Refugee Policy

Refugee policy in this country has been turned into a Punch and Judy show, with the right screaming about invasions and Labour so terrified of looking soft that it is drifting towards a 20 year probation period that no sane person could defend. Twenty years is not policy – it is a sentence. It is the sort of thing you impose when you want the headlines, not the outcome.

But there is a line that is firm, fair and workable, and it sits nowhere near this punitive nonsense. Five years of protection makes sense. Conflicts rarely settle in two or three. Let someone breathe, work, recover, learn the language and stabilise. And if their home country genuinely becomes safe in that period – not cosmetically safe, not safe on a minister’s spreadsheet, but actually stable – then yes, return is reasonable. That is what the Refugee Convention envisaged and it is what most people, left or right, consider common sense.

What you cannot do is pretend that someone who has lived here for the thick end of a decade is still some sort of temporary visitor. By the time you reach seven years – certainly by ten – people have roots. Jobs. Children in school. Community ties. Tax records longer than most MPs manage to keep a job. At that point, the idea of booting them out just to appease whichever demagogue is shouting loudest is not firmness. It is spite. And spite is a stupid way to run a country.

The right loves to bleat that refugees do not integrate. Then, when they do integrate, the right wants them treated as disposable anyway. Heads they win, tails you lose. A system designed around that kind of hypocrisy is doomed to fail. A system designed around stability – quick decisions, proper early returns, and settlement once roots are planted – actually works.

This is where the sensible line sits. Five to seven years before review. Settlement once someone has genuinely built a life. No twenty year limbo designed to keep tabloids happy. No fantasy mass deportation circus. Just a steady, adult framework that blunts the right without wrecking families or creating a permanent underclass.

Stop performing toughness. Start governing. That is the difference between a functioning asylum policy and the theatre that has passed for one in Britain for too long.