Britain’s Tory opposition party is weighing up whether to adopt a policy based on Denmark’s controversial ‘ghetto law,’ which uses aggressive urban planning to encourage integration.
The model, initiated under Leftist Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, allows the state to demolish housing blocks where at least 50% of residents have a ‘non-western’ background, with the aim of preventing the emergence of parallel societies.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch—briefly seen as capable of reviving her flailing organisation—has now expressed an interest in determining whether the policy would work in the UK. It has certainly inflamed the left-liberal Guardian newspaper, which has attacked the Danish policy at least twice, since “forcible integration in Denmark … cannot end well” while condemning
a habit of speech that shows very clearly how Muslims in Europe are now the victim of attitudes that would once have been expressed as antisemitism.
Further evidence that the Danish policy has annoyed the right people is a European Court of Justice (ECJ) advisor’s advice last February that Denmark was indeed breaking the law by discriminating against “non-Western” residents of ghettos.
The properties weren’t actually destroyed, but through a combination of resettlement, privatisation, evictions, and even compulsory infant daycare, the Danish state tried to break up the “ghettos” where it alleged residents refused to integrate.
Badenoch’s partial conversion to Denmark’s patriotic social democracy could face practical problems in Britain, not least in London, where 41% of heads of household in social housing are foreign-born. Could she withstand robust language on the issue, like that of the Guardian or the ECJ, when she has dithered repeatedly over her party’s approach to the European Court of Human Rights and its consistent creation of loopholes benefitting illegal migrants in the UK?
