\n<\/p>\n
As a backbench opposition MP, Shabana Mahmood called for a \u2018general amnesty\u2019 of undocumented workers so they could \u2018regularise their status\u2019. Now that she is home secretary, she has proposed the \u2018most significant changes<\/a> to our asylum system in modern times\u2019, which will make life in the UK much harder for refugees.<\/p>\n Mahmood\u2019s critics \u2013 including some on the Labour back benches<\/a> \u2013 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<\/a> suggest the party is haemorrhaging more voters to the Greens and Lib Dems than to Reform.<\/p>\n But I wonder if this assessment, however true it may be of others in the Blue Labour faction, is a simplification of Mahmood\u2019s position. She is in a different situation from previous minority ethnic home secretaries who were accused of catering to far-right racist attitudes \u2013 Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly \u2013 not so much because she is Labour and Muslim as because they represented constituencies that were mostly white. In Mahmood\u2019s constituency, Birmingham Ladywood, 35 per cent<\/a> of people are Muslim and 78 per cent<\/a> are not white. What does she have to gain electorally from deploying a Reform-lite agenda?<\/p>\n The home secretary has packaged her reforms in anti-racist language. When she says that a broken asylum system has made Britain \u2018a less safe country for people who look like me\u2019, she is claiming to speak to her constituents\u2019 experiences as well as her own. Rebuking a Liberal Democrat MP who accused her of stoking racism, she said: \u2018Unlike the hon. Gentleman, unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a \u201cfucking P**i\u201d and told to \u201cgo back home.\u201d\u2019 She has called Nigel Farage \u2018worse than racist\u2019 and condemned the far-right \u2018Unite the Kingdom\u2019 protesters in September: \u2018In their view of this country,\u2019 she said, \u2018I have no place.\u2019<\/p>\n 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\u2019s looking for. It isn\u2019t 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\u2019s interesting, though, that among Mahmood\u2019s hardline reforms is a plan to extend a version of the \u2018Homes for Ukraine<\/a>\u2019 scheme to refugees from other countries, \u2018to give voluntary and community sector organisations a greater role in resettlement through named sponsorship\u2019.<\/p>\n The proposed reforms will not \u2018heal division\u2019, 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 \u2018tough on immigration\u2019, she may both keep her seat and get the keys to Number Ten. Sky News<\/a> has already crowned her \u2018the new hard woman of British politics\u2019 and a potential successor to Keir Starmer.<\/p>\n Like Wes Streeting<\/a>, a likely rival in any leadership contest, Mahmood saw her majority cut significantly at the last election<\/a> \u2013 from 28,582 to 3421 \u2013 by a challenge from an independent candidate, Akhmed Yakoob, who made Gaza a focus of his campaign. There\u2019s a photograph of Mahmood as a backbench opposition MP protesting against the 2014 Gaza War with a placard that says: \u2018Free Palestine. End Israeli Occupation.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n