Will we miss Mahmood?

When Keir Starmer exchanges No 10 for the international speaking circuit, as he clearly will after the Makerfield by-election in June, there will be collateral damage. One victim is likely to be Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. All the would-be challengers for the top job, apart from appeasing the unions and buttering up the party activists, will be campaigning on a ticket of not being Keir. The political reality is that Shabana is far too close to the PM to have much chance of survival after any regime change. 

This is a pity for the country. It is also potentially a big problem for Labour. 

Despite being part of Keir’s comfortable coterie of lawyers, Mahmood is by far the most intelligent and independent-minded member of the group. Unlike the others, she has actually thought deeply about two problems — immigration and human rights. 

On immigration, she overtly embraces the idea that settlement in the UK must be a privilege and not something there almost for the taking. On that basis, in March this year she changed the rules to require review of refugee protection applications every 30 months, and the smart return of those no longer needing protection. She is also pressing further changes, notably increasing from five to ten years the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain and also requiring a demonstrable contribution to our life here; and she is consulting on possible legislation to scale back drastically the statutory duty to support asylum seekers with taxpayers’ money. 

On the subject of human rights, she is very different from her mentors Starmer and Attorney General Lord Hermer. Both regard the ECHR, and the expansive construction of it by the judges in Strasbourg, as close equivalents to Holy Writ and the interpretive authority of the Church respectively. Mahmood has in the last two years been highly critical of the application of human rights overreach. Furthermore, last June, and again last November, she overtly mooted unilateral UK legislation to cut back the ability of Article 8 of the Convention, which protects family and private life, to stymie the removal of undesirable foreigners. She clearly knew perfectly well that this might put the UK on a collision course with Strasbourg, but was prepared if necessary to take the risk.

None of this ought to be controversial. Nobody seriously denies that the administration has largely lost control of immigration and the ability to decide who we allow to stay here — and even if they do not say it, Ministers realise that the currently indefinite legal duty to house and maintain soi-disant asylum seekers represents a potential infinite balloon of debt that needs to be popped fast. On the human rights front, there was never much hope that much could be done about the runaway court in Strasbourg on the European front: the dilution of last week’s Chișinău Declaration from a serious demand for a rights rethink to a fairly milk-and-water mixture that says nothing enormously controversial makes that clear. In the end, the only escape is by unilateral action.

Until now, Labour politicians have, one suspects, quietly welcomed Mahmood’s outspokenness, in much the same way as Tory members were previously happy to indulge Dominic Raab’s maverick human rights scepticism. Coming from someone in a safe billet, she has expressed what many know but fear to say for fear of political death at the hands of an establishment only too happy to call out what it sees as pandering to Reform sentiments. 

Labour, if and when it quietly sidelines Mahmood, may just have killed its last chance of doing anything in 2029

But no longer so, almost certainly. Andy Burnham, Starmer’s challenger from the left, needs to keep the radical Corbynista wing of the party onside. He will not do this by seeming to condone a rightward move on immigration. And Wes Streeting, a would-be centrist dad and managerialist who makes even Keir Starmer look intellectually adventurous, will at all costs want to avoid doing anything at all that might offend the progressive establishment. The outlook is clear, if depressing. However essential they may be (and they are), whoever wins Mahmood’s plans on both immigration and human rights are destined for a drop kick into the long grass: indeed, even more disconcertingly, it is quite possible that the changes we already have will be reversed, the excuse being a need to steady the ship and return to business as usual.

Bad news for us indeed. But longer-term it could be much worse for Labour. Its difficulty is simple. Whatever its intellectuals think, the voters it needs to woo, the just-about-managing, the fed-up and those from the Red Wall, care not a straw for the ECHR but a great deal for immigration control and a great deal for removing obstacles to it. True, they despise Starmer: but they will be still angrier at a replacement who regards a return to business as usual as more important than dealing with their worries. Labour, if and when it quietly sidelines Mahmood, may just have killed its last chance of doing anything in 2029.