Over the weekend, Shabana Mahmood MP, the home secretary announced ‘new safe and legal routes’ for refugees to come to Britain. That Home Office tweet in full: “New safe and legal routes for refugees to come to the UK will begin to roll out in the autumn, giving genuine refugees a pathway to rebuild their lives.
Our new community sponsorship scheme will allow approved groups to choose the refugees they sponsor, taking responsibility for their housing, integration and supporting them into work. Trusted universities will be able to directly sponsor refugees through a new refugee study route. A new refugee work sponsorship route is expected to open next year.
All arrivals will have refugee status, undergo strict biometric screening, criminality checks and health assessments before arrival, to ensure support reaches those in genuine need. Numbers will start small and build over time, ensuring the routes remain controlled and sustainable while public confidence is restored in Britain’s immigration system.
The first refugee arrivals are expected by autumn 2027.”
Mark that in your diary.
Labour’s ‘controversial’ immigration and asylum bill is expected to be introduced to Parliament next week. This ‘safe route’ scheme is necessary to shore up support for Mahmood’s controversial immigration bill on the left of Labour according to the Guardian. When the Bill was first suggested it was sold as a crackdown on illegal immigration. This caused panic even in Dublin. I wouldn’t get too excited.
The Bill promised last November seeks “to increase the forced removal of people refused asylum, introduce stringent age checks for people claiming to be children and limit applications under human rights laws…”
The legislation is expected to direct how article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is applied in immigration and deportation cases. The much hyped changed to indefinite leave to remain (increasing the time you need to be in the country from 5 years to 10 years before you could apply for ILR) will not be in the bill. It will contain new structure for asylum tribunals by dropping an independent court system and replacing it with a new appeals body that sits within the Home Office. Finally, it is proposed to allow the “immediate forced removal of those who have exhausted all appeals.” The family reunification scheme was paused in Mahmood in September 2025 but is expected to reopen this year.
All of this – like the proposed welfare changes – will come against fierce opposition from the labour left as well as refugee charities. Hence the offer, the sweetener, of legal safe routes for refugees to settle in the UK.
This is what will happen. Asylum numbers will increase. This will be the welfare shambles part 2. Remember when PM Starmer proposed a £5 billion cut in welfare but the backbenches rebelled and managed to turn that into an increase of about £4 billion? A £9 billion swing. Expect the same with immigration – a cut that somehow turns into an increase. A demand by the public for reduced numbers of people coming to Britain will be “realised” by more people coming to Britain.
The safe route scheme has some support. It is the kind of thing that a government would come up with after consulting a lot of focus groups. In these focus groups the peeps tell you they are not against immigration or asylum seekers, just those who abuse the system. I’ve said this kind of thing myself. What really irks is the ongoing small boats crisis, hundreds of military aged men coming over what should be a natural sea defence and border to break into the country. An invasion, if you will (call me far-right.) This drives even the middle-class slightly crazy, as it is daily reminder of the diminishing status of Britain and how it cannot even control its own border. A mere 11,000 have arrived this year so far. The numbers since 2022 are:
- 2022 – 45,774
- 2023 – 29,437
- 2024 – 36,816
- 2025 – 41,472
Asylum via the English Channel also favours the strong – those who can make difficult and dangerous journey to the UK. Whereas if we had “safe routes” this could shift the balance to women and children securing asylum. Or as my friend Tim Stanley tweeted, “refugee sponsorship scheme sounds promising! A capped safe/legal route, sponsored by private citizens, less pressure on communities &, if like Canada, speeds-up employment. Combine this with reducing boats & it’s a better balance: a wall with a gate in it.”
A few problems. First, many people in Britain want zero new asylum seekers. The British people have taken in more than their fair share already. They have suffered an influx of people unprecedented in modern times. How about you deport the 164,500 military aged men who broke into the country illegally since 2022 before you set up the whole safe route fandango? How about that?
In addition to the small boat numbers above there was the 30,000 Afghanis settled in a secret scheme, kept super-secret by a super injunction. The small boats keep coming and show no sign of stopping. Also by definition asylum seekers have the least to offer. They are not here because of their skill set or to fill a gap in the labour market. It is the exact opposite. They are here because of what Britain offers them. Indeed the more traumatic their experience of war, oppression and persecution the greater the claim to asylum.
That’s sad, but it’s not our problem. This is the truth. It is time for someone to make the case and say, new asylum seekers or refugees with their tales of woe are not our problem. I have compassion for them but that does not mean I should take hundreds of thousands to the detriment of my fellow countrymen.
Do you know what is our problem? At least 520 women and babies who received maternity care so substandard that they died or were seriously harmed. The housing crisis and poor condition of the NHS is our problem. The fact that more is spent on welfare than defence is our problem.
There is a hierarchy of people you owe a duty to. If you take those duties seriously and are not morally bankrupt, that hierarchy is: your family, your extended family or clan, those in your community, those in your broader community and then your fellow countrymen. Right down the bottom of the list, at the very, very bottom, is the person who turns up on your door from Turkmenistan with a sad tale of woe and suffering from PTSD and very poor English. This includes the children. Read my lips: this is not my problem.
A person who prioritises someone from say Sudan over their own family, friends and community is morally disordered. The refugee charities will say that this is a false choice. It isn’t. Resources are limited. Every child of a large family knows this. It is one thing to lose parental time and resources to another sibling but quite another to the dude from Sudan who receives resources transferred under compulsion by a vast government bureaucracy.
This is before we get to issues of the culture clash and the threat a minority of these men pose to the safety of women and children in this country.
For instance, part of this mad ‘safe route scheme’ includes universities taking on refugees. So this means a university could take in a few hundred (we don’t know?) men who have witnessed a brutal genocide, was perhaps a child soldier for years or lived in a country where rape was a weapon of war. And they are just going to drop that lad into Freshers Week 2027. Tell me, how is this a good idea? Will that person be offered the counselling they need and if so, who is paying? Again the greater the persecution and oppression the better your claim for asylum. You witnessed your entire village being butchered with machetes? Welcome to first year residence accommodation.
Getting back to Tim who sees the Bill as a deal – safe routes for fewer small boats. “Combine this with reducing boats & it’s a better balance: a wall with a gate in it.” The word combine is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The problem with legislation is that it reflects the wishes of the legislators, in this case the Labour left. The home secretary cannot make laws herself. The Bill must pass through the House of Commons, committee stages, and then go to the House of Lords until finally it receives Royal assent. Just like the welfare bill all the restrictions to reduce asylum seekers will be watered down or stripped out completely and the provisions for ever increasing numbers of asylum seekers will be beefed up. Has anything the Starmer government done so far given you cause to believe otherwise?
Britain doesn’t need a wall with a gate in it. It just needs a big wall. A very high, very long scary wall with barbed wire on top that says: Keep Out. Nothing less than that will do.
