Shabana Mahmood is already the third British Asian woman to be a home secretary talking tough on asylum. That shows how much ethnic diversity in high office has accelerated. No Asian woman had ever been an MP before Mahmood and Priti Patel were elected in May 2010. But that Mahmood is so closely following Patel’s agenda now casts doubt on how far the Labour government’s new asylum proposals can deliver control in the Channel or rebuild public confidence in the system.
Mahmood’s core mission is to grip the asylum issue: she declares her reforms to be the most significant since the 1950s. Yet, they are uncannily similar to Priti Patel’s new asylum law in 2022 – which also proposed asylum seekers getting only 30 months of temporary protection. Suella Braverman then went even further – pledging that no asylum claims would get heard at all. By memory-holing these efforts, Mahmood misses crucial lessons of why they failed. If “pull factors” of the UK asylum design were the key to small boat arrivals, Patel and Braverman would have stopped the boats before the election.
These latest reforms are founded on a false premise. Mahmood’s foreword declares that “we have become the destination of choice in Europe – visible to every people smuggler and would-be illegal migrant across the world”. That will generate headlines that reinforce a widely held public misperception. But it is simply untrue. The UK received a tenth of total asylum claims in Europe last year – but Germany got twice as many. France, Spain and Italy got more too. As the Home Office’s statistical bulletin reported last month, “the UK received the fifth largest number of asylum seekers in the year ending March 2025, and the seventeenth largest intake when measured per head of population”.
Claims in the UK are rising, while they fall in Europe – but that does not necessarily show that people are ‘asylum shopping’ by comparing the terms. Data-sharing across EU members – with fingerprints taken – now makes it harder to apply to another member state after a failed claim. That used to make up a quarter of asylum claims in Europe. But the UK is not part of the data-sharing scheme, creating one new incentive to try the UK, instead.
This Labour government envies how Denmark has spent a decade seeking a reputation for being the most unwelcoming government in Europe. But lurid Home Office media briefings about how the UK could be equally harsh began to spark a backbench Labour rebellion before Mahmood spoke in the Commons. Here she used a somewhat more measured tone, ruling out the confiscation of jewellery just after the Sun had been told she would propose it. There was more emphasis on safe routes to claim asylum. Mahmood told the Commons these would be modest – but could expand after the boats had stopped. That sequencing misses how controlled routes should be core to the toolkit for control. Rapidly expanding deals with France and others to admit a capped number of people through controlled routes, and return those arriving outside them, is more likely to remove the smuggling gangs’ market, than legislating that refugees might wait twenty years to become British.
While Mahmood was seeking asylum lessons from Denmark, Swedish Social Democrat frontbencher Lawen Redar was in London. The daughter of Iraqi Kurdish refugees to Sweden, Redar’s mission is to lead how social democrats can talk and act on integration. Polls suggest she could turn that into policy after next year’s Swedish election.
Sweden is now as ethnically diverse as Britain – over a much shorter period. Having been the pacesetter for equality in the 20th century, it has struggled with 21st century diversity. So Redar shares Mahmood’s ‘blue Labour’ instincts for strict controls on immigration. She is challenging Sweden’s Social Democrats to belatedly understand that immigration, integration and anti-racism each need distinct attention. In Britain, over the decades, a focus on calls to reduce the pace of change of immigration has seen too little intentional policy action on integration itself.
We took part in a podcast together to compare integration challenges. Britain’s integration story is objectively more a glass-half-full experience than that of Sweden, despite our volatile and fractious politics. The UK has high levels of ethnic minority identification as British, plus migrant employment rates and ethnic minority educational attainment that more than matches those of the majority group. On these measures, Sweden lags behind. Redar wants to bridge the divides between what she calls Sweden’s “parallel societies”. Britain faces new challenges – including when the white working-class feel left behind by visible ethnic minority success, and polarisation by generation, groups and politics about where we go next.
Tackling racism is a foundation for integration too. Mahmood told the Commons that being called a “f*****g Paki” motivates her mission to control asylum. The key asylum question is what can secure control, maintain compassion and restore confidence. But action on racist hatred must not wait for a government to finally stop the boats.
Sunder KatwalaThe author is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
