The Hostile Environment 2.0 Patch Update

Labour’s asylum policy proves they fear the far-right more than they trust their own values.

Bearly Politics is an independent publication written, edited and distributed by me, The Bear - and if you can hear the faint cheering in the distance this morning, that’s just the far-right welcoming Labour’s new policy direction on immigration.

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Today, on this gelid Tuesday, we’re going to start our post off with three multiple choice questions about immigration policy - and who we think introduced the policy in question.

Question 1

On arrival in this country, asylum seekers will have assets seized to pay for the support they receive.

A) Reform UK

B) The Conservative Party

C) The Labour Party

Question 2

People with confirmed Refugee Status (i.e. having been found to have a valid claim) will now be expected to reapply for asylum every thirty months.

A) Reform UK

B) The Conservative Party

C) The Labour Party

Question 3

Refugees in the United Kingdom will now have to wait for 20 years before they can apply to settle here permanently instead of 5.

A) Reform UK

B) The Conservative Party

C) The Labour Party

All done.

Now, if you had answered anything but “C” to all of the questions above, you would now be getting the angry buzzer noise - because you would be incorrect.

Because these are the policies from the Labour party that we got introduced to yesterday - the most sweeping and overtly punitive overhaul of the asylum system that we’ve seen in modern times. A package that’s so comprehensive, labyrinthine and so very obviously designed maximum performative impact that even Nigel Farage’s fan club is currently becoming tumescent with giddy chest flutters.

Christ, even Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was celebrating the damned trail of it as a win¹ - and I don’t know about you, but if I found that one of the policies that I had introduced was getting Tiny-Tommeh-Ten-Names all excited, I would go away and do some serious introspection about where my life has ended up.

Posted on 15 November 2025 - Accessed 18 November 2025.

In the interest of fairness, and before I go too deep into this, I am happy to admit that the immigration and asylum question was always going to be one of the nastiest, most impossible areas of governing for the Labour party to fix. The Tories, over 15 years, didn’t merely mismanage the asylum and immigration system at large - they set it on fire, poured petrol on the ashes and then built an entire identity around pointing at the wreckage and shouting, “See! See how broken it is! LOOK!” at the top of their damned lungs.

But the policy announcements yesterday was a step completely in the wrong direction, and was most definitely not about the corrective measures needed when it comes to migration. Nor was it about competence or even outcomes.

It was only about one thing - sending a message. Not to the public (don’t be silly), or the voters (they’ll only be a problem in three and a half years time), not even to Asylum Seekers (people escaping warzones tend not to take much notice about performative politics).

No - this was a message sent, loud and clear, to Reform UK and the UK’s right-wing press corps, and that message was:

We can be cruel too - please, please like us!

The framing that Mahmood has been trailing ahead of the announcement was very blatant - if they, as Labour, don’t impose harsh measures now, Nigel Farage and his band of grievance-merchants would definitely be even more brutal later, so they may just as well get ahead of them now.

There’s a lot to the policy - you can tell there was a long evening of throwing things at walls and seeing what sticks, but the initiative I’d like to start with is the transformation of refugee status into a temporary offer that’s reviewable every 30 months.

On paper, this sounds like a technical tweak - just extend things a bit, no big deal - but in practice, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare and, more than that, it’s a punishment ritual and a direct extension of the Hostile Environment spawned into being under Teresa May.

What it means in terms of process is that a family that has fled torture or war, will now be expected to relive their trauma every two and a half or so years, producing the requisite, documents, affidavits and evidence of continued danger, while the Home Office - the same Home Office that seems unable to process a legal migration claim without having a little weep into its keyboard - attempts to reassess conditions in Syria, Afghanistan², Iran or Eritrea with presumably the same subtlety it uses to send threatening letters to British pensioners over clerical errors.

I cannot overstate here the administrative absurdity that this would introduce into a system that’s been barely functional for a decade and a half - there would be tens of thousands of rolling reassessments dumped onto an asylum system that’s already drowning under a backlog³ of nearly 90,000 new cases.

And the cycle will just pick up steam as the civil servants involved won’t just be processing claims - they’ll be processing re-claims in, creating what would be, in effect, a perpetual-motion machine of paperwork, uncertainty and terror.

It will trap refugees, it will overwhelm the civil service and, yet again, leave the Home Office immobilised as we talk not just about a backlog of new claims, but of reclaims.

And we have to ask for what, exactly? To create the appearance of toughness.

Now, if this were the case for the current arrangement, in which Refugees can claim Indefinite Leave to Remain after five years, that would limit these extension exercises to just twice before applicants can be free of it - but no, there’s another bow to Mahmood’s quiver, an extension of the settlement period to an absolutely mind-boggling 20 years.

Stella Creasy commented in the Guardian that:

“If you can’t stabilise your status, you will always struggle to get a job, a bank account or a mortgage, making it more likely you will be dependent on state or voluntary support.”

Well, yes - pre-fucking-cisely.

A person who is unable to permanently anchor themselves in a society, is a person that cannot fully participate in it. They cannot plan, they cannot invest, they cannot grow and they cannot build a life. Integration becomes near impossible into the fabric of the country that Labour is claiming that it wants to protect.

This extension is an engineered precarity - a deliberate manufacturing of instability under the guise of restoring control, and the worst bit of all?

