Labour's Shabana Mahmood MP, who is our Home Secretary, ramped up her hate-fuelled campaign against migrants yesterday.
Refugees will no longer get an automatic permanent status after five years. Instead, they will get temporary protection, which will be reviewed every 30 months, with a 20-year wait now being required before most can apply for permanent settlement. If their home country is deemed “safe”, protection can be withdrawn and they can be removed.
In addition, the statutory duty to provide housing and basic financial support to certain asylum seekers will be removed and replaced with discretionary support. Refugees' access to Universal Credit will also be tightened.
There will also be faster returns of failed asylum seekers, including families with children, and those who refuse a supposedly voluntary return will then lose support and be subject to enforced deportation, nonetheless.
There was also talk of seizing assets (such as valuables) from asylum seekers to help fund accommodation and removals.
And, in a significant change, Labour has said that the UK will remain in the European Convention on Human Rights, but will change how key provisions. In particular, Article 8 on the right to family life will be narrowed so that the term “family” is likely to mean immediate family only, making it harder to resist deportation on the basis of wider family ties in the UK.
What does this mean? Politically, this is a far-right approach that is hard to distinguish from what Reform and the Tories propose.
The two traditional leading parties in the UK, plus Reform, can all now be fairly described as profoundly xenophobic. Without exception, they are openly fuelling racism in this country.
That the Labour plan to seize assets has extraordinary echoes of Nazi policy within it is something that those proposing it were apparently either unaware of or were happy with.
And that all of this gave rise to hours of news coverage, far too much of which was itself xenophobic, is not, apparently, Labour's concern.
I am shocked, dismayed and profoundly ashamed of what is happening in this country.
The hatred of "the other" that the Tories, Reform and Labour all now actively promote is far removed from any reasonable ethical basis for a sustainable society.
And throughout all this, there appears to be almost no recognition that those we are talking about are people, with hopes, fears and straightforward terror that they can feel, just like us. They are - and no one seems to be saying this - people, after all. And no one flees their home, takes enormous risks, leaves everything behind with little or no hope of return, and risks getting in a small boat in the hope of crossing the English Channel unless they are desperate.
I am not saying there are no migrants who are seeking to exploit opportunity; to do so would be absurd. But the vast majority, I am sure, are not, which is why so many have been granted refugee status. In almost all these announcements, that is ignored.
And now, even those in the UK who have built lives, had children who only know this country as home, and who have become members of communities, will be forced to live in fear of deportation. They will remain "othered" for much of their lives, with their lives blighted by the officially sanctioned threat of exportation. This is callousness that is almost incomprehensible. And what it most definitely is not is refuge, because that provides hope, and this new policy is designed to remove that, which is why it is so callous, discriminatory and vile.
No MP who votes for this ever deserves to be voted for ever again.
No person who supports this can ever describe themselves as Christian, because what is happening is the exact opposite of all Christian ethics.
No person supporting this can even call themselves a decent human being, because when you demonise others, you cannot be.
And have no doubt that a government that can sink to this depth is capable of going further. As Tony Benn once said:
The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows how they would treat the rest of us if they could get away with it.
Worry.
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In further news the “hatred of the other” party Reform is rumoured to be considering payment of government pensions and benefits to be made conditional on having the British or English flag tattooed on your forehead!
You have nailed it. All those MPs who vote for this should never be voted for again. It is if the history of Germany in the 1930s had never happend and ignorance is fuelling barbarism.
I share your shame. The amount of news coverage is truly sickening.
“I am shocked, dismayed and profoundly ashamed of what is happening in this country.”
Amen to that.
Thank you for this post, which so well expresses my own feelings. The shock at what Labour are proposing, and doing is, for me, literally nauseating. Stella Creasy’s article in the Guardian yesterday offered a faint glimmer of hope that there may yet be a trace of morality left on their benches but I’m not optimistic that the leadership can be much influenced. The frustrating thing is that they are clearing the way for Reform to move into Downing Street without any coherent opposition of ideas. And Tony Benn was spot on.
It is shameful to see a Labour government implementing policies of performative cruelty like this.
It sounds like the government are going to unwind parts of the basic safety net erected by an earlier Labour government in the National Assistance Act 1948. (In the depths of post war austerity and amid the waves of migration and resettlement after the war, we could see then need then, but we can’t not?) We can expect to see homeless and destitute refugees on the streets if no one has a duty to protect them.
And it seems we are going to throw to out people who have been granted asylum and remained in the UK for 17, 18, 19 years. So you could come to the UK as an infant and be here for almost two decades and then be deported. You could be born and grow up here to refugee parents and be deported to a country you have never visited. (Compared to the leader of the opposition, who was born here to overseas parents just before we changed the citizenship laws, and I understand spent little time here until she was a teenager. I wonder what she thinks about that.) An 18 or 19 year old can spend almost the whole of their adult life in the UK but then be deported to a country where they know no one and which they can barely remember.
