We’ve become grimly accustomed to people throwing around the phrase ‘far right’. But seeing it flung at Labour home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms has felt particularly barmy – a new low from the liberal-left midwits who we all hoped couldn’t sink any lower.
Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans to fix our ‘broken’ asylum system, has gone down exactly as you might expect
Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans to fix our ‘broken’ asylum system, have gone down exactly as you might expect. The Guardian has accused her of entering into a ‘damaging arms race with the far right’. ‘Straight out of the far-right playbook’, was one anonymous Labour MP’s assessment. ‘Lots of colleagues feel the same.’ Folkestone Labour MP and (whaddya know) former human-rights barrister Tony Vaughan served up this word salad on X: ‘The rhetoric around these reforms encourages the same culture of divisiveness that sees racism and abuse growing in our communities.’ So far, we’ve mercifully been spared an ‘emergency podcast’ from The Rest Is Politics. But I fear it won’t be long before we hear from them.
All this outrage, and for what? A series of measures that are aimed at getting a grip on a very real problem – an asylum system that has become a funnel for illegal migration and a ‘human rights’ framework that has become an implacable obstacle to deporting even provably dangerous criminals.
The twenty-year wait for asylum seekers to apply for permanent settlement. The thirty-month rolling reviews of asylum seekers’ status. The tightening up of how the European Convention on Human Rights is applied to asylum cases. You can agree or disagree with these policies. You can be sceptical as to whether they will work. (I tend to agree with the Tories’ Chris Philp, that anything short of leaving the ECHR and banning all illegal entrants from claiming asylum is ‘tinkering around the edges’.) But the idea that any of this is ‘far right’ is an insult.
It’s an insult to Mahmood, who is of British Pakistani heritage and clearly isn’t doing this out of a xenophobic desire to kick out all the foreigners. (Unless she’s really fallen out with her parents, who came to the UK in the late 1960s and 1970s.) She was on fire in the House of Commons yesterday as she cut Liberal Democrat Max Wilkinson down to size, after he accused her of ‘stoking division by using immoderate language’.
Not only, Mahmood fired back, is illegal immigration out of control, it also risks fuelling precisely the division and even hatred that do-gooders like Wilkinson claim to oppose, but will never likely be on the receiving end of. ‘Unlike him, unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a “fucking Paki” and told to go back home’, she said. Which shut him up.
It’s also an insult to the electorate, who are sick of being told that they are, if not racist, then at least badly misled. This is rich, given that ordinary people have grasped something about illegal migration that the great and good are clearly still struggling to digest. Namely, that if you allow tens of thousands of people to enter a country illegally – all while making it very difficult to deport them – a non-negligible proportion of them might (just might!) be wrong’uns. You know, people who aren’t fleeing war or pestilence but charges in other countries. Like the Afghan who claimed asylum in the UK while on the run from a murder trial in Serbia. He went on to stab a British man to death. Or the Moroccan asylum seeker who went on a Hamas-inspired stabbing spree in Hartlepool. It turned out he had been refused asylum in several European countries. But mention cases like these to Mahmood’s critics and they’ll just stare into the middle distance, mumbling something about the Second World War.
There’s been a lot of blather about Mahmood’s announcements being against ‘Labour values’, as unprogressive by definition. Personally, I can’t see anything remotely progressive about an ‘asylum’ system that is not only fuelling tensions and a sense of injustice, with some of the poorest communities in the country forced to bear the brunt of our broken borders, but has also become a risk to those caught up in it. (The first person who that Moroccan terrorist stabbed was his Iranian housemate, also an asylum seeker, who had tried to raise the alarm about him.) If Labour MPs (and their media chums) would rather a government that totally ignores such horrors, so as to allow them to continue to polish their virtue, then they deserve to never be near power again.
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