The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is expected to announce a radical overhaul of the UK’s asylum and immigration system, modelled in part on what Denmark has done over the past decade.
Since 2019 Denmark’s centre-left government has been trying something new: its normal social democratic manifesto, alongside a series of harsh policies around immigration and asylum – even bulldozing estates deemed to contain too many residents of “non-western” origin.
Helen Pidd talks to Politiken journalist Nilas Heinskou about what these policies have entailed, why they have proved popular, and whether they could be replicated in the UK. Agob Yacoub, a Syrian refugee, describes a rising climate of racism and Islamophobia that he has seen across Danish politics since this experiment began.
Photograph: Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images
