Tomorrow Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, is set to announce changes to Britain’s asylum system, designed to discourage those who arrive through illegal routes. Those changes will include making housing and financial assistance ‘discretionary’ so that they can be denied to those who are able to work, and increasing the length of time asylum seekers have to wait before they can apply to settle permanently to 20 years. On Sky News this morning, Trevor Phillips asked Mahmood how she responded to the accusation that she is being ‘panicked into a racist immigration policy’. The Home Secretary rejected the claim, saying this is a ‘moral mission’ for her as the child of immigrants. She added that illegal immigration is ‘creating divisions’ across the country and called the current asylum system ‘broken’. Mahmood continued: ‘It is my job therefore to think of a proper solution to this very real problem… so that I can unite a divided country. That matters more to me than almost anything else in politics.’

Chris Philp: Labour’s asylum proposals are mostly ‘gimmicks’

Speaking to the BBC, shadow home secretary Chris Philp told Laura Kuenssberg that........

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