All to deal with confected controversy fuelled by the right wing press about 40,000 or so people each year crossing the channel in small boats. It is a tiny number for a very rich country of almost 70 million to deal with, but it has been blown up into a bigger and more pressing problem than climate change.
Much to agree with.
Thank you.
Zack Polanski describes the Labour government as a “government of cowards” whose action is unconscionable:-
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/a-government-of-cowards-zack-polanski-blasts-labour-as-asylum-backlash-grows_uk_691c0933e4b085766d7ec971
Clearly Polanski is prepared to be brave and be a rallying point for those who detest Neoliberalism/fascism. This appears to be working as there’s a surge in membership of the Green Party and mainly by a younger generation. Starting to look like the Labour Party will soon be a heap of dust!
This attempt to counter Reform by moving onto their territory and legitimizing their arguments is intrinsically futile. Reform will simply shift the battleground even further to the right. Time to rediscover basic moral principles and stick to them.
Much to agree with
@ Gerald Jepps
I don’t believe we’ll ever see much interest in moral principles with Keir Starmer he comes over to me as a cowardly and vindictive man. There are an awful lot of mangerial type people like this.
Tony Benn was so right. The question is, who will the Single Transferable Party come after when they get finished with these terrified, desperate people? That will be a frightening time for anyone who doesn’t “believe in Britain”, such as the Scottish and Welsh independence movements and the Irish unification movement.
Agreed
Your question is appropriate and your fear well placed.
Obviously they are terrorists. I expect all climate change protestors will also be reclassified as terrorists soon, and anyone in the public sector who goes on strike.
I’m horrified, sickened and terrified at what’s happening.
Dehumanisation is being normalised; it’s relentless amongst politicians and the media and infecting the wider population.
It has got to be stopped.
Interesting quote taken from a comment on National Preservation this morning.
……………I idly daydreamed an image of Nicholas Winton standing on his own in that That’s Life audience, because all the children escaping the horrors of war had bean booted out… it’s amazing that in less than 40 years, indeed less than 20, we’ve gone from being a nation that venerates those who saved lives of desperate people……………….
Its absolutely as spot on as its tragic
Full post at
https://www.national-preservation.com/threads/labour-its-ups-and-downs.735798/page-641
Post 12818
‘
Agreed
And how many of these wretched people, the migrants, been forced to leave their country of birth because of policies carried out by western Governments?
All because Mahmoods government refuses to acknowledge the real power it yields as regards money and investment in public services which is lacking and is the real reason for discontent.
This is nothing but a coarse strategy for political survival. It is that bad for Labour – Gary Gibbon said that Starmer’s government is prone to tripping up over its own shoelaces at the moment, even though they are wearing slip-ons.
A party whose leader came to his position through a campaign rooted in, and nourished almost entirely on lies, is capable of almost any barbarity.
I found myself thinking of John 8.44, where Jesus speaks about “the father of lies”.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208&version=NIVUK
Now, I appreciate that John 8, and the whole of John’s gospel, is very focussed on Jesus’s claims to divine sonship – but when I read the whole chapter, what struck me was how many contemporary political parallels it contained. His audience, whom he is very confrontational with, are “Jews who believed him”, but they accuse him of being a Samaritan (hated foreigner), they question his legitimacy (where is your father? v19) and they literally demonise him, they deny being slaves to anyone or anything – their arrogance and hubris is staggering. By the end of the chapter, some are convinced by his words, but the rest try to stone him. They make great play of their Abrahamic descent (superior ethnic purity) and religious righteousness (weaponising a divisive interpretation of religion).
But that cuts no ice with Jesus.
He accuses them of hypocrisy, of lying dishonesty, of conspiracy to murder, and of not knowing God at all. (It’s chapters like John 8 that have led apologists to say Jesus is either mad, bad or God – but that debate can be had elsewhere).
What I want to do with this chapter is to use it to illustrate the very stark and binary moral choice we face in politics right now. To use theological language, it is either heaven or hell, God or the devil, or – for the agnostics and atheists in this co-belligerent “political economy coalition” that Richard has assembled (that includes me as a serious believing follower of Jesus, glad to be here) – as stark a division between right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral, as it is possible to get, and certainly, as stark a one as I have seen in my lifetime of 7 decades.
To Labour MPs – I say, now is the time to choose. Fudge this and you are FINISHED.
Starmer and his dark evil McTeam have to GO, and your party has to rediscover its heart. NOW.
