It’s an irony that would make Alanis Morissette proud: whenever a government decides that the public has had enough of foreigners, they look overseas for inspiration.
In 2019, Boris Johnson promised the public that an “Australian-style points-based immigration system” would be the answer to Britain’s woes. You can judge for yourself how that went.
In 2025, of course, things are different. Keir Starmer is prime minister, Labour is the party in government, and the immigration system the government is looking to adopt this time is Danish. How times change.
The practicalities and focus of the two systems are, in reality, very different. The Australian-style system focused on economic migration, promising that by focusing on granting visas only to workers the UK needed, immigration would be reduced, and the people arriving would only be those who benefited the UK.
The issue with this was that the UK had so many worker shortages that hundreds of thousands of extra visas a year were granted – contributing to an all-time spike in immigration, later dubbed the “Boriswave”.
The Danish system that Labour hopes will be its salvation, meanwhile, focuses on asylum seekers – only a small fraction of immigrants to the UK, but the most visible due to media focus and the nature of the arrival of tens of thousands of asylum seekers on small boats.
Denmark – which, let us not forget, is still an EU member in good standing, and a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights – introduced multiple limits even on successful asylum seekers. These include time limits on most refugees, requiring them to return once Denmark deems their home country “safe”, restrictions on when refugees can bring even their close family to the country, and a strict definition of who qualifies for refugee status.
Some of these restrictions specifically consider the “character” of the neighbourhood in which a refugee lives – if an area is more than 50% occupied by people from “non-western” backgrounds, refugees living there cannot bring their families.
This is a level of intrusion into life, and into the ethnic mix of regions, that no UK government has ever seriously considered in modern times. It is unsurprising that Labour MPs, including Nadia Whittome, have characterised Denmark’s immigration system as “undeniably racist” and a “dangerous path to take”. Whittome told Radio 4’s Today that the scheme was “a dead end – morally, politically and electorally”.
No 10 and the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, however, seem convinced that the proposals are a vote-winner, probably boosted by much of the coverage of the plans – which were introduced by a centre left party in Denmark – which refers to their popularity in the country. Junior immigration minister Mike Tapp, sounding more like an MP for Reform, tweeted on Saturday that he was “fed up with migrants ‘asylum shopping’ and seeing our great country as a soft touch. Not for much longer!”
Calmer heads on the Labour benches are sinking their heads into their hands in despair at what they see as yet another doomed attempt by the government to out-Reform Reform.
Every previous effort to do so has failed – as Reform will always be able to suggest something more extreme or outlandish than Labour – but the effort is noticed by the party’s core voters, who are left wing and liberal.
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The party alienates its ethnic minority supporters, many of whom already feel unwelcome and threatened in their daily lives, just when they most need the government in their corner. It drives away voters on its left flank to the resurgent Green Party, or to the Liberal Democrats, or Your Party, while failing to win anyone back from Reform. As Whittome suggested, it is both electorally stupid and morally wrong.
There is no shortage of electoral evidence from across Europe to back up this reading of events. Almost every time a centre left or a centre right party has tried to raise the prominence of immigration on an issue and show it can be as tough as its new far right rivals, it has backfired at the ballot box.
The voters who like such crackdowns don’t settle for racism-lite, they vote for the full-fat option. Voters who supported mainstream parties because they weren’t racist, meanwhile, cast their ballots elsewhere.
Denmark appears to be the exception to that pattern, but research highlighted by Kristina Bakkær Simonsen, associate professor at Aarhus University, writing for UK in a Changing Europe, suggests the picture is more complicated. One experiment suggests the Danish social democrats did indeed win over voters from right wing parties with the anti-asylum crackdown – but lost just as many voters to their left by doing so.
The reason this allowed them to stay in power was Denmark’s proportional system, and its political culture, which is well used to coalitions. Those parties to the social democrats’ left had enough votes and seats to keep the social democrats in government, and were willing to lend their support. In Britain’s drastically different political system, none of this is guaranteed.
Simonsen further argues that a second experiment showed that voters could actually have been convinced and won over by a more pro-immigration argument – if only social democrats had bothered to make it.
“The study shows that by framing pro-immigration policies as a matter of what is ‘fair’ and ‘decent’, mainstream left (and mainstream right) parties can obtain sufficient policy support to compete with anti-immigration messages,” Simonsen concludes. “Going more restrictive may therefore not be the only viable option for mainstream politicians.”
Brits from ethnic minorities are facing an unprecedented surge in overt, everyday racism – it is unchallenged on X, and it is increasingly visible on our streets. They deserve better than a government that seems determined to split the difference with the increasingly racist policies of Reform and the Conservatives, with some vague messaging that it’s being done for their own good.
Labour has tried to compete with Reform on immigration ever since it was elected in July 2024, and as a result its vote share has halved, it is historically unpopular, and its backbenchers are counting the days until they can attempt to oust the prime minister.
Their new strategy is to do more of the same, even as the evidence says the argument could be won, if only they would ever try to make it. As some Labour MPs note, making the positive case for migration might not work, but at least they’d be fighting the good fight. And with their polling as it is, what have they got to lose?
