Shabana Mahmood’s Triangulations

As a backbench opposition MP, Shabana Mahmood called for a ‘general amnesty’ of undocumented workers so they could ‘regularise their status’. Now that she is home secretary, she has proposed the ‘most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times’, which will make life in the UK much harder for refugees.

Mahmood’s critics – including some on the Labour back benches – accuse her of pandering to the far right, of trying to out-Reform Reform in a doomed effort to stop Labour tanking in the polls, even though data suggest the party is haemorrhaging more voters to the Greens and Lib Dems than to Reform.

But I wonder if this assessment, however true it may be of others in the Blue Labour faction, is a simplification of Mahmood’s position. She is in a different situation from previous minority ethnic home secretaries who were accused of catering to far-right racist attitudes – Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly – not so much because she is Labour and Muslim as because they represented constituencies that were mostly white. In Mahmood’s constituency, Birmingham Ladywood, 35 per cent of people are Muslim and 78 per cent are not white. What does she have to gain electorally from deploying a Reform-lite agenda?

The home secretary has packaged her reforms in anti-racist language. When she says that a broken asylum system has made Britain ‘a less safe country for people who look like me’, she is claiming to speak to her constituents’ experiences as well as her own. Rebuking a Liberal Democrat MP who accused her of stoking racism, she said: ‘Unlike the hon. Gentleman, unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a “fucking P**i” and told to “go back home.”’ She has called Nigel Farage ‘worse than racist’ and condemned the far-right ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protesters in September: ‘In their view of this country,’ she said, ‘I have no place.’

Mahmood is explicitly linking the safety of ethnic minorities in Britain to a more punitive asylum system, conscripting us in her defence of the national borders: forget any solidarity with the global dispossessed, think of these reforms as a bulwark against racism at home. She may well find some of the support she’s looking for. It isn’t unusual for migrant descendant groups to support more stringent border controls (there was a large swing towards Trump among Hispanic voters in the US in 2024, even if it has since reversed). It’s interesting, though, that among Mahmood’s hardline reforms is a plan to extend a version of the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme to refugees from other countries, ‘to give voluntary and community sector organisations a greater role in resettlement through named sponsorship’.

The proposed reforms will not ‘heal division’, which Mahmood surely knows as well as anyone. They will never go far enough for the far right, even if Britain ends up leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. But if Mahmood can successfully triangulate between meeting the concerns of her ethnic minority constituents and proving that she has the mettle to be ‘tough on immigration’, she may both keep her seat and get the keys to Number Ten. Sky News has already crowned her ‘the new hard woman of British politics’ and a potential successor to Keir Starmer.

Like Wes Streeting, a likely rival in any leadership contest, Mahmood saw her majority cut significantly at the last election – from 28,582 to 3421 – by a challenge from an independent candidate, Akhmed Yakoob, who made Gaza a focus of his campaign. There’s a photograph of Mahmood as a backbench opposition MP protesting against the 2014 Gaza War with a placard that says: ‘Free Palestine. End Israeli Occupation.’ She abstained from the vote to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation earlier this year and since becoming home secretary in September shows no sign of lifting the ban. Voters may not easily forgive her for what they see as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause, but her hope must be that by 2029 she will have consolidated her vision of community safety.

Mahmood wrote in the Guardian a few days ago that ‘dark forces are stirring up anger in this country, and seeking to turn that anger into hate.’ A Home Office spokesperson meanwhile has said: ‘If we don’t solve the crisis at our border, dark forces will follow.’ That is a decidedly more ambiguous form of words than Mahmood’s: are the ‘dark forces’ the threat of fascism or migrant bogeymen? However successful Mahmood’s triangulation may be for now, she has to know that the narrative around asylum is out of her control. Reform’s response to her proposals this week was to invite her to join the party. But soon enough they will move further to the right, dragging Labour policy behind them.