Thanks
Labour deserve whatever they have coming. Has there even been a more spiteful Labour government? They really should be ashamed of themselves for the sucking up to the Reform agenda. It won’t end well for them.
They are facilitating fascism via the backdoor, until Reform get the keys to the front.
The ruling Labour faction are showing their weakness by trying to parasitise Reform and the Tories and talking up the crisis – ‘tearing the country apart’ and glorying in their performative cruelty.
There was an interesting piece of polling highlighted by Christina Pagel showing how ‘public concern’ with immigration was much more volatile than concern with the health service or the standard of living and the economy.
The NHS and cost of living are always near the top of the list, but the concern with migration seems to go up and down in response to what people are told – and they have been told by the BBC’s blanket coverage of migrants and asylum seekers over the last year. that this is the only thing that matters. It would be interesting to see how much time of R4 news programmes of the last year has been devoted to migration and asylum seekers compared to the NHS, and cost of living and people not being able to afford the basics. My impression is that its probably 70% migration and 30% the other two.
But blaming the ‘other’ for all our ills has worked many times through history, and has led to catastrophe.
Yesterday I watched David Frost’s interview with Sir Oswald Mosley from the 1960s. I thought David Frost handled him very firmly. He got Oswald to open up about the ideology that had governed his actions of the 1930. I can say with full confidence that in the 1930s he was firmly anti-conservative, pro-isolation, anti-war, pro-empire, anti-capitalist and anti-communism. I believe these to be contradictory positions and it should be no surprise to us that his popularity suffered as a result. He went from being seen as a future prime minister to someone who sabotaged their own future and joined a movement which he had previously see denounced as buffoons. What troubled me more was the question, what is the labour party today? They do not say. It looks like they are the buffoons.
I see this government as becoming, or having become, the antithesis of a caring government. In showing their true colours to migrants, I have to wonder if they care about any normal person, UK born and bred, and whether the assistance would be there for them.
In part, I can already answer this by their treatment of the NHS and social care – it hardly supportive, is it? They just aren’t the labour party I knew back in the 60s and 70s. They aren’t for the people, but for finance.
A major bank in difficulties? Likely to be rescued.
Individual are left to go hang.
It is so obvious that they are picking their policies from a different playbook; we need to vote for those that show they care – just beware of false prophets and those with fascist tendencies.
A humane response to today’s asylum pressures requires far more than tougher border controls. The drivers of displacement – conflict, repression, economic collapse and climate stress – are now so deep and widespread that only a coordinated international effort, on the scale of post-war reconstruction, can make a lasting difference. The most realistic path would begin with a UN-led summit that reframes migration as a shared development and security challenge rather than an immigration problem for individual states. This could launch a multi-year recovery fund, jointly financed by major donor nations and regional partners, to support stabilisation, governance reform, economic recovery and climate adaptation in high-departure countries.
The essential lessons from past successes are clear: predictable investment; strong local ownership; early peacebuilding; and parallel creation of safe, legal routes that reduce the power of smugglers. Regional organisations, civil society and diaspora groups would need to be fully involved to give the programme legitimacy and to ensure that interventions are matched to local realities. This approach is politically difficult and expensive, but it offers the only credible alternative to the increasingly punitive, fear-driven measures emerging in parts of Europe. Without such a strategy, the pressures that fuel hostile domestic politics will only intensify.
Much to agree with
Starmer and his team press the self-destruct button yet again. These moves on immigration could only be supported by very right wing Labour MPs and must further motivate those agitating in the Labour Party for a change of leadership. If Polly Toynbee has her way (per today’s Guardian) and there is no change of leadership soon, then the position of many non-far right Labour MPs will become untenable. According to Zack some are already considering resigning from the LP. Will this be the last straw? Waiting for the people’s verdict at next May’s elections seems cowardly – better to make a principled stand sooner rather than later if they’ve got any principles.
I was down in London last night and I watched Newsnight with Green Party Leader, Zack Polanski, pitted against an aggressive Reform representative angrily ranting about ‘rapist’ migrants with the sham excuse of “protecting our women and girls”. Why didn’t Victoria Derbyshire demand a retraction of such a blatantly inflammatory racist slur? No, it was left to Polanski to calmly challenge the warped classification of all migrants as rapists. While I can understand how past trauma might result in serious mental disturbance and aberrant behavior in a few highly-publicized cases, migrants cannot all collectively be shunned as rapists.
To be clear the two recent cases violated British law, but neither of the migrants were accused or charged with rape. One of these men made several inappropriate attempts to kiss a woman and a young girl. The second case involved indecent exposure. Both men were rapidly brought to trial, charged, convicted and scheduled for deportation. Meanwhile a powerful foreign leader, credibly charged with sexual assault in the US, and who openly boasted of “grabing women by the pussy”, was recently privilaged to receive a second state visit to the UK!
