In the Aeneid, after the purported departure of the Greeks, the Trojans find two things left behind: a great wooden horse and a Greek soldier named Sinon. Sinon is brought before King Priam of Troy. He tells an emotive story about being persecuted at the hands of his enemies while imploring the Trojans to accept the wooden horse into the city, promising that it is a gift from Minerva. Priam is so moved by Sinon’s story that he tells him: ‘Whoever you are, forget the Greeks lost to you, you’ll be one of us.’ That night, now unchained and trusted to walk the city, Sinon opens the wooden horse and out comes a group of hardened soldiers, who set about burning and razing his supposed sanctuary.
When Aeneas tells this story, his message is not that we should never trust foreigners in need of shelter or care. It is instead a message about the value of the precautionary principle, particularly when it comes to dealing with soldiers. The Trojans are so swept up by their victory that, egged on by the gods, they ignore the warnings of Laocoön and Cassandra to check the horse before it enters the city walls. And so, as Panthus wails: ‘Troy is past.’
Britain’s border policy is (so far as we know) not decided on Olympus, and so our politicians cannot blame the gods for their actions. A secular explanation is therefore needed for the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s decision to open new routes up for asylum. In September, the government reopened the UK Resettlement Scheme (UKRS), which will work with two international partnership agencies. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) will identify women and girls displaced from Afghanistan, while the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), an American non-profit, will refer Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan.
Hamas has repeatedly shown that it is capable of infiltrating international refugee organisations
This is part of a wider ‘safe and legal routes’ strategy, which will include new sponsorship paths for displaced peoples in seven countries: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia, Uganda and Kenya. All these countries have varying issues with homegrown Islamist terrorism, and the refugees they house (Afghans in Pakistan, as an example) are also disproportionately at risk of radicalisation.
Bringing in new safe and legal routes serves two purposes for the Home Secretary. It allows her to sweeten the bitter pill of her Immigration and Asylum Bill, which has been criticised by her cabinet colleagues for being too hardline and has provoked open rebellion on the back benches. Providing these alternative routes will also strengthen the legal argument for tougher reforms that are planned on small-boats migrants, such as placing some of them on 30-year earned settlement timelines. The Home Office is emphasising that refugees who arrive on UKRS will be put on a five-year path to permanent settlement, saying ‘this is, by design, more generous than [to] those who arrive by small boat or other illegal means’.
The Home Office expects the number of migrants using these schemes to begin in the ‘hundreds at first, but this will grow into the low thousands as levels of illegal migration fall’, with a quarter of referrals expected to be Palestinians and Afghan women and girls. It is hoped that numbers will be small and manageable enough that international agencies and the Home Office will be able to control the risk. But sources I have spoken to with direct experience of the Home Office have suggested this confidence may be misplaced.
First there is the problem of the international partners helping the Home Office in this endeavour. IRAP, which will manage referrals for the Palestinian route, has sued both the Trump and Biden administrations over the US travel ban, which restricted entry for foreign nationals from countries and territories designated dangerous by the US government. It has also fought to speed up the admission of Afghan and Iraqi migrants. It is fair to say that, whatever their intentions, the organisation the Home Office is partnering with has a preference for looser border policies.
IRAP will be recommending refugees to the government based on information gathered from verified partner organisations in Lebanon and Jordan. Here is another problem; many of the camps housing Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are policed by armed factions. Last year, Hamas refused to participate in an arms handover in the camps. Hamas and other terror groups could have the means to intimidate and corrupt this part of the process.
Hamas has repeatedly shown that it is capable of infiltrating international refugee organisations. In 2024, the UN sacked nine staff working in its refugee agency in Gaza when it emerged they ‘may have been involved’ in the 7 October attacks on Israel. Fatah Sharif, the leader of Hamas in Lebanon, who was killed by an Israeli strike in 2024, had been an employee in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) until he was suspended a few months earlier. Sharif died in a Lebanese refugee camp, the sort IRAP will be examining for humanitarian cases.
The UNHCR will be the government’s partner in helping to resettle Afghan women and girls. The humanitarian case for evacuating these women is strong, given the recent behaviour of the Taliban, but this does not come without risks. The UNHCR has had problems with corruption in resettlement for years. In 2019, whistleblowers alleged to NBC news that resettlement slots were being sold across East Africa. The UNHCR usually resettles girls with their families, so a single referral could bring an entire household, which will sometimes include men.
