My response to media reports of UK government’s proposals for Danish-style immigration reforms:
Oh great. The worst of both worlds.
When an authoritarian mindset takes hold of a marketised state, what emerges isn’t security but cruelty in the form of a low-trust, low-investment society that manages poverty instead of abolishing it.
Denmark’s Social Democrats turned sharply towards deterrence and exclusion: offshoring asylum, revoking residency, and framing refugees as a burden.
It’s an ugly, illiberal turn that has cost them dearly, splitting their voter base (they have PR so less of an issue).
But crucially, it happened inside a high-trust, high-welfare society. One where people pay high taxes and, in return, receive universal healthcare, free education, generous childcare, low levels of inequality and strong worker protections. The social contract remains visible. People see what they get.
The UK, by contrast, is imitating the fear without the fairness. Copying the deterrence, the moral posturing, the rhetoric of “control”, but still pushing benefit-austerity, outsourcing, privatising and means-testing its way through public services.
Welfare here isn’t a safety net; it’s a maze of sanctions, stigma, and corporate contracts. That’s the real danger. An authoritarian mindset grafted onto a hollowed-out, marketised state that produces something worse than Denmark’s model: a low-trust, low-investment society that polices poverty instead of preventing it.
When a progressive party adopts the logic of its opponents – that migrants are a threat, that order must come before rights, that the state’s job is to manage people rather than empower them – it doesn’t neutralise the authoritarian right. It normalises it.
The outcome isn’t a strong or fair society – it’s an increasingly authoritarian one – with government strong enough to punish, but too weak to care. Secure the borders, open safe-routes, democratise immigration, operate an efficient asylum system and invest in well-funded, universal, public services/housing.
It’s not rocket science.