Should Labour copy the Danish Social Democrats on migration?
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Photo by Omer Messinger / Getty Images
Years before Keir Starmer's 'Nation of Strangers' speech I found myself on the doors at Labour's ill-fated Hartlepool By-Election campaign. A front row seat to the new leader's Labour Party and its floundering first steps in pro-Brexit Britain.
Joining a slim team (made up entirely of Labour Party staff bussed in from the North West) I marched around the kind of council estates that were once reliable Labour strongholds. An inexplicably cold Spring afternoon with a colder welcome waiting behind each door. A series of hairdryer-strength rants about how the party had abandoned Hartlepudlians. Bafflement about taking the knee for Black Lives Matter. In an attempt to sell a changed Labour to one resident, a middle aged man in an England shirt. Whether he liked the new, patriotic flag-toting leaflets we were handing out. He mimed spitting on the floor in front of me, then spoke about how the Labour council had closed the local police station.
The vacuity of Labour's new offer was palpable then, with Starmer still speaking mostly to Westminster press corps about how he wasn't Jeremy Corbyn. Little to say about the economic system that had left Hartlepool as one of Britain's child poverty hotspots.
It was that teachable moment, encountering the pure disdain for Labour in one of Britain's most deprived neighbourhoods, that led me to wonder whether the left really was completely doomed, or whether another left wing party had turned the dire situation faced by Labour around.
Enter Mette Fredriksen. In Denmark, Fredrikson's Social Democratic Party (SDP) was celebrated for leading her party back to government after beating the populist, hardcore anti-immigration Danish People's Party (DPP) – a rough analogue to Reform.
By the mid 2010s, DPP were the second largest party in Denmark, largely drawing their support from rural, manual workers and pensioners. Stymying this flow of voters and returning them to the left is a miracle of European politics. A case for left-wing beatification. Denmark has become the laboratory for any left politician wondering how to win back the type of voter that used to be their most loyal.
Frederikson's party has returned, aggressively, to the traditions of the social democratic covenant. In everything they do there's an emphasis that trust and integration are paramount; a prerequisite for any redistributive politics to exist.
This pathos would be familiar to anyone who had knocked a voter's door in one of the post-industrial red wall towns, like Hartlepool, that have emerged as globalisation's marked losers in the winnowed field of British life.
In these areas there is a longing for the sense of being knitted together by societal norms, values and friendships that has gone missing. In their place; a country where the state seems to exist as a mechanism to help someone else – someone that you feel little sense of shared endeavour with – first, if it ever gets around to helping you.
Frederikson's gambit has been to restore the legitimacy of left politics through forced assimilation: either the population becomes more incontestably Danish or the social democratic tradition dies like an unwatered plant. In the front page of the SDP's 2018 strategy pamphlet Just and Realistic she appears above a quote reading 'You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.'
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This last chance saloon mentality led to dramatic policy shifts – significantly more coercive than any in the recent Labour tradition – paired with a language of morality and a sense of self-belief that contrasts the more apologetic tone and secrecy of Starmer's Labour. The Danes do not try to debate immigration with their working class voters. They spend their political capital at elections on arguing successfully for traditional left policy – increasing public spending in a society where 88 percent of voters are happy paying some of the highest taxes in the world.
Could Frederiksen's example help Labour's least popular Prime Minister in generations? Could it help him win again in those white majority, working class areas the party is currently projected to lose to Reform in 2029?
Where Labour needs to be careful is not to re-enact the same decade-long mistake it made with the wholesale adoption of the identity politics of America – without checking its relevance to Britain.
The Danish political debate on immigration and multiculturalism orbits around the 'Ghetto Package' of 2018. Introduced by the right, Frederiksen's winning coalition of 2019 continued the policy with few adjustments, save it being renamed the 'Parallel Society Act.'
The Act empowers the government to designate areas 'vulnerable' where they exhibit a mix of factors related to a lack of education, low incomes and higher than average crime rates. People that might in a less PC-era have been referred to as 'the poor'.
There's a further factor common to all the 'vulnerable' areas – most of their residents are officially designated as 'Non-Western'.
This group includes migrants from South America, Asia and Africa and their children. A cynic might argue that 'South America' is included in the list in order to muddy the waters on whether the policy is ethnically-targeted and discriminatory, something the European Court of Justice will decide later this year.
