A shameful Bill

The Labour leadership transition — it cannot really be called a contest or an election — has so far been defined by vagueness and generality.  Our presumptive new prime minister seems to have no real interest in any area of policy, and is instead fixated on promoting his own shallow but well-defined brand of personal retail politics. On Monday, he gave a set piece speech setting out his platform, half of which was empty LinkedIn-style bullshit, the like of which was described in Ned’s business column in the July issue of The Critic (“make place-based collaboration the new operating principle for UK plc”). The other half sounded as if a pub had offered a free pint of beer in return for a random policy suggestion from each of its punters on a Friday afternoon (Mr Burnham will work at least one day a week from an alternative 10 Downing Street in Manchester, etc).  He would take no questions.

His pitch appears to be aimed at those who basically liked Starmerism, but thought it was too ideologically rigorous. Yet while Burnham prepares the mood music for his government, others are busy jockeying for positions in the next cabinet. The main contenders for the role of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Wes Streeting and Ed Miliband, are working the corridors behind the scenes, but the battle for the Home Office is going on very much in public. The main contenders are the no-nonsense scourge of the human traffickers Shabana Mahmood, and the internationalist upholder of Labour’s tradition of human rights, Shabana Mahmood. 

On Tuesday, these two ciphers combined into their singularity of form to introduce the new Immigration and Asylum Bill — the contents of which had been the subject of leaks and rumour over the weekend. On Friday last week, I wrote elsewhere about leaks — presumably emanating from sources close to the more robust side of the Home Secretary’s personality — bemoaning the inability of the Home Office to remove from the country those who had no right to be here. We could therefore expect to see reforms in the new Bill designed to tighten up the appeals process in order to give the Home Office’s beleaguered lawyers a fighting chance — as indeed we have. 

The leaks revealed that the cases of around half of those who had been identified for deportation in 2024 had been written off by government lawyers, who thought them too likely to be overturned in the courts to be worth the bother. In many instances, this was due to the risk of challenge under either Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, or Theresa May’s Modern Slavery Act. My guess was that the leaks were an attempt to ward off those in Mr Burnham’s entourage who might be encouraging him to replace Mahmood with someone regarded as more liberal on immigration.  

All of this is quite nakedly political by the Home Secretary

However, within 24 hours, Mahmood had re-announced the most significant liberalisation of the UK’s border policy since Boris Johnson opened the flood gates in January 2021. This was after she initially announced it in November 2025 and nobody noticed. The forthcoming Bill would include a “safe and legal” refugee visa, in which employers, educational institutions and “community groups” will be able to sponsor select individuals to settle in Britain. This amounts to the additional visa stream for random men with no good reason to be in Britain that the Greens and the hard Left of the Labour party have been calling for for years. 

All of this is quite nakedly political by the Home Secretary. Having judged that her credentials as a tough opponent of illegal immigration had been sufficiently burnished, she was free to signal to Burnham’s handlers that she could play the game with the Labour backbenchers, and could be relied upon to help defend the party’s left flank against the Greens and other challengers when called upon. 

Much ink has been spilled by commentators on the Right defending Mahmood’s position as the last great hope of holding off the wave of settlement and citizenship applications that is about to break as the Boriswave cohort becomes eligible. Mahmood’s proposed extensions to the waiting periods offer the chance of pushing those applications back beyond the horizon of the next general election, at which point there is the possibility of changing the system entirely. Her proposals are loathed by the Left for precisely that reason, and she has absorbed a great deal of political flak — far more than her predecessor Yvette Cooper would have been willing to tolerate — in order to keep them in play. As such, Mahmood constitutes the last remaining bulwark in Labour’s credibility on Home Affairs. 

But we must be very careful not to confuse Ms Mahmood’s skills as a political operator — which are considerable — for a sincere commitment to whatever policy she claims to be backing at the time. She correctly judged that her willingness to take brickbats from the Left on human rights issues — unique on the Labour frontbench — made her politically indispensable to a prime minister who desperately needed some plausibility in the eyes of a public growing increasingly worked up about illegal immigration. She thinks she can repeat the trick in service of Andy Burnham, and she is probably right. Mahmood has a more instinctive understanding of where the electorate are on the subject of migration and citizenship than most of her colleagues, but this is because she is just a better politician than they are, rather than a matter of principle. 

