Britain is burning. The recent weeks of far-right riots have seen mobs assembling outside mosques and hotels housing asylum-seekers; the burning of public libraries; and an uptick in targeted racist violence and vandalism. Sparked by the tragic deadly stabbings of three young girls in the town of Southport, the incident has been sickeningly exploited by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups, which have spread disinformation online and garnered support from prominent far-right figures.
Less than two months after a new Labour government took office, the issue of immigration has already taken center stage. Prime Minister Keir Starmer now faces the steep challenge of tackling the root causes of Britain’s toxic relationship with immigration.
For years now, the issue of immigration has been at the heart of the British predicament, and in the wake of Brexit, the normalization of far-right rhetoric has increasingly embedded itself in Britain’s media and political landscape.
The Labour Party must not be blown off course by the recent riots. It should instead capitalize on this moment—using it to carve out a new, humane immigration policy.
Even though Starmer’s government has pledged to increase the number of deportations of those who do not have the right to stay in the country, there have been some important changes to Britain’s immigration policies since Labour came into power.
Most prominently, on the first day of his premiership, Starmer scrapped the controversial Rwanda bill that entailed sending asylum-seekers from the United Kingdom to the East African nation. Introduced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022, many considered the policy to be a cynical maneuver rather than a serious solution to address the country’s broken immigration system. New Home Secretary Yvette Cooper called it “a complete con,” which she told Parliament had cost the British taxpayers 700 million pounds (about $918.4 million)—a considerable sum of money given that no asylum-seeker ever set foot in Rwanda.
Perhaps the only enduring image of this failed Rwanda policy was a photo of the Conservative Party’s former Home Secretary Suella Braverman joyfully laughing in a center in Rwanda meant to house asylum-seekers. The daughter of immigrant parents who migrated to Britain from East Africa celebrating her “dream” of sending vulnerable asylum-seekers to one of the most repressive African countries was a stark symbol of the cruel and ineffective anti-migrant policies of the recent Tory era.
Last month, after Starmer spoke about “resetting” Britain’s approach to immigration in a way that respects international human rights standards, Labour also announced plans to permanently shut down the controversial Bibby Stockholm, a barge moored off the coast of Dorset that is used to hold asylum-seekers. In a surprise appointment, Starmer then chose Richard Hermer, a distinguished human rights lawyer who began his career at famed human rights firm Doughty Street Chambers, as his attorney general.
Another sign of change at the Home Office is that it now refers to migrants as “irregular” rather than “illegal,” a term routinely used under Tory governments that implied criminality and reinforced harmful stereotypes.
This is the sort of humane approach that Britain needs—only a much larger scale. Though these small changes were announced before the recent riots began, the question remains whether the Labour Party—even with its dark past—has the courage to transform Britain’s troubled relationship with immigration going forward. A lasting solution would address the spread of deceptive disinformation aimed at sowing hatred while also advocating for a truly compassionate and ethical immigration system.
For instance, Starmer could officially repeal the Illegal Migration Act, which was passed in July last year by the Tory-led government. The law allowed the government to deny the right of asylum to migrants who had arrived in the U.K. irregularly. It stated that the government could instead detain and deport refugees to their home countries or “safe” third countries (such as Rwanda). The controversial law was criticized by several human rights groups as well as the United Nations, which described it as an “asylum ban” that penalized vulnerable refugees by effectively closing off safe and legal pathways for those escaping persecution, violence, or conflict. Although the International Rescue Committee reports that the Labour Party has “effectively ended” enforcement of the law, it remains on the books.
In addition to scrapping the Tory-era act, the Labour government should also look to tackle the backlog of asylum cases. According to the latest Home Office data, there are more than 118,000 people waiting for an initial decision on their asylum applications. To truly bring down these figures, Starmer will need to do a lot more to reform a broken system that leaves thousands of vulnerable people trapped in destitution.
