“I’m sorry to find that the Reform Party is living rent-free in so many people’s heads,” Shabana Mahmood told the Commons. “I can assure you, it’s living nowhere near mine.” Much of what the new Home Secretary said on Monday evening was questionable, but I hope she’ll forgive us for noting that this line was total rubbish.
Mahmood had announced an awful lot: powers to stop payments to asylum seekers who have significant resources, plans to tighten the way the European Convention on Human Rights is applied, new legal routes to claim sanctuary and a great deal else besides. But the message was a painfully familiar one: Nigel Farage is right, don’t vote for him.
Farage, of course, wasn’t present. He is paid far more than his pittance of an MP’s salary to present an evening TV show on the Reform Party’s emotional support channel, GB News. But he didn’t need to be there. He was cited regularly by MPs to the left of Mahmood who accused her of aping his policies, and those of Tommy Robinson.
It was hard to imagine we’d have been there without him
Mahmood became quite angry whenever the latter was mentioned, pointing out that he doesn’t even believe her to be British. As for the influence of Farage, she denied it, but it was hard to imagine we’d have been there without him.
“The world has changed and our asylum system has not changed with it,” she said, setting out a package that was, according to your taste, cruel or ineffective. “The system feels out of control and unfair. It feels that way because it is.”
In purely parliamentary terms, she gave a confident, fiery performance. Failure to reduce illegal immigration would, she warned “draw more people down a path that starts with anger and ends with hatred.” In other words, it you don’t like the Home Office when she’s in charge, think about how you’ll like it when Lee Anderson is running the shop. “It is our job as a Labour government to unite where there is division,” Mahmood said, to which one could only reply that the best place to start might be within the Cabinet.
She gave no quarter to those who suggested she was encouraging racism. “I am the one who is regularly called a fucking Paki and told to go back home,” she said, earning a rebuke for her language from Deputy Speaker Caroline Nokes.
We had expected more pushback from Labour MPs, and it was certainly there, but there was plenty of support, too. That was partly because the opening of legal routes gave the instinctively loyal ones something to welcome, and partly because, listening to them, a lot of them know their voters are angry about this.
Mahmood retreated from some of the fruitier reports overnight: officials won’t be confiscating people’s jewellery, she said, several times, citing instead an asylum seeker who was living in supported accommodation while driving an Audi. She struggled a bit more when pressed by Labour’s Stella Creasy about plans to deport families.
Kemi Badenoch had decided, once again, to shove a Shadow Cabinet member aside and respond to the statement herself. This is a bold strategy from someone who doesn’t even understand her own party’s immigration policy, but the Conservative leader for once made a decent fist of it. Her strategy of welcoming the proposals and urging the government to go further is certainly the right one for encouraging Labour splits. “I urge her to put party politics aside,” Badenoch said, which got one of the biggest laughs of the evening.
Indeed the main Tory complaint, one raised several times, was that the government has abandoned the plan to send people to Rwanda. Somewhere, someone is writing a PhD on the weird articles of faith the Conservative Party picked up over the last few years: not just “Brexit was a good idea, well-executed” but also “the Rwanda plan would have worked if we’d just given it another few weeks.”
Other Tories had their own supportive contributions. Karen Bradley suggested that asylum seekers be made to pay back the cost of their support, creating the exciting prospect of taking modern slavery in-house. Nick Timothy wanted the government to publish data on the fiscal contribution of “different profiles of migrants”, presumably because the problem with British racism is that it’s insufficiently data-driven.
Zarah Sultana called the Home Secretary a fascist, and some MPs still in the Labour Party accused her of pandering to the worst in British politics, but Mahmood was defiant. “This system is badly broken,” she said repeatedly. “I do not care what other parties are saying on this matter or what other politicians are saying.” But she does.