Once these partner organisations make their recommendations, it will fall to the Home Office to vet applicants for any unsavoury links. Some of the sources I have spoken to have little confidence that the Home Office will be capable of meeting the demand imposed by a new influx of displaced peoples. A report into Home Office asylum casework from June said that the quality of decision-making has ‘declined significantly and was at an unacceptable level’ due to rushed recruitment and unreachable targets. The Home Office will probably use bio-metric scans of individuals and reference this against available data. But there are worries that our databases are not good enough to stop terrorists slipping through the net.
The Home Office’s record on vetting is hardly robust. The 2020 Reading stabbings, in which three men were killed, were perpetrated by a Libyan refugee who was given permission to stay in Britain, despite telling officials he had been in the militant group Ansar al–Sharia. The Home Office has also allowed terrorists from Hamas into Britain. In September, the Sunday Times revealed that a former bodyguard to Ismail Haniyeh, who was then the leader of Hamas in Gaza, had secured asylum in Britain and later citizenship. He now faces extradition to Germany, where prosecutors accuse him of plotting a terror attack against Jews in Europe. It was already public knowledge that he had worked for Haniyeh and that he had been arrested in Egyptfor operating a tunnel which had allegedly been used for smuggling weapons into Gaza.
One government source I spoke to said that, even more than the danger of Hamas using this pipeline to smuggle terrorists into Britain, there is the risk that many of the refugees could become radicalised. Ahmed Hassan, the perpetrator of the 2017 Parsons Green train bombing, arrived in October 2015 from Iraq. Hassan told officials he had been trained by Isis and was scared his family might be killed by the terror group. Surrey County Council housed him with an elderly couple who were not made aware of his extremist links.
Hassan said he blamed the UK government for the killing of his father in Iraq. The risk is that there may well be those among the new arrivals coming from Palestine who will bring similar grievances with them and even pass them on to their children. Salman Abedi’s family fled from Gaddafi and was given refuge in Britain. Our generosity towards his family did not stop him from blowing up 22 people and injuring hundreds of others at the Manchester Arena. Huda Ammori, born in Bradford to a Palestinian father who was displaced in 1967, co-founded Palestine Action, which has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation while a Supreme Court appeal is pending. She has previously accused Britain of condoning ‘the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people’.
The 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent recommended extending the Prevent Duty – which requires specified public authorities to ‘help prevent the risk of people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism’ – to immigration and asylum. The Conservative government accepted this in principle but to date no action has been taken. This means there is no legal responsibility for those working in the asylum system to flag people who are at risk of radicalisation. Prevent is also not well suited to handling the radicalisation of asylum seekers, as it is mostly focused on those aged 11 to 15, and not adults in hotels.
There are worries that our biometric databases are not good enough to stop terrorists slipping through the net
Mahmood is also expanding safe and legal routes from a new group of countries which will make use of new sponsorship schemes through education and employment. These routes will give accredited charities formal routes as sponsors. Like IRAP, these are not neutral actors, but campaigners for looser borders (as an example, the Migrants’ Rights Network has branded the Home Office the ‘Hostile Office’). These charities have, since the 7 October attacks, been assiduously lobbying for a Gaza refugee scheme modelled on the Ukrainian family scheme. Their case will be strengthened by the government beginning the process of accepting refugees from Palestine.
The Muslim Council of Britain, which the government has not engaged with since 2009, has recruited mosques to become community sponsors. East London Mosque, which last year organised a fun run that excluded women, is just one mosque which has previously pledged to sponsor refugee families.
The problem posed by encouraging another wave of refugees through safe and legal routes is not just limited to the terror threats they may pose. In 1992 the Danish government decided it would grant residency to 321 stateless Palestinians from Lebanon who had arrived in Denmark seeking refuge. In 2017 the Danish government reviewed what those refugees had been up to – of the 321, 67 had been given prison sentences. More than half were living off the state in some way.
In the past month, the government has been advising us to stock up on cans of baked beans and bottles of water. We are told repeatedly that sacrifices will have to be made to repair the nation’s finances. Our prisons are bursting at the seams as serial offenders are repeatedly released and re-arrested. Nigh on every synagogue in the country must now pay for hired protection after a spate of anti-Semitic terror attacks perpetrated by jihadists. It shouldn’t take Cassandra’s gift to see that the country is not well prepared for a fresh intake from Lebanon’s camps and Afghanistan’s neighbours.
It would be unconscionable to turn our backs on displaced people fleeing war or women facing persecution. But unless we can guarantee the ‘safe and legal’ routes will also be safe for the host country – which we cannot – we must find other ways to help. What Mahmood is doing is a mistake, and she should have the courage to change course.
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