Shabana Mahmood is a really horrible person whose policies are cruel. She’s one of the worst people in the Labour administration and should be fired immediately.
Asylum seekers in the UK are generally not allowed to work while they are waiting on a decision on their claim. If they have been waiting for more than a year, then they can apply for permission to work.
As a result, they are reliant on the Home Office for housing and support as they cannot work to pay for accommodation.
Marley Morris, associate director at the IPPR, said there are “better ways of bring down” costs of asylum such as “speeding up asylum processing and appeals, reforming the existing asylum contracts”.
That whole criminal labelling is super annoying to fight. Because yes, SOME will be criminals.
But let’s look at the British public first. According to the Home Office, as of 2024, ~12.5 million people in the UK, out of 68 million, have a criminal conviction. That’s roughly 20% of the population.
Further numbers show that the 10-51 age range has a roughly 15% segment that had some sort of criminal conviction (this is just convictions, so ignoring all the cases where it did not go to court etc.), 8% for females, 25% for males…
Based on that, out of every 100 Britons that go to live abroad, AT LEAST 15 will be criminals. Yet do you see any country complaining about all Brits being criminals?
Let’s presume that the criminal rate of the asylum seekers is half of that of the UK’s, meaning 7 criminals out of 100. Their influx net lowers the ratio of criminals to “regular” population. And yet because of the handful of outliers that refuse to assimilate (and are often extradited/deported because of it), all of them get labelled a criminal, when in reality, the average Briton is much more likely to be a criminal themselves.