THE Labour Party delegation that visited Denmark recently came back with the sense that the Scandinavian country’s mix of an eroding social democratic welfare system combined with a “muscular” immigration policy was a perfect fit for contemporary Britain.

And, in the imagination of many Labour MPs — those equally afeard of their electorates and of the No 10 disciplinary culture — this will tackle their most pressing fear, that a combination of Labour (and Keir Starmer’s) unpopularity with the appeal of Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle will see them jobless.

The idea that appeasing those voters in the grip of the delusion that restricting the rights of refugees is the key to solving Britain’s immigration problems will claw back electoral credibility has induced a paralysis.

Even the dimmest knows that Labour’s problems are deeper than this but they think this surrender to a primitive nativism is a quick fix.

Today the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood proposes changes that would make housing and financial support for asylum-seekers discretionary. Her rationale is that these proposals are the “most sweeping reforms to tackle illegal migration in modern times” and calibrated to “restore control and fairness to the system.”

This is dressed up in the usual self-flattering language that is standard when Labour politicians surrender before a reactionary idea.

Far from Britain having “a proud tradition of welcoming those fleeing danger,” our country has a long tradition of receiving them with reluctance and hostility. There is not a Jewish family that does not have tales of hostility to their families fleeing eastern Europe, and of Holocaust survivors refused settlement both here and in Palestine. Migrants fleeing the empire to fill jobs in Britain faced no less hostility and discrimination.

Where the lie is made explicit is in Mahmood’s framing of the issue, that our “generosity is drawing illegal migrants across the Channel.”

In this she colludes with the fascist and Farageist conflation of refugee arrivals with immigration. There is a substantial, if fluctuating, refugee flow to Britain made explicable by factors that include decades of imperial war on the countries of north Africa and western Asia, climate change — for which the principal responsibility lies with the developed capitalist world — and the neocolonial super-exploitation of the global South. That they arrive by boats is because the beach is our border.

But such arrivals are only a small part of migration to these islands. Mass migration is an inevitable function of a geriatric capitalist system — wedded to the bond markets and the anarchy of private ownership — that cannot predict or plan economic outcomes with certainty.

A contemporary example: thousands of British resident doctors cannot progress towards their specialism because there are not the places available. This is perhaps as powerful a driver for their industrial action as the lag in their pay. This exists alongside a substantial flow of foreign-trained and qualified doctors from other countries, particularly in the global South, which, however desirable for reasons of professional development, is objectively part of the system of imperialist robbery.

The same is true in other parts of the economy where employers drive the government to meet the inevitable labour market dislocation that is in the DNA of capitalist anarchy and the pursuit of private profit.

Britain needs controls on the export of capital and investment to reconstruct and reskill Britain’s industrial base and meet the needs of an economy planned and managed to meet the needs of our people and play our part in meeting the obligations that our colonial past and imperial present bring.

Neither refugees nor migrant workers are the cause of our problems, the capitalist system is.