In a week of kamikaze malfunction, Labour’s horizons beyond the tortuous helmsmanship of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are on the minds of MPs and ministers, who are worrying out loud that the present leadership constellation is likely to lead it to a resounding defeat in 2029.
That is not something that can be cured by stuffing discontent down the back of the Number 10 sofa or publicly scolding leakers. The chaotic briefings and counter-briefings were really symptoms of concern that the bosses are just not good enough.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary and self-proclaimed “Faithful” to the Government, emerged enhanced by behaving like a political grown-up in the squabbles. But another figure who managed to stay out of the internal meltdown, and is emerging as a favourite in the volatile Labour futures market, is the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Indeed, she is emerging as the voice of what a new kind of Labour politics might look like.
Mahmood’s forthright approach to asylum and immigration start from a very different place to many of her forebears on the centre-left. Labour has suffered badly in the Starmer era from an inability to couch its message in clear language. There is never much doubt about that with Mahmood. She eschews endlessly announcing complex policies and gradualist solutions for straight talk.
Crucially, she actually sounds like she actively shares the view she is putting across. Her predecessor Yvette Cooper evinced a slightly pained tone of having asylum and integration problems to deal with, but rarely a sense that she felt personally affronted by abuses of hospitality in the UK. Sensing that, Starmer opted for a new home secretary.
Mahmood makes explicit statements like: “I think that people rightly feel that the pace and the scale of what we’ve seen is out of control.” It’s also “very Shabana”, as one of her allies notes, to begin controversial sentences with: “I think that…” and lead the argument in personal terms.
Essentially, she is arguing for changes to terms for illegal immigrants already in Britain as well as deterring those set to cross the Channel in small boats – a shift Labour was slow or loath to make previously.
She leans very little on previous Labour philosophy, which aimed to play nicely with France and make side-deals with Germany to “smash the gangs”. The gangs have proved stubbornly resistant. So Mahmood has moved sharply toward deterrence rather than cooperation as the key to fixing the immigration and asylum debate for Labour. She plans to end the “automatic path” to settled status after a refugee has been in Britain for five years, and remove automatic rights to housing support and allowances.
The “Denmark” model she announced on Sunday makes leave to remain a probationary model and has clearer conditions attached, such as applicants having or acquiring no criminal record and limiting asylum to those who can very directly prove they are fleeing targetted persecution.
Mahmood’s own ethnic background, from a Kashmir-Pakistani family who settled in Birmingham from the 70s, makes it easier for her to adopt a parallel stentorian tone in Labour on this matter. It rests on her insistence that even many non-white voters are fed up with a chaotic system and want to address its impacts on stretched public services and housing which have driven a substantial move towards Reform among Labour voters.
Several countries with track records of being attractive to illegal migration are seeking to make themselves less so. Germany’s leader Friedrich Merz is in a tussle with the courts over turning back irregular migrants at the border, even when their place or origin is unclear. Denmark rejects over 90 per cent of refugee applications and places strict conditionality and ongoing review on indefinite leave to remain arrangements.
Unsurprisingly, this model works in terms of reducing numbers of incomers, which makes it a potential model for Mahmood. What she has yet to deal with is the bit that is harder to achieve: the integration part of the deal, and working out what the criteria would be for those immigrants or asylum claimants who would have something good to offer their host country. Supporting a society which does not only want to keep people out is not an unreasonable or mad leftie objective.
I was struck in a visit to the main Copenhagen arts museum by the work of a Turkish artist, long settled in Denmark. It is a sort of immigration video game, in which the viewer accompanies the harried main character through a snakes-and-ladders existence, attempting to find work, renew their paperwork, avoid welfare dependence, get their permissions to remain approved and somehow integrate his family into feeling part of the society. It feels forbidding – even as a game.
My sense, watching Mahmood powering her way through the arguments in a BBC interview, is that she sees a reshaping of her party’s narrative on what it means to be accepted into British life. Conditionality is at the heart of it: “giving back to their community” is one of the phrases she has used, but the definition is clear. Does (say) an immigrant who ends up as a hardworking A&E doctor or nurse have to give “more” back to the community than a UK-born colleague – or will just working and paying taxes here do?
Reducing the magnetic effect of a country’s welfare system is easier than achieving greater integration and ease of people living together – and the Danish model is less secure on that success metric. For one thing, because integration is a two-way street, the rules of acceptance need to be clear: many migrants to Denmark end up in greyzone economic activity, because employers are so worried about their legal status that they sift out even those who are compliant.
Secondly, if the aim is electoral (which it pretty clearly is in Labour’s case), the policies often buy time for a centre-left government but do not necessarily repel the further-right in the longer term. Denmark’s own “Iron Lady” PM, Mette Frederiksen, still has challengers from the right, who want even less immigration.
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In fairness, Mahmood looks like a better gatekeeper than her predecessors in the role. But the Danish example is a reminder that toughmindedness about what has gone wrong in managing immigration is a whole lot easier than managing the mood and expectations that follow.
So an outspoken, courageous Home Secretary is warning illegal migration is “tearing Britain apart”. If this determined minister is also to be an honest one, she needs to apply herself to how we go about keeping it together as well as the tough talk about whom we are keeping out.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico and host of the Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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