“In the first six months of 2025, 47 people were permitted to lodge an asylum claim in Hungary. In the same period, Britain received roughly 50,000. Both countries answer to the same conventions and laws. The difference between 47 and 50,000 is not capacity. It is choice.”
Hungary Stopped It In Six Months. Britain's Government Chose Not To.
In May 2025, Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street and told the country, "The experiment is over." Six months earlier, he had already explained what it was. Of his predecessors, he said, "Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalise immigration. This happened by design, not accident." Both statements are true. The experiment was deliberate. But it is not over.
In the first six months of 2025, the same period Starmer declared it over, 47 people were permitted to lodge an asylum claim in Hungary, a country of 9.5 million. In the same period, Britain received roughly 50,000. Both countries answer to the same conventions and hold the same tools. The difference between 47 and 50,000 is not capacity. It is choice.
The United States made the same choice this year. Border Patrol apprehensions fell to their lowest level since 1970, down from 1.6 million in 2021 to under 240,000. Net migration to the United States turned negative for the first time in half a century. This was achieved within months of a government deciding to act. Britain's government has not made that decision.
This is not new. In 2013, Peter Mandelson admitted that in 2004, under a Labour government, "we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people." Andrew Neather, who wrote the 2000 speech opening Britain's borders, later said the policy was intended to "rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date." Six of eight references to that policy's social objectives were removed before publication.
More recently, Professor Alan Manning, former head of the government's own Migration Advisory Committee, admitted that mass migration was used to paper over economic failure. A substitute for reform. The trade-off was understood. The warnings were issued. The decision was taken anyway, by both parties, across three decades.
What is new is the second half of the choice. Having decided, repeatedly, to expand migration rather than confront the harder political work, the same state has built the machinery to manage the response.
The government's own project delivery guidance states that British equality, diversity and inclusion policy is governed by the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Prevent's training classifies "cultural nationalism," the belief that mass migration threatens Western culture, alongside extremist ideology, broad enough to capture the Prime Minister's own warning that Britain risks becoming "an island of strangers." A new definition of Islamophobia was opposed jointly by Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh leaders, by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and by the government's own former anti-extremism adviser, who warned extremists would use it to deflect scrutiny. It was announced regardless.
The pattern repeats in how dissent is handled. After the 2024 riots, people were jailed for social media posts within days, sentences in the same range as those who set buildings alight. This year, the Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced new powers to remove "incendiary" content during "times of crisis," definitions set by ministers, the same day the government's own terror reviewer revealed his questions about migration's national security implications had gone unanswered. One question produced legislation within forty-eight hours. The other, silence.
None of this is incompetence. Incompetence does not produce a 47 person asylum total in Hungary and a fifty-year low in US border crossings within months of two governments deciding to act, while Britain, holding the same tools, produces neither.
Choosing not to close a border is one decision. Branding concern about that choice as extremism is another. The two are not separate. The second protects the first.
"In May 2025, Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street and told the country, "The experiment is over.""