You can’t react to every piece of flotsam on the unending tide of nastiness that emanates from Westminster on the subject of immigration, or you’ll start to feel like you’re the idiot. Are we surprised that a Labour home secretary would want to remove any prospect of permanent citizenship for all refugees, thereby ending Britain’s standing as a place of sanctuary? Petty, vindictive, counterproductive, narrow-minded, yes, but you could hardly call this surprising.
But, finally, a policy arrived that was so out of the normal run of things that I assumed it was a joke – a piece of satire, floated on X by some member of the wokerati, to make Shabana Mahmood sound truly heinous. Apparently, she wanted to seize the jewellery and other valuables to pay for their accommodation.Deploying exaggeration to underscore how much like a cartoon villain a politician sounds is a little bit sixth form and so far hasn’t been effective. And yet it couldn’t possibly be real, right? Because it sounds like a cartoon villain.
Except this is a real idea, borrowed from Denmark’s similar provision in 2016. There was a lot of head-scratching about its compatibility with EU law at the time, but Denmark had opted out of the Common European Asylum System anyway, so that was all a bit abstract. The more trenchant critique came from the Danish police union which, though couched in the neutral terms of pragmatism, boiled down to (I paraphrase): “You seriously want us to find the most beleaguered people in the country and take away their jewels?”
It may have been that lack of institutional buy-in that undermined the policy in Denmark, because six years later, in 2022, the law had been used only 17 times in six years. Or it may have only ever been symbolic in the first place, like Theresa May’s “go home or face arrest” vans. For all the talk about them, there were only ever two of them; one to please the Daily Mail, the other so that they could describe them in the plural. There would have been something so pathetic about having to tell parliament about your racist “van”.
In other words, it turns out the policy is a joke, in the sense that it is deeply unserious. But it’s not funny.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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