Will Labour MPs accept Mahmood’s asylum gamble?

UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced radical moves to restrict asylum-seeker numbers. Picture: AFP.

Here’s a sentence about British politics that has no right to exist: the Labour MP for Folkestone has criticised the Home Secretary’s plans for an asylum clampdown.

First: the Labour MP for Folkestone? Folkestone in Kent? That true-blue seat held for decades by Michael Howard, home secretary then leader of the Conservative Party?

Such was Sir Keir Starmer’s landslide, and the haste with which Labour decided to act like an embattled minority, that it is easy to forget his party won such places.

But second: the MP for Folkestone & Hythe is criticising proposals for an asylum clampdown? Folkestone, on the Kent coast? Do they have a political death wish?

That was certainly what some in government thought when Tony Vaughan, the backbencher in question, opened fire on Shabana Mahmood on Sunday evening.

The Home Secretary, taking her cues from the Danish Social Democrats and Donald Trump’s White House, had spent the day explaining that asylum-seekers would be forced to wait 20 years before applying for permanent settlement, and that some refugees would be deported once their home countries were deemed safe.

Not long after her tour of the broadcast studios, Vaughan – like the Prime Minister, a Doughty Street human rights silk – gave his verdict. It was sharply put.

“The Prime Minister said in September that we are at a fork in the road. These asylum proposals suggest we have taken the wrong turning. The idea that recognised refugees need to be deported is wrong. We absolutely need immigration controls. And where those controls decide to grant asylum, we should welcome and integrate, not create perpetual limbo and alienation.”

Insisting that Mahmood’s plans bore little resemblance to Denmark’s successful reforms and would not work, he added: “The rhetoric around these reforms encourages the same culture of divisiveness that sees racism and abuse growing in our communities … the government must think again on this.”

Given Vaughan’s background in immigration law, it is hardly surprising that he should take this view, no matter the geography. But it is significant that an MP elected only last year feels empowered to say so.

“He’s certainly not what the media would call a ‘usual suspect’,” John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor and hard-left rebel, said of Vaughan. “I suspect he is reflecting here what many in the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party) feel.” For Mahmood and Sir Keir, there is the fatal risk.

Labour MPs have proven quite capable of mutiny. It happened when Liz Kendall, then work and pensions secretary, attempted to cut the welfare bill over the summer. Is Mahmood next?

In the Home Office there is cautious optimism. Some dissent is inevitable: such is government and such is trying to convince a party of the centre-left to address the realpolitik of the issue over which Nigel Farage now claims a political monopoly. “They may not love it,” a source close to Mahmood said, “but they understand that this is an election-defining thing.”

Mahmood is courting Labour’s MPs carefully. The Home Secretary has a new special adviser, Keir Cozens, who was until last year secretary of the PLP. He has spent weeks in conversation with backbenchers. Mahmood’s ministers spent much of the weekend hitting the phones too.

Were you to conceive of a policy with the aim of making the average Labour backbencher uncomfortable, it would be this one. They nonetheless know that many of their voters, most voters, actually, according to opinion polls, are unhappy with the status quo and want inward migration reduced and the small boats stopped.

There are exceptions, of course, on the left and soft left, including the four MPs who have only just had the whip reinstated after their suspension in July. So too MPs in London, and other cities where Zack Polanski’s insurgent Greens are on the march. The discontented could be in the dozens – more than 16 had signalled opposition even before Mahmood had finished addressing the Commons on Monday.

Already there are concerted attempts to reassure them.

And as the Home Secretary grapples with questions of migration and numbers, this, for now, is the one that matters most: Are there enough MPs to overrule the wishes of the silent, begrudging majority on which her success is riding? Mahmood and her ministers think not.

The Times