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At last, the long-anticipated new Border Security, Asylum & Immigration Bill has received its first parliamentary reading, meaning we got our first glimpse of its contents. Spoiler alert: it didn’t make for pleasant reading.
Firstly, it’s no accident Labour skipped the White Paper and leapt straight to publishing a bill. The Government that said it was doing away with the failed gimmicks of its predecessor and being led by evidence and experts refused to hear from either. Why? They knew exactly what they’d be told.
This dangerous legislation is doomed to fail.

Not only will this bill cause untold human suffering and will — mark my words — cost lives when enacted, but it will also fail on its own terms to deter irregular migration and it’s an act of political self-harm by the Labour frontbench.
For those who haven’t seen the bill, here are the headlines: It maintains the ban on irregular migrants claiming modern slavery protections — a hangover from the Illegal Migration Act that Keir Starmer bemoaned “drives a coach and horses” through protections for women trafficked to the UK as victims of modern slavery when it was introduced by Suella Braverman.
Instead of establishing safe routes, it places a cap on the number of people who can access the pitifully few resettlement routes that survived the Conservative years. It also hands counter-terrorism powers to border enforcement agencies and additional legal powers to prosecute people seeking asylum with charges including the endangerment of human lives.
Where to start?
How about with deaths, that this legislation will cause. According to the UNHCR, 2024 was the most fatal year at our border yet with at least 69 people killed. Experts in the migration sector suspect this estimate is very much on the conservative side. Further border securitisation will inevitably push that number up higher.
We’ve seen the formula; stricter border enforcement policies don’t bring down the number of Channel crossings, but they do bring up the number of Channel fatalities. Starmer’s shiny new Border Security Command represent more border violence, more needless losses of life, and more vulnerable people being wrongly criminalised.
We know that when the Government ‘cracks down’ on people smugglers and human traffickers in an effort to ‘Stop the Boats’ or ‘Smash the Gangs’, it’s more often than not the victims of said criminals that are punished by our judicial system.
According to Humans for Rights Network, over 500 people, including unaccompanied children have been arrested and imprisoned for immigration offences including ‘illegal arrival’ since the Nationality & Borders Act of 2022.
The vast majority are fleeing in search of safety from countries such as Sudan and Afghanistan. Many are survivors of trafficking and torture.
The introduction of these offences, that this bill expands, has done nothing to deter people fleeing to Britain in search of sanctuary, nor the smugglers who facilitate Channel crossings — all it’s done is re-traumatise refugees by locking them up for the ‘crime’ of seeking safety.
When the measures that underpin this bill were introduced by the Conservatives, now Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips described them as “a trafficker’s dream, a tool for their control”. That’s as true today as it was then.
Needless to say, the bill will fail on its own terms. The only way to put the people smugglers out of business is by establishing safe, regularised routes that negates the need for irregular migration. It’s that simple.
No machismo rhetoric of ‘smashing’ will do it, nor will policies aimed at courting Reform voters have any effect.
This piece of legislation represents continuity with, not a departure from, failed Conservative policies established in successive anti-refugee laws over the past five years. Not only will this bill mean Britain continues to abandon its obligations to refugees often forcibly displaced by wars we started in countries we colonised, but it’s a gift to the far-right served up on a velvet cushion.
Because this law, beyond taking the lives of refugees, will simply fail to ‘Smash the Gangs’ it makes Starmer the same hostage to fortune as Rishi Sunak with his promise to ‘Stop the Boats’ with the same type of policies (plus an unhinged Rwanda plan thrown in for good measure).
If you keep promising people that the problem they perceive is real, and that you will make it go away, but you avoid any measures that may appear ‘soft’ even if they would be most effective in achieving your aims, you’re trapped in a race to the bottom that erodes trust in political institutions and waters the fertile ground for fascism that Nigel Farage and Reform are itching to sow.
Sunak stated his reputation on stopping small boat crossings with a policy prescription eerily similar to Starmer’s — ask him how that worked out for him electorally.
I’ve written extensively elsewhere of the electoral folly of cosplaying as Farage. Those who want the real thing won’t settle for Farage-lite and it turns off more people than it attracts. That’s an awful lot of new Liberal Democrat MPs occupying traditionally Conservative seats, I hear you say? Exactly.
With this bill timed to be heard weeks before the local elections, Labour clearly think they’re on to a vote-winner. They’re not only wrong, but they’re playing with fire.
Last summer our streets were literally on fire. The racist riots (which I note a distinct lack of clamour for a national inquiry into, by the way) demonstrated the danger of appeasing the far-right with anti-migrant policies and rhetoric.
Privately Labour Ministers talk of the importance of ‘integration’ in immigration policy —well integration is a two-way street, and whipping up anti-refugee sentiments with bravado and bluster about being tough on borders makes it near-impossible.
Refugees are already banned from working, warehoused on army camps or overcrowded hotels, and now they are increasingly fearful for their safety here in Britain.
Imagine that for a moment. You’ve fled the Taliban, or Assad’s murderous regime. You’ve come to the UK because you think it’s safe and you might have family ties or speak the language thanks to colonialism.
You make a perilous journey in pursuit of sanctuary. You think your life-threatening ordeals are behind you. Then you find the hotel you’ve been packed into with others like sardines is on fire and you are trapped inside, because the political classes thought there were votes in scapegoating you for the nation’s ills.
That’s the reality for asylum seekers in Britain today. Is nowhere safe?
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All in all, Labour’s new borders bill is cheap bid for right-wing acclaim and Reform-minded voters that will fail to deliver on every measurable metric.
It will push the vocal minority further into the outstretched arms of Farage. It will push the quiet majority who actually value Britain for its multiculturalism towards the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP, Plaid, or more likely to staying at home on polling day.
It’s not just electoral kamikaze, it risks further inflaming community tensions that saw our streets burn last year. Finally, it’s a ‘Stop the Boats’ bill that won’t stop any boats. But it will cost lives, and Starmer will have to find a way to live with that.