Mahmood seems genuine in wanting to deal with the issue of illegal immigration as a matter of administrative hygiene and for the challenge it poses to the rule of law. She also seems to have a grasp of the short term financial hit that would come out of giving the Boriswave full recourse to public funds. For migration sceptics, this is about as good as it gets from a Labour politician nowadays, but we should be under no illusions about her being “one of us”. Last autumn, she was able to give the entire political Right the slip by provoking a row with the Left using a ridiculous proposal to force small boat migrants to hand over their jewelry to pay for their hotel stays. What should have been hostile opposition commentators spent half a week defending Mahmood’s honour against her leftist critics, and completely missed that she had snuck through far reaching liberalisations in her proposals, which we are now watching come to their dismal fruition. 

True to her word, the safe and legal routes were present when the Bill was introduced on Tuesday.  Anybody with a serious interest in migration and Home Affairs policy would know that this is a massive intervention that will have major demographic and financial implications in the medium to long term. The history of post-war migration in Britain demonstrates that an initial wave of migrants is often followed by far larger and more persistent flows of people, over which governments have far less discretion, as those original entrants settle and gain the ability to sponsor visas for family members, and future spouses for their children.  

Over decades between the 1960s and 1980s, successive British governments learned that tightening family and spousal visa entitlements was the key to controlling long term inflows. This lesson was subsequently overlooked by the New Labour governments in the late 1990s, and the Home Office has been dealing with the consequences ever since.  The new refugee channel creates another mechanism by which existing diaspora groups will be able to invite their kin from back home into the country. This has more or less been made explicit by the euphemistic reference to “community groups” in the legislation itself. The reference to the partnership with the UN’s refugee agency to select appropriate individuals for sponsorship offers little reassurance, given how broadly the agency’s definitions of what constitutes a refugee could potentially be applied. 

Furthermore, in a few years’ time, once the newly arrived refugees have acquired settled status, they will be able to sponsor family visas for their own family members back home. And then in the years ahead, their own children may do as many of the previous cohorts of immigrants to Britain have done, and look to their parents’ homelands for a spouse. As such, the whole process of chain migration will start over again. 

We can expect that NGOs will be likely to prioritise individuals from those nationalities most over-represented on small boat crossings. Given that the pathway is supposed to act as an alternative to arriving illegally, they will presumably have the government’s support in this. This will mean more arrivals from countries like Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. These nationalities are associated with some of the worst outcomes once they arrive in Britain, and are some of the most over-represented in criminal statistics and in British prisons.  To say that there is no appetite for an increase in the number of migrants from these places among British voters is a huge understatement. It is difficult to conceive of a policy more diametrically opposed to the interests and wishes of the British public than this. 

Given the political and financial constraints, this is a profoundly reckless and immoral Bill

This is not the kind of policy-making we would expect to see from a government that was seriously weighing either the long-term national interest, or even its medium electoral chances. It is not clear the extent to which the outgoing Prime Minister was politically invested in the policy — in any case it is rather unusual (though not unprecedented) for such a significant piece of legislation to be introduced during a de facto interregnum between prime ministers. The content of the Bill has far more to do with the current Home Secretary’s political triangulation between the public, the backbenches and the inhabitants of Number 10, past and future. These are myopic concerns when compared with the weight of the policy at hand — both in terms of the long-term future of Britain, but also in terms of the lives of the individuals who may be induced to travel here. It is the political equivalent of driving at 80 miles per hour with your eyes fixed on your own front bumper. 

Up until this point, Nigel Farage and Reform UK have remained unwilling to consider retroactive changes to the status of any individual who has acquired settled status in the country, as these refugees will on arrival. This Bill clearly stretches that point of principle to breaking point, and it is likely that Farage will come under pressure from his own supporters to confirm that he will reverse this policy should Reform come to power at the next election.  Retroactivity is considered a red line, because it dishonours promises that were made by the British Government to individual people, upon which they have built their lives. As such, it transcends the realm of policy and becomes a question of ethics. But surely it is morally incumbent on today’s decision-makers to consider whether the promises that they are making on behalf of future governments can or realistically will be honoured? Given the political and financial constraints, this is a profoundly reckless and immoral Bill.