According to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood the aim of her proposed asylum policy is to head off the possibility of Farage at some point doing something even worse.
The Guardian’s regular 7am news e-mail on 18th November carried an interview with the paper’s Nordic correspondent Miranda Bryant. Some key points are below.
Firstly the policy hasn’t really succeeded in getting migrants to leave Denmark due to legal challenges. No doubt some will complain about activist lawyers but even Trump, so far, has to contend with the US legal system.
Secondly the policy far from capping off support for the Danish far right, because it hasnt really worked, has simply driven Danish politics further to the right.
There are elections in the social-democratic stronghold of Copenhagen on Tuesday. Hopefully a report on the outcome will appear somewhere…
Guardian 18th November
“The rhetoric in Denmark has had a big impact,” Miranda Bryant told me. “Even when policies can’t be fully implemented, they create huge uncertainty and vulnerability for people seeking asylum. And that can deter people from entering Denmark, regardless of what is legally possible for the state to do in response.”
Denmark is also an ECHR signatory, and I asked Miranda if there had been legal obstacles to enacting the asylum seeker policy there. She told me: “A lot of the hardline rhetoric hasn’t translated into action.”
Denmark’s own legal system has blocked some of the most controversial measures. Miranda said that hundreds of Syrian refugees had their residence permits revoked and were told they had to return to Syria as it was now deemed safe by the Danish state – but the country’s appeals court prevented anyone actually being forced back.
“So while the rhetoric seems to have helped bring down the number of asylum seekers choosing to attempt to settle in Denmark, much of the policy hasn’t been enforceable.”
In 2019, the Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen campaigned to be prime minister on a platform explicitly tough on immigration, going as far as to say she wanted zero asylum seekers arriving.
“The Social Democrats retained progressive positions on many issues, but became right-wing on immigration. That helped them take votes from the far right, and support for the Danish People’s Party fell away sharply,” Miranda said.
“But now the far right is climbing in popularity again, making even more extreme demands, including so-called ‘remigration’ – the mass deportation of people with immigrant backgrounds living in Denmark. Given that, it doesn’t look as if the Social Democrats’ shift to the right has ‘solved’ immigration as a political issue for them. If anything, there are concerns that the party will move further right again.”
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