Adopting despicable Danish-style exactions on refugees brings disturbing resonances of the 1930s. Labour MPs must rebel and the left build mass opposition, argues Kevin Ovenden

For Luton Labour MP Sarah Owen, it was the word ‘repugnant’ that summed up the new Starmer policy of stripping those seeking refuge in Britain of their jewellery and personal items of value. There was widespread outrage across the Labour Party nine years ago when this abomination was introduced by the Danish government and the party was in opposition.

Now it is borrowing from Denmark even though Britain’s anti-asylum policy is already harsher than there.

‘Performative cruelty’ is in danger of becoming a cliché. But that is exactly what Starmer-Labour is engaged in as it also pumps out Hunger Games videos of Border Force and police seizing those whose papers are not in order and deporting them. Just like in Donald Trump’s USA. Not surprising. Keir Starmer told his MPs last week that they must not dump him because it will upset Trump.

It remains to be seen how many Labour MP s are prepared to rebel over this. Some are pointing to suspect snap polling to say that while they may find these policies personally upsetting, they might prove more popular than not among voters.

But the argument against Labour’s slide into Trumpism has yet to be made on any big scale. How many people realise that what the wretched Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood proposes means that someone already accepted as a refugee – a ‘legal’, as we are encouraged to distinguish them from others seeking their papers – will have to be checked every five years to see if they still qualify to be a refugee?

Back to the 1930s

That would have meant last century that the Kindertransport Jewish children brought by private endeavour and collective campaigning to Britain before the war would have been deported back to Germany in the 1950s and 1960s on the grounds West Germany was firmly in the Western camp and therefore there could be no persecution there.

In any case, polling support for a barbaric policy does not make it any less so. The reality is that neither Shabana Mahmood nor Keir Starmer believe this will have any impact on the reasons why people seek to come to Britain. It does though show the reality of their professed concern about people smugglers exploiting refugees. The smugglers robbed you of what savings you had, the British government take from you your bracelet and wedding ring. Unless the ring is a family heirloom, protested one government minister on Monday.

So if you can prove it came down from a great-grandmother you might be able to keep it. If your husband’s family bought it for you, hand it over.

It is nauseating and of course it has all the horrific connotations of state forces seizing personal affects and herding people into camps. Mahmood and Starmer should feel thoroughly ashamed to invoke, as do they so often, the suffering of Jews under the Third Reich in order to cover their own reactionary positions today.

When seizing migrants’ jewellery ‘to pay for processing costs’ two women from the 1930s sprang to mind. Ida and Louise Cook would go to Nazi Germany ostensibly to listen to the opera. In reality, they were in contact with Jewish families and smuggled back what valuable effects they had so as to pay for setting up in Britain those few who could get out and who had to leave everything behind to the Nazi regime. You don’t hear this from those who forever talk of their pride in Britain.

We can stop this

The more people find out about this horrendous policy, the more people will oppose it. If, that is, people speak out and the left organises ferocious opposition.

For those Labour MPs who are against this obscenity but who worry about losing the whip or suffering some detriment if they speak out, they should consider:

1. The principled and moral case. They know it is wrong. They know it will bring monstrous injustices. They have a duty to speak out and to stop it, as more and more in civil society are doing right now.
2. Failing that, they should consider that in many of their cases this move will seal their fate at the next election. Many will become one-term MPs, with less than the expected lavish pension entitlements.
3. Starmer’s authority is slipping away weekly. Why prostrate yourself before a shade of a man who most expect to be well gone come this time next year?

The truth is that this can only shed votes to Reform. Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, from his time as a councillor in Barking, east London, drew the conclusion that Labour MP Margaret Hodge saw off a challenge from the fascists of the British National Party by triangulating their racism. In fact, that was what spurred on the BNP to the extent that her safe Labour seat became vulnerable. She was rescued by a broad, focused anti-fascist campaign to stop BNP führer Nick Griffin.

The evidence today is beyond doubt: Starmer-Labour is boosting Reform, and outright fascists, by trying to out-Reform Reform. It is also upsetting millions of people who will be appalled and need to find on the left both a popular and principled campaign to stop this horror and a credible political alternative to those implementing it.

It is often forgotten that it was not only the Iraq war two decades ago that began the process of sundering New Labour from its bases of support that made up its historic electoral coalition.

There was also the Victorian-era rhetoric directed at the ‘undeserving poor’ and those in receipt of their entitlements from the welfare state that we all pay into, including them.

Then there was the plain-old nasty demonisation of asylum seekers. That was a key issue in immigration minister Barbara Roche losing her seat in 2005. Despite a background of liberal words about immigration and multiculturalism, she could not escape the image of her stepping over protesters to enter an asylum detention camp to highlight the government clampdown on refugees.

What Starmer-Labour is doing today will not swing votes away from Reform. It will authenticate Reform’s appeal: ‘Keep voting for us if you want to keep the pressure on the government, because we all know that deep down they don’t mean it. Look at Mahmood’s background…’

It is alienating millions of people who have a basic position of humanity when it comes to treating those fleeing war and disaster.

Those people do not exist only in constituencies in north London. They exist and are making their presence felt in places such as Epping Forest. In communities around the country, you will find largely working-class people and often women volunteering to provide help with supporting and integrating refugees and building shared community bonds.

They need to have a voice of their own. Immediately. They need to be helped to organise through a fightback over this on a national scale that puts clear arguments against Labour’s slide to Trumpism and in ways that connect with working-class people as a whole under the cosh of the squeeze on living standards to serve the interests of the rich.

‘What Enoch Powell says today the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after,’ said the important black radical Ambalavaner Sivanandan in the 1970s. That is exactly what is happening now. Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage have both said they applaud Shabana Mahmood for seeing sense. On Monday afternoon, the government refused to distance itself from Robinson’s praise.

This can become very dark indeed. The left needs to stand firm but also turn outwards, building confidence that we can win the arguments at a mass level, defeat this policy and end this vicious cycle.