Governments rarely advertise their anxieties, but Britain’s sweeping new asylum overhaul is about as close as one gets to an admission that politics, not policy, is setting the tempo.

Labour swept into power promising competence and calm; now it finds itself reaching for Denmark’s rulebook. The plan, unveiled with a severity that surprised even some of Labour’s own MPs, seeks to redraw the implicit bargain between refugee protection and public tolerance.

Support for asylum seekers will no longer be assumed.

It will be conditional on work, on conduct, on cooperation. The logic is borrowed from Copenhagen, where a decade of Social Democratic toughness has reshaped Europe’s migration debate.

Officials who travelled to Denmark returned with a sense of admiration that bordered on envy.

Temporary status, periodic reassessments, and repatriation when home countries stabilize are policies that speak to political appetites shaped by years of anti-immigration sentiment. Britain, determined to blunt the insurgent Reform UK party, appears convinced the Danish approach offers a shield.

Rights groups take the opposite view. They argue that the new strategy treats asylum as a favour rather than a legal right, and that harshness in one country rarely deters people fleeing danger.

Most asylum applicants, they note, follow family and community ties, not comparative policy spreadsheets. But polls have turned migration into an existential question for politicians. Claims have risen, yes, though not to historic extremes.

Yet politics is often less about numbers than about narratives, and the prevailing narrative is one of strain: on cities, on services, on patience. The government seems intent on proving that it can be both compassionate and unyielding, a combination that, in practice, often collapses into contradiction.

Ministers insist that generosity must be channelled toward those who contribute. Critics counter that asylum seekers cannot contribute if they fear destitution while awaiting decisions that may take years. Britain once prided itself on quiet competence in handling refugees.

The new overhaul suggests a country increasingly unsure of how to balance its principles with its political nerves.