On Friday, we dined at an Oxford college. It was all very graceful and civilised. Unfortunately, a typhoon of fury about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was building up inside me. I needed to discharge the ire.
Thankfully, on hand were a black Peer and a British Sri Lankan ex-journalist. “Remember,” the latter rued, “we have Zia Yusuf.” The Reform radical wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)-like immigration enforcers in the UK.
We, black and Asian activists, fought ceaselessly to get people of colour into Parliament. The first four elected after the Second World War were Bernie Grant, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz in 1987. Abbott could be abrasive; more seriously, Vaz was caught up in a sex scandal in 2016. But they all stood up for equality and migrant rights.
Too many of those who came after them, however, turned out to be self-servers. Or, like former prime minister Rishi Sunak, pathetically naïve. In August 2022, he promised Tory voters he would reroute public funds from inner-city areas into the leafy suburbs.
I went to some of those suburbs after his resignation. Racism spilled out of the mouths of many: “This is a white country”; “Why should an Indian lead us?”; and so on. Does he now see that for xenophobic Brits, his money and luxurious life are inconsequential? In the race game, he will always be one of them, not one of us. Yusuf will learn that too, one day.
Over the Tory years, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman were appointed Home Secretary – the latter, incredibly, twice. And Kemi Badenoch leads the Conservatives. Their anti-migrant ravings and policy plans show they will do anything to keep Britain “British”. Now Mahmood is being performatively hard on incomers.
They tell us it is to improve race relations and social cohesion, to placate implacable white “patriots” over and over, to create a happy, clappy, multiracial Britain. Say, do, fail, repeat. It’s gone on since the fifties. But now feels nastier and grubbier than ever before. The message from the Gorton and Denton by-election, won by the Green Party, has not got through to Mahmood, the daughter of migrants from Mirpur, Pakistan.
She has morphed from a liberal into a mini-despot. This week, a young Afghan woman who refused a forced marriage, studied in private and got a place at two British universities, was kept out of the UK because Mahmood’s obscene new rules barring people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan from applying for study visas. Interestingly, she leaves well alone the horrendous immigration scam used by many Mirpuri men whereby they marry young, British-born Mirpuri women – who have no say in the matter – and come over. Though numbers have fallen over the decades, arranged marriage migration still goes on among Mirpuris.
Mahmood now plans to deny those with indefinite leave to remain settled status for 10 years. She is emulating Denmark, once an open society, now openly nativist. Family reunification is not allowed. The rule will apply retrospectively. Cattle would be more sympathetically treated than undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and those who have, after a gruelling process, recently acquired the right to remain.
I have no problem with the Home Office insisting on migrants learning English. This is the key to integration and success. But other proposals and Mahmood’s recycled Reform messages about migrants straining services are troubling liberals and internationalists, including around a 100 Labour MPs.
“You don’t win back public confidence in the asylum system by threatening to forcibly remove refugees who have lived here lawfully for 15 or 20 years,” one such MP, Tony Vaughan, told the Guardian. “That just breeds insecurity and fractured communities.” Another MP accused Mahmood of mimicking Trump and yet another warned of another Windrush-style scandal. The Law Society has come out against the proposals. Who cares about the bleeding hearts? She means to press ahead.
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What happens to such politicians of colour? What is the state of their psychological hinterland? Justice Secretary David Lammy has gone from being a principled man to a “pragmatist” who backs Starmer’s appalling curtailment of human rights. Former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, now a member of Reform, uses his immigrant story while remaining terribly entitled. Ethnic minority MPs elected in the last election keep their heads down and follow the leader. Maybe we made the wrong call. Power corrupts. Breaking through glass ceilings would never change that.
But then I think of Labour’s Dawn Butler, who keeps the socialist flame burning in spite of the racism she is subjected to. And Nus Ghani, a Tory, who got parliament to pass a law against the use of Uyghur forced labour in UK business supply chains. And Clive Lewis, one of Labour’s most principled and effective MPs. And Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who has held on to his political ideals, year after year, whilst abominable slurs and fake accusations rain down on him. You can stay principled.
Ethnic minority MPs backing Mahmood will get the prizes and prestige they crave. But by dashing the hopes of desperate arrivals and disdaining international obligations, they have harmed themselves and our nation.
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