When an estate receives the 'vulnerable residential area' designation, sanctions are enacted. The owning housing association or municipality must reduce the number of social housing units in its stock to 40 percent. Participation in crime becomes collectively and more harshly punished, with an entire family liable to be evicted for a crime committed by a relative.
Since the act came into effect thousands of social homes have been lost. While thousands were sold to private investment firms, multiples more have simply been demolished. Thousands of families have been evicted, 11,000 are expected to be moved on by the time of the programme's end in 2030.
The effect on Denmark's overall stock of social housing is small and the 'ghetto laws' apply to a comparatively small amount of that population, less than 1 percent. However, it is hard not to see these punitive measures mostly as a means to make an example of communities based on their ethnic heritage. The accompanying, much-maligned policy of taking assets from refugees had only ever been applied in four recorded cases by 2022. These are policies designed to make an example in rhetoric more than they are designed to make progress with integration into Danish values.
What could Labour learn from Frederiksen's success? Could the party create its own equivalent vision equivalent to 'Just and Realistic'? Not a 'Nation of Strangers' but a more positive and hopeful proposition, that showed a belief in Danish society's ability to absorb and overcome its issues, so long as everyone feels a sense of shared purpose?
Any leader of the left today must be able to face up to the collapsing consensus of the liberal political era, acknowledge the difficult reality between the politically convenient myths, as Denmark did.
Among those myths; most parties of the Left in the Western World are parties of the working class. They aren't. Most have spent a generation haemorrhaging working class support and members.
Further, after a rate of migration outpacing the rate of housebuilding for a parliament, the majority of the public thinks immigration levels are too high. Especially so those in the left-behind areas that notionally left wing parties should feel a natural compassion and solidarity toward.
Another myth is that a multicultural society leads to integration by default. We are beginning to see parallel societies in England – as evidenced by the exceptionally poor levels of English spoken in places like Leicester, a recipe for pariah status. Alongside this, the emergence of a form of politics that votes along ethnic, racial and religious lines more so than by ideology.
It is difficult to imagine the kind of cultural chauvinism whereby Danes see their society as superior taking root in Britain, but it's exactly this that leads to both their approval of high taxation, high trust and to their unforgiving focus on integration.
But just like we are not America, we are not Denmark.
Danish ghettos are a result of the country's quietly unacknowledged, decades long, nativist approach to housing. In the supposedly liberal nordic countries, Asian and African migrants and asylum seekers have been pushed into conurbations of undesirable housing and became second-class citizens.
The Danish Left has been more forthcoming than Britain about the effects of this ghettoisation, phlegmatic when it comes to publishing the racial details of criminality and working backwards from the numbers. But Britain, by contrast, has not developed a culture of sublimating morality to statistics and that is a strength – Britain loves a triumph over the odds, we give second chances. At no point in history was there a working class life that wouldn't be doomed by quick statistical contextual rundown.
Britain has done significantly better, historically, in creating a country where migrants contribute and become part of the country's social fabric. Contrary to the dominant liberal left view of Britain as an avowedly racist country that has barely moved on from the 50s, the most diverse areas of Britain are the most socially mobile. Almost every ethnic group out-performs white working class children at school. We have fewer 'ghettos'. Our housing policies have largely mixed social tenants with private tenants in the same estates.
It's almost certain that Britain would never tolerate a racialised idea of a person as 'non-western'. If applied as in Denmark, this label would encompass the former Prime Minister, celebrities like Mo Farah, Linford Christie, Idris Elba, Bernadine Evaristo and the Reform chairman Zia Yusuf.
Most of all, it would be an enormous mistake to interpret the SDP's success as solely oriented around issues of immigration. By 2022 the issue had largely fallen away from Danish political debate, with only the rump of Danish Democrats (the DPP successor party) still citing it as one of their main political motivations.
Frederiksen had succeeded in neutralising the issue, but she had won on a platform of reducing cuts to social welfare and maintaining taxes much higher than in Britain. Her voters in 2022 placed welfare as their highest priority.
Labour, boxed in by fiscal rules and an unwillingness to make the case for taxation, is about to enact the biggest cuts to social security since the coalition.
Where Frederiksen did truly excel was in leading her party openly and authentically into this new era. Starmer has so far chosen to hold this conversation in the back offices of Labour HQ, ignoring his party's members, winning consent to lead with a fake mandate.
Now, trailing in the polls, time has run out for back room meddling. Labour needs its own reckoning.
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