Britain’s Welfare Empire: A State that Feeds Strangers and Starves Its Own

British Police State Disclaimer

The illustration to this article is political satire. It criticises government policy on asylum and welfare, not any ethnic, national, or religious group. It makes a moral and political argument about the unequal treatment of British citizens and asylum seekers under current law.

It does not incite hatred or hostility toward any individual or community, nor does it deny humanitarian duties.

Its purpose is to expose and criticise state policy, bureaucratic hypocrisy, and the deliberate demoralisation of the native population—nothing more.

The Government’s own website explains, in the plainest words, how the asylum system works. It is a document of quiet enormity, a polite statement of how the British State treats foreigners as clients and its own people as expendable. On the page “Asylum Support: What you’ll get,” the Home Office writes: “You can ask for somewhere to live, a cash allowance or both.” The housing “could be in a flat, house, hostel or bed and breakfast.” There is no means test, no investigation of savings, no five-week delay before payment. The guarantee is absolute: “You’ll be given somewhere to live if you need it.” If meals are included, the allowance falls from £49.18 per person each week to £9.95, but the entitlement remains. The allowance is placed automatically on a prepaid debit card—the ASPEN card—and reloaded weekly.

The page continues: “You’ll get extra money to buy healthy food if you’re pregnant or a mother of a child aged three or under.” The payment is £5.25 per week for pregnancy, £9.50 for a baby under one, £5.25 for children aged one to three, plus a one-off £300 maternity grant for anyone expecting a child or with a baby under six months. Even when asylum is refused, support continues: “You’ll be given somewhere to live and £49.18 per person on a payment card for food, clothing and toiletries.” Only those who decline the accommodation lose the card.

Medical care is covered in full. “You may get free National Health Service healthcare,” the Government states, including “free prescriptions for medicine, free dental care, free eyesight tests and help paying for glasses.” Children are guaranteed a place in a state school and “may be able to get free school meals.” The terms are so generous that the NHS issues a dedicated HC2 certificate for people on asylum support, giving them automatic exemption from all prescription and dental charges, free eye tests and optical vouchers, and even help with wigs and fabric supports.

Compare this to the treatment of the people who pay for it. A British worker who loses his job must apply for Universal Credit, then wait at least five weeks before receiving a payment. Any advance must be repaid out of later instalments. He must show that he is seeking work, accept appointments and interviews, and risk sanctions if he misses them. He is scrutinised as a potential cheat. An asylum claimant is treated as a recipient of moral debt, requiring no proof of worthiness.

When the native taxpayer falls ill, he must pay £9.90 per prescription unless he qualifies for a limited exemption. He may buy a “pre-payment certificate” to spread the cost, but the charge remains. Dental treatment on the NHS costs £27.40 for a check-up, £75.30 for a filling, £326.70 for a crown or denture, and many cannot find an NHS dentist at all. Asylum seekers, by contrast, present their HC2 certificate and pay nothing. If the citizen asks the council for housing, he is told that the waiting list is full, that he is not a “priority case,” and that the private rental market is his problem. The asylum applicant, by the State’s own words, is “given somewhere to live if you need it.”

None of this is accidental. The cost of asylum support in 2023–24 was about £4.7 billion, according to the Home Office’s own figures, of which £3 billion went on hotel accommodation. In 2024–25, the bill fell slightly to £4 billion, but £2.1 billion of this was still for hotels—an average of £5.7 million every day. The National Audit Office has found that the ten-year accommodation contracts, first priced at £4.5 billion, are now projected to cost £15.3 billion. Between April and October 2024 alone, £1.7 billion was spent on housing and managing asylum seekers. The Financial Times has estimated the total annual cost of the asylum system at roughly £4.8 billion. The number of people receiving asylum support—housing, cash or both—now stands at over 100,000.

The figures expose a transfer of resources on a colossal scale. What is presented as “humanitarian duty” has become a domestic welfare state for foreigners, sustained by British workers who receive less support in return for greater taxation. The British State can house every migrant but not every nurse, find free dental care for the undocumented but not for the elderly, provide optical help for those who have just arrived but not for those who have paid into the system all their lives.

The purpose is not merely financial. It is political. Britain’s ruling class has long ceased to think of itself as the steward of a nation. Its loyalties lie with the financial oligarchy that treats Britain as a safe platform for speculation. For that oligarchy, a settled and confident working class would be an obstacle. It prefers a fluid population, dependent on state mediation, with no common interest strong enough to resist extraction. Cheap labour holds down wages; imported dependency justifies permanent taxation; and the administrative machinery of “support” provides work for tens of thousands of middle managers whose salaries depend on the continuation of the problem.

The governing class, in turn, has found moral satisfaction and career stability in administering this arrangement. The bureaucracy grows, the contractors profit, the activists in their funded charities pose as saviours. The native population, meanwhile, is divided—resentful yet intimidated, taxed yet excluded. Their anger is policed as hate speech. Their hardship is reframed as “inequality.” Their resentment is proof of guilt.

This is why the asylum system endures despite every promise of reform. It serves too many interests. Each new crisis is an income stream: the hotel contracts, the consultancy fees, the NGO grants, the security staff, the interpreters, the lawyers. The longer the backlog, the larger the budget. Even the occasional “crackdown” is useful, since it keeps the system looking busy while guaranteeing more staff and more funds.

There is, of course, a humanitarian argument for protecting the genuinely persecuted. What we have instead is a vast administrative dependency machine. It feeds its clients, funds its servants, and weakens the taxpayers who sustain both. The asylum seeker receives guaranteed housing, weekly cash, and full medical care. The citizen who pays for it is told to endure waiting lists and charges.

The result is a society divided between the protected and the unprotected. The stranger is told that Britain owes him a living; the native is told that he owes the world his silence. The asylum system is not simply expensive. It is an act of demoralisation—an official statement that the British State does not belong to the British people.

Sources:
UK Government, Asylum Support: What you’ll get; NHS Business Services Authority, HC2 certificate guidance; NHS England, Prescription Charges 2025; NHS, Dental Services: Band Charges; Department for Work and Pensions, Universal Credit statistics; National Audit Office, Asylum and Protection Transformation Programme (2024); Financial Times, Britain’s asylum system still costing billions (2025); UK Parliament Commons Library, Asylum Support Expenditure (2024).