It won’t even work. It will do nothing to stop crossings, it will do nothing to stop persecution and the numbers will remain as high as they have been since 2020.

What it will do, however, is create a permanent subclass of people who are long-term resident in the United Kingdom without any long-term rights - a group that Labour will then be forced to spend a decade “supporting⁴”, while simultaneously whinging about that exact support that they incubated the need for.

It’s completely fiscally incoherent, socially erosive and morally bankrupt - i.e. the holy trinity of policy failure.

To pause for a second, I can already hear some people tell me “But, Bear, Mahmood has at least added safe and legal routes - three of them, in fact - and even though they’re ‘modest’, at least it’s something.”

Indeed. I did note those. Very modest indeed.

Except - a safe route with no numbers attached is not a “route” - it’s a placeholder. It’s a paragraph that’s been chucked in there to try and appease (rightly) pissed off Labour MPs and to soften the headlines from the publications that are still trying to be fair.

The problem I have with it is the vaguery of it all. Community sponsorship? Great - but unclear and undefined. Skilled refugee work route? Useful, yes, but limited to those already able to work and excludes many of the most vulnerable. Displaced student route? Worthwhile, but again, only for a select subset.

All three of these will remain capped. By the Home Secretary. Annually. According to what feels right that year.

The rest of the package reads like yet more “tough decisions” that have been cooked up by a committee in a room with no windows:

• The end of guaranteed asylum support

• New powers to seize property

• Downsizing rights under Article 8

• Deportation of families, including those with children

• Expansion of military-site accommodation

• Single-route appeals

• Narrowing of modern slavery protections

• Deportation incentives

• Visa sanctions on multiple African nations

• AI facial age assessments because, apparently, the Home Office has learned nothing from its last five technology disasters.

It’s less policy than just more a series of hostile gestures, each individually defensible only if you have swallowed whole the premise that asylum seekers are, first and foremost, a threat, nuisance or cost rather than human beings whose safety is the literal damned point of the system.

And herein lies the problem - because these polices have in no way been designed to fix the system, they are designed appeal to a fictional cohort of “swing voters” that live primarily in the imagination of someone who hasn’t spoken to an actual voter since the Brown era.

The messaging is built around two pillars:

1. Immigration is out of control.

2. The only way to prove that you are in control is to be as harsh as the far-right, but do it in fancier words.

The positioning of this is transparent, though, and Labour’s voters will see through it, and the far-right will only see it as an endorsement of their rhetoric, with all of Mahmood’s claims that the system is “tearing the country apart” sounding not unlike what you would expect from a Reform UK backbencher (to which Farage himself agreed, by the way, stating that Mahmood “sounded like a Reform supporter”, and if that doesn’t chill your right down to your spine, I don’t know what will).

And backbenchers are understandably not comfortable with this - Richard Burgon called the plans “dragged from the moral sewer”, Nadia Whittome called them dystopian, Kim Johnson pointed out that they were taken from the “far-right playbook” and the topping on this angry cake is from Abtisam Mohamed, who said:

“If we truly want an asylum system that works, the answer is clear: faster decisions, better accommodation, and a functioning agreement with France. Punishing recognised refugees won’t achieve any of that… We need a fair, workable approach, not another round of policies that divide communities and fail on their own terms.”

I will note that these are not marginal voices - this is the party’s conscience desperately trying to be heard.

All-in-all, it appears that Labour believes that adopting the harsh rhetoric and punitive measures so loved by the far-right will somehow entice far-right voters - but historically, strategically, politically and empirically, this is something that has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually working.

Because the moment you replace your opponents framing⁵, you instantly validate their world view - and when you tell voters that asylum seekers (and legal migrants⁶) are the real reason they can’t get GP appointments, own a house or afford your groceries, the voter will instead choose the party that promises even more harsh policy and overt cruelty.

The plans announced by our Home Secretary yesterday were not about competence, economics or even evidence - they were, at their core, an admission by Labour of fear.

An unshakeable fear of Reform, of headlines - a fear of the narrative.

Because if we’re to believe Labour that the UK’s values are fairness, compassion and decency, then they need to make that case and not hide behind policies meant to shield them from criticism from the right-wing press and demagogues that are influencing our country.

If the government wants a functional asylum system - a system that’s fast, fair, humane, integrated and economically rational, then they have completely missed the boat here.

Instead, what Mahmood gave us was yet more posture - posture applauded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Nigel Farage, condemned by their own MPs and that serves to further create the standard that cruelty equals a political asset.

And that angry buzzer from the quiz? That’s going to keep going - and it’s going to keep getting louder if Labour doesn’t change course.

Soon.

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1. This, I would say, is a reliable barometer that something has gone morally very sideways.

2. “I mean, Kabul isn’t great but there are a bunch of charities there that could help you and your daughters get some books to read in secret, so that’s nice” echoes through my brain.

3. Which was completely manufactured by the previous government, and basically kept as is by the current one.

4. Read: blame loudly, fund poorly, outsource expensively.

5. Crisis, danger, threat, nuisance, cost, hindrance, burden - pick your favourite noun to describe some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

6. Because, I will remind you, this is not the only immigration policy where Labour is turning the screws and hoping for a friendly op-ed from The Telegraph.