The central aim of this book is to examine the role and figure of the refugee as situated in British refugee policy. It analyses the positionality of the refugee and how the politics of hospitality can be viewed as a defining feature of the British refugee system, one where fear and suspicion of the other are paramount, with hospitality defined and redefined against the refugee. This chapter analyses how hospitality towards the refugee is facilitated through the use of labelling. Within the international refugee regime, as Aristide Zolberg (cited in Ludwig 2013: 6) reminds us, there is a very ‘precise’ definition of a refugee that is bound in law, ‘the term “refugee” has acquired a diffuse meaning in ordinary parlance’. Through what I term the politics of labelling there emerges a hierarchy that situates the label of refugee at the pinnacle, followed, in descending order, by the labels of asylum seeker, bogus asylum seeker, illegal immigrant, economic migrant, and so on. By failing to use the label of refugee, British governments have been able to successfully steer debates and create suspicion, tension and reduced sympathy towards this group within society. In 1993, Lord Jakobovits identified this practice of re-labelling refugees, during a House of Lords debate in March 1993 (HL Deb 11 March 1993, vol. 543, col. 1145). He commented, ‘I cannot quite understand why the inelegant and perhaps supercilious term “asylum seeker” should have replaced the simpler word “refugee” which might evoke more sympathy.’ Indeed, what Lord Jakobovits highlighted here is the politics and fracturing of language that underlies British refugee policy. By failing to employ the label of refugee, there then emerges the possibility to frame the individual as an abusive, bogus, or failed asylum seeker, something that would not be possible with the label of refugee. You either are or are not a refugee, an individual with refugee status, or an individual seeking to attain refugee status as an international right conferred within the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees Article 1A.(2) (1951) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 14.(1) (1948). The label of asylum seeker or migrant, on the other hand, can fall into an array of subsequently inferior categorisations and strategies of identification that further remove the individual from the prized refugee label, thus politically destabilising and undermining the label altogether.