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When veteran Labour peer Alf Dubs first heard the Government’s hardline proposals to transform the asylum system, he was shocked.
Lord Dubs, who arrived in Britain as a child refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 on the Kindertransport and has since spent his life campaigning on behalf of displaced children, told Byline Times that he was “taken aback” to hear some of the proposals announced last week.
“There are some very harsh and unnecessary things, which are bitterly disappointing coming from a Labour Government,” he said.
“They are very different to the sorts of things the party supported when we were in opposition. We cannot defeat Reform by trying to outdo them.”
Dubs has good reason to feel shocked. In 2020, he signed a joint letter with Keir Starmer urging the then Conservative Government to restore its commitment to family reunion for child refugees.
In the letter the then Shadow Brexit Secretary said there was a “moral argument” to protect “some of the most vulnerable people in the world.” Five years on and Starmer’s own Government is now ripping up some of those same protections.
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Dubs says the Government’s new plans, which include making refugee status temporary and making it harder for refugee families to reunite, represent a “historic low for the Labour party” that he has been a member of for the past five decades.
Of particular concern for Dubs is the suggestion that families could be forced to return to their home country once ministers deem it “safe” to return. That would involve imprisoning children, including those born in this country, something the Home Secretary has declined to rule out.
Lord Dubs met last week with Home Office minister Alex Norris to raise his concerns. However, he hasn’t yet met the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.
“She [Mahmood] is doing things that I think are letting this country down,” he said. “I don’t think [former Labour Home Secretary] David Blunkett did that. These proposals undermine basic human rights principles. We’re better as a country than that.”
Last week Mahmood justified her plans for the asylum system by telling MPs that she and her family had been subjected to racist abuse over many years, including being called a “fucking paki”.
Given her experiences, Dubs finds it surprising that she has taken such a hardline stance on refugees. “I’m hoping that her feelings will hold sway over the harsher line she’s putting forward. She knows what it’s like” he says.
Lord Dubs, who has spent his life helping lone child refugees to settle in Britain, was particularly disheartened by some of the language the Home Secretary used.
In her statement on the plans, Mahmood suggested that asylum seekers were “exploiting the fact that they have children” to “thwart attempts” to remove them. The Home Secretary added that the system currently “incentivises” families to put their children on unseaworthy dinghies to cross the Channel. Responding to the comments, Lord Dubs told BBC that the Government was “using children as a weapon”.
His alarm was only heightened by the response from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to Mahmood’s proposals. Reform UK MP Danny Kruger welcomed the rhetoric used by the Home Secretary, suggesting that Labour sounded like Reform, and invited Mahmood to defect to their party. Reform’s official Twitter account later posted a meme of Mahmood in her bedroom with their flags behind her. This was, Lord Dubs says, “cheap politics” with the refugee issue being exploited for “cynical electoral ends.” He believes Nigel Farage is riding the crest of the wave, but it won’t last. “Unfortunately, they are having some success in the polls because he is an effective communicator.”
Is Keir Starmer an effective communicator, I ask him? “No, and that’s the problem” he replies.
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An Island of Strangers?
It was, Lord Dubs says, a mistake for the Prime Minister to say that the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers”. To his credit, he pulled back on that language, but Dubs still found it “quite breathtaking” from a Labour leader. Much of this language is different to the man he knows and has known for many years. It is, he feels, “out of character”, down to the pressure from Reform. Immigration is, he believes, not an argument that the Labour party can win.
“It doesn’t automatically follow that to be tough [on this issue] is the way of dealing with Nigel Farage. We’ve got to show we’re different.”
The European Convention on Human Rights, which was a key postwar piece of legislation protecting the rights of refugees, is coming under increasing fire at the moment.
Dubbed ‘the new Brexit’ by its critics, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch have both argued that Br