His government can seek real improvements in the asylum process by expanding safe routes, ensuring fair hearings, and demonstrating compassion and humanity. To focus on longer-term solutions, Starmer should prioritize Britain’s efforts to address the root causes of the global conflicts that drive many people to make perilous journeys in the first place.
Beyond repairing the asylum system, the Labour government could also uphold the rights of Britons of migrant background by revoking the Nationality and Borders Act that was passed in 2022, which creates a two-tiered system of citizenship, making naturalized British citizens—such as myself—second-class citizens.
The act grants the state the power to strip Britons of citizenship without giving them notice. This extreme measure makes Britain an outlier among liberal democracies—and unfairly targets its own citizens, especially British Muslims, even if their families have been in the country for generations.
Citizenship-stripping powers are not new in the United Kingdom, having been weaponized by both Labour and Tory administrations post-9/11. In the past two decades, hundreds of Britons have been stripped of their citizenships.
As the historian Hannah Arendt famously said, “citizenship is the right to have rights,” and the British state has weaponized citizenship in the name of security. Starmer has a rare opportunity to fix this.
Finally, Labour’s immigration policies ought to focus on the most vulnerable and impacted group: unaccompanied children. A recent data investigation conducted by Lost in Europe, a cross-border journalism collective, found that across 13 European countries, including Germany and Italy, more than 50,000 unaccompanied child migrants went missing between 2021 and 2023.
Though the British Home Office is yet to release specific numbers regarding the United Kingdom (despite a pending Freedom of Information Act request), we know that unaccompanied minors migrating to Britain remain at increased risk of gang recruitment, workplace exploitation, and modern slavery.
Another report conducted by a group of nongovernmental organizations earlier this year showed that hundreds of child refugees who had experienced abuse and violence were often placed in adult prisons after the Home Office wrongly assessed their ages. To make matters worse, British tabloids often disregard or question the ages of migrant children—making a mockery of the country’s laws intended to safeguard the identities of minors, especially those in search of safety.
These depictions of migrants in Britain have dangerous consequences, and they often act as a precursor to discrimination and violence. Britain has been here before.
More than 24 years after the infamous Oldham riots of 2001, which saw a brief period of racial rioting in a town near Manchester that spurred on the country’s far right, Britain has yet to learn from its mistakes.
The easy talk of race and civil war—most recently invoked by Elon Musk—plays into standard far-right tropes about the country, but the reality is that Britain has absorbed migrants much more effectively than many of its European neighbors, and its capital is largely a tolerant and multiethnic place. This is a story that is rarely told by irresponsible media figures and politicians who have whipped up far-right extremists for far too long.
As a member of Parliament, Starmer represents the Holborn and St Pancras seat, one of the most diverse areas in inner-city London. My family arrived in this constituency as refugees from Somalia almost 30 years ago. I grew up on a council estate in Camden next to pretty, tree-lined Edwardian terraced houses worth millions. It was a place of poverty and friendship—a place where Irish, Bangladeshi, Kosovar, and Somali kids mixed together, speaking multicultural London English, listening to garage music, playing soccer, and drinking in local pubs.
There were tensions when I was growing up—for example, in Somers Town, where I went to school in the mid-1990s. The fascist, far-right British National Party (BNP) tried to capitalize on the tragic killing of Richard Everitt, a white boy, in 1994 by a group of Bangladeshi boys. At one point, a far-right mob firebombed halal butchers on a street lined with Asian shops. But the incident had no real long-term impact, and the community moved on.
While these recent riots may hark back to those days, unlike the BNP of the 1990s, these disparate far-right groups have far more power today. They are bolstered by social media algorithms and support from online extremists, established media, and some of the billionaires who operate those very platforms. They systematically spread their hate.
It is these forces that seek to warp and destabilize British culture rather that the tiny minority of asylum-seekers and larger group of regular migrants who seek to make their lives in Britain. Labour must not fall into their trap and let British democracy be undermined.
The post How Starmer Can Fix Britain’s Toxic Immigration Policy appeared first on Foreign Policy.
