Refugee Convention was created. There are no easy answers. But if we aren’t trying to find answers, and Farage is offering what sound like answers, Farage will win.
Ken Macdonald – former Lib Dem & ex head off DPP… Talking about the refugee convention.
This is the foundational problem. The definition in the Convention – that anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution is entitled to asylum – is too broad. That’s what has allowed the whole question of migration to get out of control. So millions of people are on the move who are, in reality, economic migrants, not entitled to settle in the UK. Yet they can plausibly claim that they face persecution at home and win asylum that way. If they are from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or a host of other places, who is to say they would not have a well-founded fear of persecution if they return? In this way, economic migrants magically become refugees.
@Greg: Yes that’s an important point. We’re used to thinking in terms of economic migrants (who aren’t eligible for asylum) versus ‘genuine’ migrants who are migrating because they face persecution. But it’s not a simple either/or. Doubtless many migrants are moving for a mixture of both reasons – and that makes it all but impossible to distinguish the two groups. Not only that but, even if your main motive is economic, there’s an obvious motivation to play up ‘fear of persecution’ in order to make it likely that an asylum request will be granted.
Realistically, anyone crossing the English Channel in a small boat has already passed through multiple countries, quite likely including countries that are safe, but which offer a lower standard of living than the UK or France, and has chosen not to apply for asylum in any of those countries. We need to be a bit realistic and accept that someone who has done that must be motivated at least in part by a desire to live specifically in the UK (whether for economic or other reasons) and therefore is not 100% motivated by fear of persecution – because if fear of persecution was their only motive, they would have applied for asylum in the first safe country they reached.
@David Howarth,
“The situation in your younger days is long gone.”
I doubt this is true.
It’s one thing to have laws, it’s another to actually enforce them.
The way it often works, with agricultural work gangs, nail bars, turkish barbers, sweat shops etc, is that a relatively “respectable” company doesn’t do the employing. This is subcontracted out to labour only companies.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8dqeerd75mo
Thanks Greg. The Refugee Convention is both too broad and too narrow. It’s too narrow in that it does not provide for refugees forced off their lands by climate change or large-scale natural disaster. Rules for these eventualities should be put in place now – without waiting for the Maldives to be totally submerged.
There must be scope to renegotiate the Convention. Pressing for that to happen – while condemning Farage’s plan to pull out – would help to show that we are not slaves to the refugee lobby.
@Peter Martin, @David Howarth
Almost all building construction workers are cheap immigrant cash economy. Add car washers. Its hard to resist cheaper costs for our needs. Macron is right in that the UK has to reduce its pull factors.
The other cash economy that we have long accepted are gardeners and window cleaners.
The case against identity cards for any sort of employment in te age of social media and the internet iw weakened by the day. The govenrment is already putting pressure on elements of the internet to verify age etc.
We need to reassure people that there is no evidence that asylum seekers are more likely to be criminals than uk citizens, that many European countries take more than we do in proportion to their populations, that the number decreased greatly for many years after 2002 and only recently went slightly above the 2002 figure (so may well decline again) that the total cost of the asylum system is only 0.37% of total government expenditure, that this ‘cost’ does not include the contribution to our economy that settled refugees give us, that those who settle work mainly in low paid jobs, that the cost is already showing signs of coming down and could be greatly reduced if they could work 6 months after arriving, that more who are not genuine are now being returned, and that even systems to stop any arriving here without authorisation would cost us. So the issue has been grossly exaggerated compared to all the other issues we face as a nation.
As well as reassuring people, we can continue to advocate more legal routes with processing centres in Europe in order to get proper control of them. More international cooperation, not less, would help by playing our part across Europe and through the UN. We need more efficient and effective control of the flow of asylum seekers, so that we can confidently ensure the benefits outweigh any cost even in the short term. There are long term benefits of playing a good part in the world order for the benefit of our children. Simultaneously we can concentrate on our much bigger issues that are holding up our economy and our wellbeing; like care and health, low productivity, lakc of investment in green jobs and inequality of pay.
@ Ellyott,
I’d be cautious about any claim that “almost all building construction workers are cheap immigrant cash economy”, given the shortage of workers in that sector and the interest that government agencies take in it.
The gig economy offers far more opportunities, it’s true, but the risk is far greater in terms of employers, given the penalties chargeable on employers who fail to carry out the checks outlined by David Howarth above.
Most employers don’t want to take the chance of being penalised for employing illegal workers but the ones who do are likely to be guilty of a range of offences, including tax evasion.
As I said, one thing that needs to happen is better enforcement of the legal requirements that already exist on right to work checks. But I really don’t understand how a national identity card will make any difference. Employers who comply with the law are already checking passports and immigration documents, which they can often do digitally these days. But employers who are willing to risk breaking the law will break it regardless of whether the documents required are passports and photo-ID immigration documents, as now, or national identity cards and photo-ID immigration documents.
Those who think this has anything to do with the case for or against national identity cards have obviously not been involved in employing anyone for the past two decades.
I made my comments from experience in knowing building contractors around in my are.
I have a tevhnology development and manufacturing business and employ people.
@ellyot
I hope you are not saying that you have not been complying with the law!
But, seriously, some of the examples you give are not of employment at all but of self-employment. It would be entirely possible to extend the current requirements for right to work checks to self-employment, so that anyone who paid a gardener or a window cleaner would be liable to a large fine if they failed to carry out the checks that employers are now required to carry out. That would not be a very popular policy, which is why no government has proposed it, but it would not need the introduction of a national identity card. It would simply require more people to come under anobligation to carry out the existing checks on the right to work, a system which already requires photo-ID in the form of passports and permission to work documentation verified by a government website.
