In 1968, British Conservative Enoch Powell was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet after what became known as his “Rivers of Blood” speech. In it, Powell recounted a conversation with an “ordinary working man,” who, he claimed, was staying in the United Kingdom only because he couldn’t afford to leave. What was pushing him away: immigration and Brits being made “strangers in their own country.” When current Labour prime minister Keir Starmer presented his government’s new direction in migration policy, he evoked the language of that speech, claiming that if Britain failed to curb immigration, it would become an “island of strangers.”
This was naturally met with strong reactions from the British left, and Starmer later walked back the comments. Yet this is not only hostile rhetoric but is also backed up by real policy proposals, as Labour doubles down on its hard-line turn on migration. It’s also a move that can only feed right-wing forces. This November, in the context of an emboldened far right marching in the streets, the rising confidence of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and Labour attacks on pro-Palestinian organizing, the Starmer government’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, claims that “illegal migration is tearing our country apart.” This statement came together with a plan to change British asylum rules, and — following Denmark’s lead — to make refugee status only temporary.
The British government’s plan also includes stopping family reunification and limiting housing and financial support for asylum seekers, who Mahmood claims are in a “better position than most British citizens in social housing in this country.” This bears no relation to reality. People seeking asylum are stuck for months or years in “degrading and overcrowded conditions,” often with families of six crammed into a single room, rat and bedbug infestations, and food so poor it leads to malnutrition. Yet instead, benefits and social housing will be limited to those who hold British citizenship; under the new plan, it could take thirty years to claim residency.
The Starmer government’s new direction is explicitly modeled on Denmark’s “radical transformation of the asylum system” — the so-called 2019 “paradigm shift.” A raft of measures included tighter restrictions on family reunification, a turn to short-term residence permits, and symbolic moves like rebranding “integration benefits” as “repatriation benefits.”
These policies were put forward by a right-wing government, with Inger Støjberg — appointed as minister of integration and immigration in 2015 — in the lead. She had already pushed immigration policy sharply to the Right, introducing the notorious “jewelry law,” which let authorities seize valuables from asylum seekers, and the “ghetto plan,” which made it possible to force immigrant families out of their homes. Yet this direction was also rubber-stamped by the Social Democrats, then in opposition.
Nevertheless, the parliamentary left had mobilized against this hard line on migrants and secured enough seats to support the appointment of Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen as prime minister later that year. When the Social Democrats came back into power, they did so on a ticket of welfarism — an appeal to the working class typical of the party’s tradition. They had been losing votes to the Right, particularly to the Danish People’s Party, and combined their move toward the Left on welfare policy with a right-wing move toward a more explicit anti-immigration stance.
The Social Democrats doubled down — and quickly the new minister of integration and immigration, Mattias Tesfaye, took up Støjberg’s torch, announcing that Denmark was to accept zero asylum seekers. Any hopes of change had been spoiled, and Denmark was set to become even more restrictive and openly hostile toward migrants. The Social Democrats had already begun absorbing and repackaging the Right’s agenda, but as the far right kept climbing in the polls, this strategy moved from the margins to the core of the Social Democrats’ policies, albeit packaged in a language of protecting the welfare state.
After the 2022 election, in which the Social Democrats added an extra 1.6 percent support, Frederiksen did not turn to the Left to form her government but — emboldened by a seeming rejection of the Left — instead formed a grand coalition with two right-wing parties, which still rules Denmark today. The Social Democrats assumed that embracing hard-line migration policies would fix the electoral damage done by governing on austerity and taking a softer stance toward immigration. It was said that all this would win working-class voters back to Social Democracy and suppress the far right that had also grown in that election.
Many foreign observers see this as the lesson from Denmark. Yet even apart from its inhumanity, this anti-immigration strategy has not worked electorally either.
Take the recent local elections.
In the capital, Copenhagen, the two left-wing parties, Red-Green Alliance (EL) and Socialist People’s Party (SF) received 22 and 17.9 percent of the votes, respectively — ousting the Social Democrats from the mayor’s office for the first time in over a century.
