Shabana Mahmood, Britain's Home Secretary, delivers her keynote speech at the UK Labour Party annual conference in Liverpool, in September. Photo / Chris J. Ratcliffe, Bloomberg, via The Washington Post
Shortly after Prime Minister Keir Starmer appointed Shabana Mahmood as Britain’s Home Secretary in September, she set out her stall to a packed room at the Labour Party’s annual conference.
In the audience was her father, who wept as the 45-year-old recalled a childhood incident in which the family - which has Pakistani-Muslim heritage - had been hounded out of a local park with racist slurs.
When she went on to say she wanted to reach out to right-wing voters “written off” as “Muslim-haters” and take seriously their concerns around immigration, his was the loudest applause.
It’s an episode which underlines the contradictions that have been central to Mahmood’s appeal, at a time when her colleagues are quietly starting to consider life after Starmer.
She is a child of immigrants who’s pushed her party towards a more hard-line stance on immigration.
A former barrister who wants to limit the way human rights law is used to stop deportations.
After she chastised those responsible for accidentally uncorking conjecture about who might replace the historically unpopular prime minister, colleagues were quick to assume she might be among the hopefuls.
Mahmood’s decision to take on one of the toughest jobs in British politics has only fuelled speculation that she has leadership ambitions.
Her role puts her in the frontline of the Government’s battle against irregular immigration, something which hastened the downfall of several predecessors.
It also puts her on the frontline of the Government’s fight against Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party which, despite having only five MPs in Parliament, has helped turn her beat into the most salient in British politics.
Critics say the reforms she announced to the asylum system this week aren’t substantially different from those put in train by her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, ahead of September’s reshuffle.
Mahmood’s edge comes from sounding like she really means it.
In her last role as justice secretary, she controversially said she’d consider chemical castration for sex offenders.
That helped dispel the hangover of the more left-leaning views the Home Secretary once held. As recently as 2014, she was attending Palestine solidarity events and calling for supermarkets to stop selling goods from Israeli settlements.
When asked about her leadership ambitions on Monday, Mahmood said she had no time for “tittle tattle.”
Yet her allies have stoked the speculation.
Briefings to the media over the weekend that her plans to reform the asylum system were ‘Mahmoodian’, and that failing to get in line could open the door to a darker style of anti-migrant politics, have led some within her party to accuse her of hubris.
Others believe Mahmood is aligning the traditionally left-wing Labour’s politics too closely with those of Farage’s anti-immigration Reform.
After Richard Tice, Farage’s deputy, joked at a press conference on Tuesday that the Home Secretary sounded like she was putting in an application to join Reform, one backbench Labour MP who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity said that it was getting harder every day to defend the party’s policies.
In an impassioned appearance in front of the UK’s House of Commons, Mahmood fought back.
“I wish I had the privilege of walking around this country and not seeing the division that the issue of migration and the asylum system is creating,” she said, quoting racist profanities she receives in an exchange that drew censure from the deputy speaker of the house.
She added: “It is incumbent on all members of Parliament to acknowledge how badly broken the system is”.
The Home Secretary, who grew up in Birmingham as one of four siblings, is gambling her political future on convincing the country she can fix it.
Although her predecessor Cooper kicked off the process by hiking the rate of deportations and agreeing a “one in, one out” returns deal with France, Mahmood has amped up the rhetoric.
On Tuesday, she announced sweeping changes to the asylum system which would see refugees sent back to their home countries once they could be deemed “safe”.
While levels of legal immigration have fallen since last year’s election, Labour has failed to keep its manifesto pledge of bringing down the number of irregular migrants arriving across the English Channel on small boats.
The first six months of this year saw record levels of small-boat arrivals for the period, coinciding with when polling shows voters flocking to Reform.
Labour is confident the party is in line with public opinion, with polling from More In Common showing overwhelming support for tougher asylum policy.
The Labour MP and a critic of Mahmood’s announcement Cat Eccles told Times Radio yesterday that the policies were trying to “appease the electorate”.
That’s won Mahmood support with the right of her party. But others have concerns.
Tony Vaughan, a human rights barrister who now represents the coastal constituency of Folkestone, Hythe & Romney Marsh for Labour, said his party’s plan to deport recognised refugees showed it had taken a “wrong turning”.
Neil Duncan-Jordan, an MP on the left of the Labour party who has previously rebelled over policies such as the decision to cut welfare payments, said the Government was failing to recognise the loss of votes on the left to rivals such as the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats.
“My taxi driver this morning told me that after 20 years in this country he no longer felt welcome,” Duncan-Jordan said.
“Kicking out recognised asylum seekers doesn’t speak to any of our values. It hardens us as a nation and portrays Britain as a country like its weather - cold and uninviting.”
- With assistance from Will Standring.
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