Labour’s Small Boats Bait-and-Switch

With the Labour government falling to fourth place for a second consecutive week in national polls, and leaks suggesting that Keir Starmer is in “full bunker mode” to fend off a leadership challenge from within his party, the government is desperate to reverse its fortunes. Sensing all other issues are second to migration, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has made headlines with her claim that asylum applicants will no longer automatically receive the permanent right to resettle in Britain.

But her proposed reforms aren’t quite as bellicose as they sound. Labour are planning a bait-and-switch: trying to stop the bad optics of small boats crossing the English Channel, causing them to hemorrhage support to Reform, while inventing new “safe and legal routes” through which the same migrants will enter Britain anyway.

Mahmood plans to lengthen the minimum threshold for when asylum recipients obtain indefinite leave to remain from five years to twenty, and reassess refugees’ status every two-and-a-half years. The plans emulate a policy introduced by Denmark’s leftwing government, which brought asylum applications to the lowest level for 40 years and led to the deportation of 95% of unsuccessful applicants. Mahmood promises to return refugees once their country has been deemed safe enough to do so. She has even threatened to confiscate assets from illegal entrants to recover the cost of their accommodation.

However, without changing the staff at the Home Office, and repealing laws which inhibit deportations, this is unlikely to work. Trying to disapply Articles 2 and 8 of the ECHR in rejected asylum applications requires primary legislation. Given that Keir Starmer wrote the textbook instructing lawyers how to apply Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act — which ensured the ECHR was “more subtly and powerfully woven into our law” — it is unlikely to be passed. Additionally, a precedent set by Chahal v. The United Kingdom, which asserts that Article 3 “is equally absolute in expulsion cases”, and that the criminal delinquency of a deportee, “however undesirable or dangerous, cannot be a material consideration”, predates the Human Rights Act by two years.

And even if Mahmood defied the Strasbourg court, language from the 1951 Refugee Convention has been written into domestic legislation. Its lenient definition of a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”, will be the next port of call for fake asylum seekers to appeal. Under this definition, 117.3 million people worldwide qualify as refugees. Getting deportations done requires more drastic repeals than either Mahmood or her party are willing to perform.

Nor are civil servants. Mahmood has complained about inheriting a Home Office “set up to fail” and infested with a “culture of defeatism” concerning immigration. A 2023 report, only released last month after a legal challenge by The Times, revealed “the enforcement of immigration laws is poor and has grown considerably worse in recent years”. Written by then-Home Office minister Nick Timothy MP, he found the government’s lawyers were “defensive”, citing “assessments of likely legal challenge, and even the possibility of defeat … as a reason not to do something”. “Nobody knows who, overall, is responsible for the system”, Timothy despaired, with frustrated officials quoted as saying “It takes a team of people weeks to answer a straightforward question”, and that poor record-keeping required civil servants to “rely on memory” or track open immigration cases on Excel spreadsheets. Staff impeded ministers’ agendas to reduce migration, expressing that they “disagree with either the principle of immigration control or the policies needed to achieve it”.

Since Timothy’s review, I have reported on the Islamic Network within the immigration and counter-terrorism departments. On their watch, Prevent referrals for Islamic terrorism have plummeted, despite Muslim terrorists remaining the most common perpetrators of terror attacks. Recently, it was revealed that RICU wasted £400,000 of taxpayers’ money on sending obscure boyband Mr Meanor to tour schools in Burnley, Manchester, Leeds, and Blackburn, singing about 9/11 and 7/7. Comms for the tour were handled by BreakThrough Media, the PR firm that produced RICU “products” like the Union Jack hijab image that featured on the front page of The Sun after ISIS beheaded British aid worker Alan Henning.

Muslim Home Office staff have taken bribes to overturn rejected asylum claims from Muslim countries, and prevented Christians fleeing forced conversion from getting asylum. Without a wholesale replacement of Home Office staff, and breaking up these identitarian cartels, deportations will not get done. But given Mahmood’s commitment to equalities law, and insistence that her Sunni Muslim faith remains “the centre point of my life and it drives me to public service”, it is unlikely she does either. Instead, Mahmood’s changes will likely create another bureaucratic headache that requires hiring more part-time-remote civil servants to process.

Many of these measures are token gestures, to give the impression that the government is doing something about the egregious invasion fleet crossing from France. Mahmood has written to the embassies for Angola, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, warning they could be subject to visa bans if they repeatedly refuse to repatriate their criminal nationals. But this is only after repeat violations; a leniency no doubt afforded by the Prime Minister’s belief that a “racist undercurrent” underwrites any law which restricts immigration from a given country.