But still more importantly, nationally, the picture looked very different. The Social Democrats’ collapse opened the door for the Right — and especially the far right. Frederiksen’s party bled five percentage points and fell to 23.2 percent, dropping from control of forty-four municipalities to just twenty-five. Meanwhile, the Danish People’s Party made gains, and a new far-right outfit, the Denmark Democrats, grabbed 4.6 percent. In the western municipality of Ringkøbing-Skjern, they took one-fifth of the vote and won a mayoralty.
This new party was founded by none other than former immigration minister Støjberg. After her own party turned on her during an impeachment case, she resigned as deputy leader in 2020 and was later sentenced to sixty days in prison for her actions as minister — a sentence she served at home with an electronic ankle bracelet. Just a year later, she launched the right-wing Denmark Democrats, a name echoing the far-right Sweden Democrats. In its first general-election bid in November 2022, the party immediately became parliament’s fifth largest, and Støjberg won the second-highest number of personal votes after Prime Minister Frederiksen. The momentum carried straight into this month’s municipal elections, where the Denmark Democrats continued to expand their support.
The Social Democrats’ priorities, and perhaps a key reason for understanding their electoral failure, were laid bare in a viral social media clip where an influencer asked Frederiksen to choose what mattered more: a TikTok age limit or a list of issues including higher student grants, better pay for nurses, cheaper public transport, lower food prices, and more funding for the green transition. The only item Frederiksen ranked above the TikTok question was “fewer refugees in Denmark.”
With such comments, the prime minister exposed the extent of her party’s rightward lurch, leaving behind even the faintest trace of a working-class, left-wing agenda. Even electoral defeat hasn’t taught lessons. After the election’s setbacks, Frederiksen said her party needed to “carefully consider what lies behind this” and — in a line that bordered on farce — complained that it was “becoming increasingly difficult to be the major Danish political party that embraces all Danes.”
There is no mystery to the election results in Denmark. The Social Democrats have chosen the strategy of welfare chauvinism in the face of electoral challenges from the far right. This has been a strategy of accommodating the most shameful of political projects, while abandoning large parts of the racialized working class that you might think this party ought to represent.
Welfare chauvinism works by promising to protect the welfare state but only for those deemed legitimate members of the nation. It allows social democratic parties to present themselves as defenders of “ordinary working men” while blaming migrants for the consequences of decades of austerity. The term itself was coined in 1990 to describe how emerging far-right parties in Denmark and Norway pushed for welfare states that were universal for “our own” but increasingly closed off to immigrants. Denmark became the clearest example: adopting far-right ideas about the “deserving” and “undeserving poor” with immigrants painted as a drain on public resources. It is a project designed from the outset to fracture the working class along racial lines.
The predictable outcome has been the steady normalization of far-right politics — a process that overwhelmingly benefits the Right itself. Whatever short-term polling bumps the Social Democrats gain by poaching a slice of the far-right electorate are dwarfed by the long-term trajectory: left-wing voters leave them behind, and the far right grows along with its conservative and liberal partners.
Labour in Britain is now walking into the same dead end — remaking itself into a vehicle that helps the far right grow, legitimizing racism and violence and dividing the working class even further in the process. It is a dangerous trajectory, and Labour is drawing exactly the wrong lessons from its Danish sister party. The fascist Tommy Robinson seems to have grasped the consequences better than Labour’s leadership when he wrote on X, in response to the government’s policy turn, that “the Overton window has been obliterated.”
What is the lesson from Denmark? For the people whom these policies target, the consequences will be brutal: deeper state persecution of those already suffering from having fled war and conflict; lives placed on indefinite hold; and a system in which migrants will still come to Britain but only to be forced into a permanent underclass, living in constant fear of repression. For the broader working class, this shift opens the door to even harsher attacks on wages and living conditions.
None of this will bring an end to austerity. Rents will not fall, streets will not be repaired any faster, and the National Health Service will not magically become properly staffed. In the name of “restoring order and control,” Labour is adopting a Danish playbook that delivers power straight into the hands of the far right.
Great Job Anton Ösgård & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
