Refugees - a Solution

Labour's knee-jerk reaction to Reform on refugee policy has made me think long and hard about solutions.

Like it or not, we are living under the shadow of a Farage government. Not a thought experiment. Not a social media scare story. A real political possibility. If Reform keeps scooping up the angry and the disillusioned, and Labour misjudges the mood by even a few degrees, we could wake up with Nigel Farage in No 10 and a cabinet that looks like the comment section of a tabloid. That is the hard edge to this whole debate, and it forces choices that no one relishes.

Farage’s supporters ignore every contradiction, every fantasy cost, every clue about who he really serves. None of that matters to them while they are riding the emotional wave. That is why he is dangerous now and doomed later. And that is precisely why Labour’s strategy is a delaying action. They are holding the line until Farage does what he always does and collapses under scrutiny, giving the country the space to build the asylum system that actually works.

So when people claim Labour is simply following Farage on asylum and immigration, I have to confront the uncomfortable reality. Yes, they are echoing some of his lines. And yes, I dislike it. But I also understand the battlefield they find themselves on. Brexit taught us the modern rule of politics: he who shouts loudest and stirs the most aggravation usually seizes the terrain. The careful voice gets drowned out by the bloke with a slogan and a grievance.

Against that backdrop, asylum seekers have become a national pressure point. The numbers do not justify the panic. Set against Europe per thousand of population, we are nowhere near the avalanche people insist we are facing. From a racism point of view, the whole thing is depressingly predictable. Nevertheless, it has become the issue on which people project every insecurity they have about the country. Once that happens, reason gets shoved to the back of the cupboard.

This is where Labour’s approach starts to look less like conviction and more like a military manoeuvre. In strategic terms, what they are attempting is a delaying action. A fighting withdrawal. They are yielding a little rhetorical ground to prevent a full breakthrough by Farage. It is not noble and it is not elegant, but it is recognisable. You hold the line just firmly enough to stop the enemy charging through, while buying time to reinforce the real position elsewhere. In political terms, that means stopping Reform from hitting critical mass while creating space for a better, long term solution to take shape.

Because managing the noise is not the same as solving the problem. The real answer lies in building a modern, regionalised asylum system that treats refugee flows as a shared responsibility rather than a national panic. Instead of each country shouting at the one next door, you divide the world into coherent regions and agree fair mechanisms for processing, funding and resettlement. Burden shared by population, GDP and capacity. Funding flowing in reverse proportion to pressure. A rules based insurance scheme rather than a permanent political battlefield.

Of course, none of that can be built overnight. You are rewriting parts of the UN Refugee Convention, which was designed for a world that no longer exists. You are wrestling with governments that will swear blind they care while doing everything possible to avoid responsibility. It will take years. The diplomatic pushback will be immense. That is the reality of global reform.

Which means I have to accept something I do not like: Labour’s stopgap is not the solution. It is the tactic required to prevent a far worse outcome. We cannot build a regional model if the country hands the machinery of government to Farage and the professional grievance merchants who orbit him. If that happens, the vulnerable get crushed and any hope of sane asylum reform is torpedoed for a generation.

So yes, I resent Labour’s short term posture. I dislike the mimicry. I dislike giving even an inch to panic that is not rooted in facts. But I dislike the idea of a Farage government far more. If holding the line now, using a strategic delaying action, is the price of preventing that catastrophe, then I understand why they have taken it.

The long term work is building the regional system. The immediate work is stopping the demagogues from taking power long enough for the adults to get on with it. That is the battlefield as it stands. A short term fighting withdrawal to protect the ground on which the real solution must be built.

Until then, we are trapped in the age of the megaphone, trying not to let the loudest voice become the only one that counts.