The second presentation on yesterdays Newsnight was with a woman who had been very brutally raped, but had waited years for justice while her rapist remained dangerously at large out on bail. Prepared to forgo her anonymity, this courageous woman was just one of the many victims of home grown sexual predators here in the UK, many of whom will never be punished for their crime due to court backlogs. Why is the sexual deviance of a foreign offender rapidly prioratized ahead of brutal rape cases that persistantly endanger women and girls in the UK?
Where is the outcry from Reform and the Far Right for the protection of our women and girls when they are assaulted by sexual predators who are not from the migrant community? I was annoyed when Victoria Derbyshire failed to correct the Reform rant demonizing all migrants as rapists. Why was there no comparison made between the immediate justice meted out to two migrant offenders while domestic rapists are so very rarely punished? The sheer hypocrisy was never more blatantly exposed than on that BBC Newsnight presentation last night.
Thank you
Might the current indicated policy on immigration matters indicate a serious lack of reseach, analyrical thinking and planning by the Labour Party before coming to expected power?
Yes
My horror, sadness, disgust, and fear for the future has hit a new rock bottom. After watching “Imagine” on your blog yesterday I got to thinking a lot about school history lessons from the mid 60’s with our Polish Jewish English lit teacher. As well as teaching English lit Miss Gazdik spent a lot of time teaching us about nazi atrocities, and showing us film of concentration camps. To us as impressionable young teenagers it was beyond horrific and it has all stayed with me and been a driving part of my politics and moral values. Perhaps people are forgetting too quickly.
Another thought came to me, was the nazi preoccupation of how Jewish you had to be to be Jewish enough to be transported. Where would that leave the children born in UK to refugees when there parents were suddenly 19 years later deemed unsuitable to stay ?
And how far back do you go to define British /English. If an extremo reformite met me what would they think ? I am white, I was born in UK, but my Australian mother was of Irish potato famine extraction, and my father’s family migrants in very late 19th century, of French and Dutch extraction , with a touch of Indian from Calcutta in 1824, as the family spent about 200 years (doing vile things probably!) in Molucca Islands, India, and China. Would I need the aforementioned union jack tattooed on my forehead ?
Thank you.
Comment appreciated.
Shameful and hard to believe. Sanctuary is a very old tradition, asylum linked to it. Protection, mercy and care are what it entails, not fear and the stress of endless reviews. Many responses I agree with above.
I have heard more than one Brit who I would otherwise have considered kindly, humane etc state that the only reason all these migrants come to Britain is for the welfare payments. I think like you that most people do not readily abandon their homeland for a dangerous uncertain future unless there are good reasons for them to make these super risky decisions. We also have to ask ourselves what “the west” has done to contribute to the many horrible lives being experienced by potential migrants, driving them to leave their countries. A couple of examples; before NAFTA was implemented in the US there were no migrant line ups at its southern border. Trade policy that allowed subsidized US agricultural products across into Mexico and other south/central American countries undercut local farmers driving them from the land. I believe historically US imports of rice into Haiti was the beginning of that destabilization, Trumps sanctions against Venezuela that have reportedly reduced their economy to depression levels has driven many to leave the country for the US as it ironically seems the only hope. Wealthy countries need to recognize their culpability and instead of punishing the migrants ask themselves how they can stop causing the destabilization that drives migration.
Thanks
Many good comments on your excellent piece already, but I feel compelled to add mine, because I have never been so angered and depressed by any previously announced government policy, irrespective of the party in power. There is an appalling level of cruelty hard-wired into this so-called Labour Party, coupled with a sanctimonious hypocrisy that is unbearable. Note that Mahmood claimed it to be her “moral duty” to reform asylum and immigration, in much the same way that Starmer claimed a “moral duty” to reform welfare benefits, before attempting to punch down on disabled people. They really are a vile bunch.
Here in Germany, following Brexit I was frequently asked “what’s going on over there, are they mad?” I’m now getting asked the same question. Yes Germany does have a problem with the AfD in 4 out of 5 of the former East Germany states (where there aren’t any immigrants) but it’s nothing what’s happening in the UK
Agreed
As many will have noticed John Crace was in excellent form yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/17/shabana-mahmood-puts-the-signs-up-britain-is-full-no-blacks-no-dogs-no-irish
It looks like our only hope may very well be the courts – much like in apartheid era South Africa – I cannot imagine that this government of human rights lawyers has actually considered whether what they propose would be lawful.
Agreed: he was.