Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

“Labour won’t redistribute wealth from billionaires,” said former party Leader Jeremy Corbyn. “But they will seize belongings from those fleeing war and persecution.”

A new asylum policy announced Monday by the UK Labour Party will allow authorities to confiscate the jewelry and other belongings of asylum-seekers in order to pay for their claims to be processed.

The policy, which some critics said was “reminiscent of the Nazi era,” was just one part of the Labour Party’s total overhaul of the nation’s asylum system, which it says must be made much more restrictive in order to fend off rising support for the far-right.

In a policy paper released Monday, the government announced that it would seek to make the status of many refugees temporary and gave the government new powers to deport refugees if it determines it to be safe. It also revoked policies requiring the government to provide housing and legal support to those fleeing persecution, while extending the amount of time they need to wait for permanent residency to 20 years, up from just five, for those who arrive illegally.

The UK government also said it will attempt to change the way judges interpret human rights law to more seamlessly carry out deportations, including stopping immigrants from using their rights to family life under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to avoid deportation.

In an article for the Guardian published Sunday, UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood called the reforms “the most significant and comprehensive changes to our asylum system in a generation.” She said they were necessary because the increase in migration to the UK had stirred up “dark forces” in the country that are “seeking to turn that anger into hate.”

Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right Reform UK Party, is leading national polls on the back of a viciously anti-immigrant campaign that has included calls to abolish the UK’s main pathway for immigrants to become permanent residents, known as “leave to remain.”

Meanwhile, in September, over 100,000 people gathered in London for an anti-immigrant rally led by Tommy Robinson, a notorious far-right figure who founded the anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL). The event saw at least 26 police officers injured by protesters.

Last summer, riots swept the UK after false claims—spread by Robinson, Farage, and other far-right figures—that the perpetrator of the fatal stabbing of two young girls and their caretaker had been a Muslim asylum-seeker. A hotel housing asylum-seekers was set on fire, mosques were vandalised and destroyed, and several immigrants and other racial minorities were brutally beaten.

Mahmood said that if changes are not made to the asylum system, “we risk losing popular consent for having an asylum system at all.”

But as critics were quick to point out, the far-right merely took Labour’s crackdown as a sign that it is winning the war for hearts and minds.

Robinson gloated to his followers that “the Overton window has been obliterated, well done patriots!” while Farage chortled that Mahmood “sounds like a Reform supporter.”

Many members of the Labour coalition expressed outrage at their ostensibly Liberal Party’s bending to the far-right.

“The government should be ashamed that its migration policies are being cheered on by Tommy Robinson and Reform,” said Nadia Whittome, the Labour MP for Nottingham East. “Instead of standing up to anti-migrant hate, this is laying the foundations for the far-right.”

In a speech in Parliament, she chided the home secretary’s policy overhaul, calling it “dystopian.”

“It’s shameful that a Labour government is ripping up the rights and protections of people who have endured unimaginable trauma,” she said. “Is this how we’d want to be treated if we were fleeing for our lives? Of course not.”

The UK has signed treaties, including the ECHR, obligating it to process the claims of those who claim asylum because they face persecution in their home countries based on race, religion, nationality, group membership, or political opinion. According to data from the Home Office, over 111,000 people claimed asylum in the year from June 2024-25, more than double the number who did in 2019.

The spike came as the number of people displaced worldwide reached an all-time high of over 123.2 million at the end of 2024, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, with desperate people seeking safety from escalating conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and across the Middle East.

In her op-ed, Mahmood lamented that “the burden borne by taxpayers has been unfair.” However, as progressive commentator Owen Jones pointed out, the UK takes in far fewer asylum-seekers than its peers: “Last year, Germany took over twice as many asylum-seekers as the UK. France, Italy, and Spain took 1.5 times as many. Per capita, we take fewer than most EU countries. Poorer countries such as Greece take proportionately more than we do.”

The Labour government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, already boasts that it has deported more than 50,000 people in the UK illegally since it came to power in 2024, but it has predictably done little to satiate the far-right, which has only continued to gain momentum in polls despite the crackdown.

Under the new rules, it is expected that the government will be able to fast-track many more deportations, particularly of families with children.

The jewelry rule, meanwhile, has become a potent symbol of how the Labour Party has shifted away from its promises of economic egalitarianism toward austerity and punishment of the most vulnerable.

“Labour won’t redistribute wealth from billionaires,” said former party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is now an independent MP. “But they will seize belongings from those fleeing war and persecution.”

Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).