On November 17, 2025, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, speaking in the House of Commons, announced new plans that would create more difficulties for people seeking safety in Britain. She posed her statement in the context of "how we restore order and control to our borders. I do so as this Government publish the most significant reform to our migration system in modern times."

The proposals she refers to are contained in the Government paper "Restoring Order and Control". As the charity Right to Remain points out, "As with many previous Home Secretary announcements, these plans focus on enforcement rather than addressing the real reasons people seek protection or the basic reality that migration is a normal part of life." The continual emphasis on "restoring order and control" serves to divert from taking up for solution the causes of migrants seeking asylum, and is an attack on the working class and people as a whole in that it seeks to divert them from self-reliantly taking action to take up the solution to the problems they themselves face. As part of this diversion, the posing of the problem as the danger of the "far-right" contributes to divisions among the people and blunting the sense that the government must be held accountable for its attacks on the rights of all.

In her asylum policy announcement, Shabana Mahmood announced that refugee status would be made temporary, extending the wait for settlement to 20 years, while restricting family reunion, and removing the legal duty to provide housing and allowances. Rights groups, charities, and critical MPs have been quick to point out that these measures are punitive, destabilising, and risk breaching international obligations, leaving asylum seekers in prolonged insecurity and hardship.

The key policy changes, defined as reforms since, according to the Home Secretary, the asylum system is "out of control and unfair", include:

• Temporary refugee status: Refugee protection reduced from five years to 30 months, subject to regular reviews.
• Settlement extended: Refugees must wait 20 years before applying for permanent residency, up from five.
• "Family reunion curtailed: No automatic right to bring family members under the new "core protection" system.
• Support withdrawn: The government will no longer have a legal duty to provide housing or weekly allowances; asylum seekers with assets or work rights must contribute to their costs.
• Enforced removals: Families with children could face deportation once their home country is deemed safe.
• Visa penalties: Countries refusing to repatriate nationals may face suspended visa services.
• So-called safe routes: Limited, capped "legal" pathways for "genuine refugees", modelled on Denmark's asylum regime.

The government can unilaterally announce and enact such measures without the people's determined opposition and resistance to them being backed by any constitution defined by the people themselves. Such cruel measures intensify the problems that those vulnerable to the state's whims already face by leaving vulnerable people in limbo, destitution, or subject to wrongful removal. Far from the government being obliged to guarantee protection to those fleeing persecution, war and aggression, it is asserting and promoting that it is responding to the people's concerns, and itself is taking racist stands and denying the rights that people have by virtue of being human. The whole outlook is a remnant and continuation of a colonialism which should be rejected and eliminated.

Voices against the proposals

The Refugee Council has warned that temporary status would trap refugees in decades of insecurity and injustice. It pointed out that removal of guaranteed housing and allowances would further risk increasing homelessness and destitution. The Refugee Council further criticised the proposed restrictions on family reunion, noting that 90% of visas previously went to women and children.

Amongst other comments, the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama accused Shabana Mahmood of "ethnic stereotyping" in singling out 700 Albanian families to justify ending the right to family reunions.

Amnesty International UK condemned the reforms as hostile and punitive. Amnesty said that the reforms represented a historic weakening of refugee protection, including turning refugee status into a temporary and precarious system, removing the state's duty to support people who would otherwise be destitute, and signalling a new willingness to remove families even where children have grown up and put down roots in Britain. Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK's Refugee and Migrant Rights Director, said: "The Home Secretary's immigration and asylum plans are cruel, divisive and fundamentally out of step with basic decency. Forcing refugees into endless short-term applications, denying visas to partners and children and stripping away support for people who would otherwise be destitute will only deepen chaos, increase costs and hand greater power to people smugglers."

The Immigration Law Practitioners' Association (ILPA) highlighted the risks of breaching international law obligations, including the Refugee Convention's principle of non-refoulement [1]. The ILPA criticised the use of "illegal migration" as a label incompatible with the right to seek asylum.

These proposed government measures do nothing to resolve any problem in the real world. They are completely vindictive and will exacerbate both the denial of rights to asylum seekers and the denial of rights to all members of civil society, no matter from what background.

As the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) comments, the measures will "further hardwire hostility towards asylum seekers and (low-paid) migrant workers into state policy". The IRR continues: "Asylum seekers will face the prospect of being denied all support, for 'non-compliance' or disobedience; having jewellery snatched to pay for their upkeep (involving who knows what intrusive searches), and an appeal system designed to get them out as quickly as possible. Low-paid workers, in particular health and care workers, will face at least 15 years on rolling 30-month visas (a lot longer if they have claimed any benefits) for the possibility of settlement - and benefits and social housing will be for British citizens only. These are the conditions in which refugees and migrants are being told they must 'integrate'.

"Key workers - nursing assistants, transport workers, prison officers - already fear deportation for not earning enough after the recent income threshold rise. The loss of key workers will damage society and the economy. It is the divisive and dishonest narrative that paints asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers as taking advantage, that tears the social fabric, and creates, in Mahmood's words, a 'Littler England'."

The proposals in the light of the ECHR

Nor does the Home Secretary give anything but scant respect to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), again reinforcing that there is a necessity for a constitution in Britain that recognises the rights and duties of citizens, one that exists more than on paper, such as the Human Rights Act of 1998, which the government is free to ignore as it pleases. In the maelstrom of comment on Mahmood's statement, it has been pointed out that the "Restoring Order and Control" document proposes to "limit the right to respect for private and family life in Article 8 ECHR in domestic law; re-examine the interpretation of 'inhuman or degrading treatment' for the purposes of Article 3 ECHR as part of international initiatives; and bring forward legislation on modern slavery."

In his contribution to the House of Commons debate on November 17, Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, said: "Nowhere in the Home Secretary's statement does she put this into any kind of global context. Millions of people have become refugees or homeless all around the world, and more than two thirds of them are housed by the southern countries-the poorest countries in the world-with the least resources to do it. She is putting in draconian measures against refugees trying to come to this country, failing to recognise that more than 6,000 of those who have crossed the channel this year come from Afghanistan, a war-torn country that we helped to make into a war-torn country. She is instead trying to appease the most ghastly right-wing, racist forces all across Europe in undermining and walking away from the European convention on human rights-a convention created by the post-war Labour Government. Does she not recognise that history is going to be a harsh judge of this Government for undermining the global humanitarian principles behind the ECHR and the universal declaration of human rights?"

Government's proposals must be rejected and the rights of all respected and guaranteed

Again, to quote Right to Remain on the government's statement: "It deliberately hides the real human experiences, stories, barriers, and systemic problems that people face every day - issues that, as a community, we have been consistently raising while campaigning for alternatives that are rooted in humanity, compassion, care."

It is important that the government's proposals and the outlook behind them are challenged and rejected. They constitute an attack not only on people seeking asylum, who are refugees from their dangerous or ravaged countries, or who have been forced to or chosen to migrate, but on the rights and dignity of the working class and people as a whole.

Note
[1] Wikipedia defines non-refoulement as a fundamental principle of international law anchored in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees that forbids a country from deporting ("refoulement") any person to any country in which their "life or freedom would be threatened" on account of "race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion".

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