It’s also worth reiterating that France has a bigger illegal working sector than the UK even though it has ID cards.
“The issue has been grossly exaggerated compared to all the other issues we face as a nation.”
It certainly has. However, if we tell concerned voters that they are just being silly, and fretting over nothing, then we are not likely to encourage them to vote for us.
“We need more efficient and effective control of the flow of asylum seekers.”
Yes, that’s what is missing. That’s what so many voters would really like to see. Can we persuade them that they can get that, without having to vote for a racist party?
@David Howarth
Ignoring your insinuation, ths topic is about countering a populist party building huge resentment and support against a numerically relatively small issue. That is how populists work.
There are easy ways for overstayers, student visa holders, asylum seekers etc. to get paid work (untaxed), plus access to NHS and be able to achieve their aims. The discussion is to resolve this relatively small matter and regain the national agenda before populists get in and destroy what has taken a century to build..
ID cards is a tangential topic that gets aired regularly, BUT we already have to present our identity by showing a passport, driver’s licence. student card, bus pass, recent utility bill, recent bank statement….to complete many transactions. Thus it already exists and is hardly a debate.
However, the question is how can we devise a system as part of the solution to destroy the populists ground and perhaps increase the tax take for national budgets.
At this moment, a populist is winning, as he won his previous cause and will be prime minister in 4 years time intent on copying what an orange populist is doing elsewhere.
As Ellyott and others have pointed out, the crying need is to fight back against Farage. One way to do that is to shoot his fox. We should identify where there are genuine concerns with global economic migration, and then show that it is responsible parties like the Lib Dems which can best deal with them.
There are two ways to fight better against Farage
One -stop talking about the things Farage wants to talk about
Two – talk about things Farage does not want to talk about – Climate change, undoing the damage of Brexit, The NHS.
Ellyott 2nd Sep ’25 – 8:21pm:
Almost all building construction workers are cheap immigrant cash economy.
Even with a generous allowance for hyperbole, that’s an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence to support. Looking at the list of employers hit with civil penalties for employing illegal workers in the first quarter of this year, out of 320+ listed only five appear to be engaged in construction or building work. Almost all are restaurants, take-aways, convenience stores, barbers, care homes, and car washes…
‘Illegal working civil penalties for UK employers: 1 January 2025 to 31 March 2025’:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/illegal-working-penalties-uk-report/illegal-working-civil-penalties-for-uk-employers-1-july-to-30-september-2024
“To fight better against Farage…stop talking about the things Farage wants to talk about… talk about things Farage does not want to talk about”
No. That effectively means leaving the voters to think that we have no good answers to what Farage is saying. When one side of an argument just wants to change the subject, it’s usually because they have lost the argument.
We can call Farage a charlatan, explain why his fantastical plans won’t work, and condemn his inhumanity. Or we can seek to show we have more responsible solutions to the global people smuggling racket. Or best of all, we can do both these things. But we won’t beat Farage by running away from him.
“To fight better against Farage…stop talking about the things Farage wants to talk about… talk about things Farage does not want to talk about”
No. That effectively means leaving the voters to think that we have no good answers to what Farage is saying. When one side of an argument just wants to change the subject, it’s usually because they have lost the argument.
We can call Farage out, explain why his fantastical plans won’t work, and condemn his inhumanity. We can seek to show we have more responsible solutions to the global people smuggling racket. Or best of all, we can do both these things. But we won’t beat Farage by running away from him.
David Allen, I agree with your last comment; we cannot ignore what Reform UK are saying especially since so many support them. Hence in response to your response to mine, demonstrating the relatively small size of this issue should be part of our message. The other part is to show how we really can get control of the flow of asylum seekers; it is lack of control that most drives people to support Reform UK, though second to that now is the fear of criminals coming here which also means more vetting as a method of controlling who comes.
While defending immigration to the hilt, I think we still need to remain aware of difficulties ordinary people can notice because of the legitimate demands of people granted asylum here. It’s excellent that there are crowds of young men here to do the jobs, hopefully not only in the black economy, that the country needs – such as the Nigerians and Zimbabweans working in the caring services that I have met recently, who came here legitimately. But local people do notice that those granted asylum do need services – first of all somewhere to live, and we have a housing crisis – and if they have family, the children will need schooling, and NHS services – and we are not yet out of the NHS waiting lists problem.
The government is onto this it appears and going to restrict family dependents coming, with provisions about the earnings of the host family and more requirements about English fluency. But our councillors may also be aware that complaints from local people about ‘Them taking our services’ may not be just instances of racism, but may arise from legitimate local difficulties.
Katherine, you make a good point about real difficulties that some areas face because of immigrants and how unhelpful and even wrong it can be to accuse people of racism when they complain about immigrants coming to their area and getting public services. This all points to a mess compared to what should be the situation; controlled immigration and particular care for asylum seekers needs to sit alongside properly managed public services and housing, both of which have been hit over the last decade. Is it possible to have a temporary scheme of who is prioritised, a limit on the numbers coming here and government incentives to encourage individuals to give more to charities that can help immigrants ? Just an off the cuff suggestion.
I am encouraged by seeing so many posters on this thread willing to think outside the conventional liberal box and recognise that it isn’t only racists who see some problems with high net immigration.
Starmer is making lots of mistakes, but on small boats, Labour are facing a tough challenge, and trying to make a reasonable fist of it. Whatever they do will often be easy to attack. On this issue, Labour deserve to be cut a bit of slack.