Over the past couple of weeks, Shabana Mahmood has launched not only her new asylum crackdown policy, but also her “story”. The two are inseparable: her story justifies the crackdown. It moralises the crackdown. And it silences criticism of the crackdown. Sold as an origin story from within an immigrant and racialised experience, the purpose is to imbue her politics with sacred authenticity – the credibility of the first person. It is clever and effective. It is cynical and disgraceful.
“I am the child of immigrants” is how Mahmood now starts her fable. Immigrants who came here legally. She goes on to tell us that immigration is tearing this country apart, and proposes policies that mean UK-born children, who have known no life anywhere else, will be deported. As she launches policies that will leave refugees homeless and without support, tear families apart, punish those legally in the country for claiming any benefits and make settlement and security a long and arduous process, Mahmood declares: “this is a moral mission for me”.
A test of logic for sure, but the story can help. You see, after being accused of “stoking division” with “immoderate language”, Mahmood says “unfortunately, I am the one who is regularly called a ‘fucking Paki’ and told to ‘go back home’.” She knows – better than virtue-signalling white people – what the trenches actually look like. And so she must protect immigrants by hurting them. In her telling, racism and xenophobia seem not themselves objectively bad things that must be combatted, but a natural outcome that occurs when too many rights are given to immigrants and asylum seekers. If only they had fewer rights, then people wouldn’t hate them so much and we would hit some golden ratio where everyone will be happier. Because immigration perception and immigration reality are famously aligned things.
Credulous observers will quiver in the face of her personal conviction. Whatever you think of her politics, you’ve got to see that she means it. Because how can she not? She is brown and the daughter of immigrants! Let me break it to you gently: it is entirely possible for people of colour and the descendants of immigrants to be disingenuous and use their identities as excuses for their terrible politics. The former Conservative home secretary Suella Braverman dedicated her maiden speech in parliament to her father and mother, both immigrants. And yet, she later said “I would love to be having a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda. That’s my dream, it’s an obsession”.
Mahmood is not a novelty, just an addition to the ranks of Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel and even Rishi Sunak, who in various forms used their identities to dictate what the correct immigration and race politics should be, because they’ve been there. Mahmood is just the first Labour politician to do so. Her contribution reveals two things. One is mundane, the other is structural. First, there is nothing unusual or new about immigrants creating different, lower classes of immigrants and then separating themselves from them: legal v illegal; working and housed v needing benefits; assimilated v ghettoised. But here is the structural part: being a politician of immigrant background is a powerful thing in a country utterly banjaxed by immigration discourse.
This is a sort of late-stage identity politics. A way in which the victim narrative so condemned by critics of “wokeness” remains holy and unquestionable when it is used for a purpose that isn’t equality. It’s using identity as a way to elevate and uphold stories that can be wielded in the service of authority, not to challenge it.
It takes a prodigious amount of stupidity or ignorance not to see that the home secretary provides that important service, at a time when the nation is riven by racism and xenophobia. Reform UK is ascendant, and the Labour government is trying to outflank the right while trying not to look enormously racist and xenophobic while doing so. Enter Mahmood to reassure you that it is, in fact, a sort of kindness to force children on to planes and eye up items that are not of “sentimental value” so that asylum seekers can contribute to their costs. Enter Mahmood to collapse all sorts of categories together, in one instance saying division is caused by asylum seekers, in another saying it is caused by the high recent rate of net immigration, expanding the numbers of people that need to be slapped with harsher conditions so they don’t force the public to become racist.
And it also requires a very short memory to believe that Mahmood is acting out of evangelist conviction, rather than convenience when, not too long ago, she supported a general amnesty for undocumented workers who have been living in the UK for 10 years, and in 2020 called on the Tory government to halt a deportation flight. She now vows to fight “vexatious last-minute claims” that “frustrate” removals.
But to show you the allure of being an anti-immigration immigrant, this will not be seen as a cynical reversal but, as the Spectator puts it, as a conversion – a final seeing of the light. And who cares about the embarrassing optics of it all, when the reward is Mahmood’s admission into the ranks of the contenders, the players? Much has been written, since her two-story debut, of the “new hard woman of British politics”, the proponent of “Mahmoodism”, a devout outsider driven by conviction politics, the next prime minister. Michael Gove is barely able to contain his excitement at the minister he considers “far and away the most impressive person in the Labour government”.
There is a sort of gamified glee to it all. The contrast between the pain Mahmood is about to inflict on some of the most vulnerable and desperate – exemplified by the flippant “sorry, we’re closing!” imagery that accompanied her announcement that asylum hotels will be shuttered – and the excitement she has triggered in the political discourse, tells its own story. Mahmood is here to provide the answer, to absolve. To free the country from its anxieties about immigration and race. To turn away from the hard work of confronting the economic failure, cultural capitulation and cowardice that has enabled the rise of the far right.
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Mahmood’s story is seductive, because it allows us to believe that the problem is not a bigger one about a country where dark nativism lurks unchecked, and where scarcity and inequality are endemic, but rather about resentment and racism being naturally triggered by too many foreign bodies that need feeding, watering and housing. If the child of actual immigrants says so, if the target of actual racism believes so, then, thank god, how can we doubt it?