These are also empty threats, because the majority of small boat arrivals are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan, and Syria, and Starmer already rejected dealing with the Taliban to facilitate deportations. Only 134 people (0.12%) from the DRC, 104 (0.09%) from Namibia, and 27 (0.02%) from Angola applied for asylum in the year ending June 2024—2025. The largest number of people exploiting Britain’s asylum system come from Pakistan, comprising 10% (11,234) of the 111,084 applications. We could leverage the 69,580 visas and £133 million in annual foreign aid provided to Pakistan to ensure that they accept the deportation flights they have been refusing. But it’s unlikely that Mahmood will shut Britain’s borders to the Indian subcontinent, as that will make for uncomfortable family conversation during Iftar.

Mahmood has not been convinced of the merits of immigration restriction. She previously supported a “general amnesty for undocumented workers”, and personally welcomed illegal migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Greece during the 2015 crisis. Mahmood is simply cunning enough to know that being seen to be doing something about the small boats crisis gives her cover, should she want to run for Labour leader in the near future. She also understands that the mood of the country is very much against her. 40% of the public believe that Muslim immigrants have a negative impact on Britain, and 53% recognise that Islam is incompatible with British traditions. A Muslim Home Secretary — especially one who frequented Palestine rallies and supported an Islamophobia definition that would censor the very Pakistani rape gang inquiry of which she is charged with appointing the chair — faces a lot of mistrust.

Mahmood knows this, noting at September’s Labour party conference the growth of an “ethno-nationalism, which struggles to accept that someone who looks like me, and has a faith like mine, can truly be English or British”. (She isn’t.) She told the BBC that as “the child of migrants myself”, being seen to be getting tough on the most offensive form of illegal migration “is a moral mission for me, because I can see illegal migration is tearing our country apart, it is dividing communities”.

To translate: Mahmood wants to stop the bad optics of small boat crossings, because it is leading the public to question the permissive immigration and multicultural management systems that make her presence in the country and her political career possible. Her reforms are an act of personal and political self-preservation, to fight the “Dark forces [that] are stirring up anger in this country”. Because of course, the problem is never the problem: the problem is always the far-right reaction to the problem. “We want to be a Greater Britain, not a littler England”, Mahmood writes, setting herself against 45% of the public who support the removal of large numbers of legal and illegal migrants alike.

The biggest tell that Mahmood’s reforms are a distraction is the creation of new “safe and legal routes” for “legitimate asylum seekers” to enter Britain. What qualifies as a “legitimate asylum seeker”? Mahmood has outlined additional criteria to the aforementioned absurd ECHR rulings and UN definition. A scheme will allow “voluntary and community sector organisations” to sponsor named individuals — incentivising racial and religious grievance charities to import co-beligerents from abroad. Another route will allow “skilled refugees” and “displaced students” to study in the UK, with British taxpayer subsidies. This has already been happening, with the British government quietly importing Palestinians on night-flights via Jordan to study on full scholarships in London and Manchester. Mahmood has said that these pathways will be capped, but “they will grow in time”.

This sleight of hand was foreshadowed by the rhetorical shift from “illegal” to “irregular” migration — implying there would be no problem if the arrivals were processed and provided the requisite paperwork. The same foreign criminals willing to break into our country will now enter with the appropriate documents, rather than discarding them to form a veritable coral reef out of passports at the bottom of the English Channel. This Hobson’s Choice offered by many a Question Time audience plant is becoming government policy, using being seen to be doing something about the small boats as its cover.

Whether by small boats or “safe and legal routes”, the very presence of third-world migrants in Britain brings completely preventable problems to our shores. Even Mahmood’s fellow Muslims warned author Ed Husain circa 2021 that mosques in Manchester are overrun by “Syrians and Libyans, Yemenis and Palestinians who … have seen bombs and destruction daily.”

“These refugees and others in our mosques have come from war-torn  countries, often fighting against their own governments, killing soldiers, killing other citizens. Peace in Manchester troubles them; they feel they need to seek revenge and justice for the wrongs done to them in their countries. We see it in their ways in the mosques, and in their constant agitation against stability at every level. If the imam speaks in his sermon about peace, an Arab asylum seeker will accuse him of selling out and not opposing the dictators in the Arab world. But that is not our fight. They don’t understand. Britain is different.”

Providing them with a piece of paper which declares them to be British doesn’t change that. We don’t want our country filled with millions more third-world strangers who disproportionately commit sex crimes, claim benefits, and demographically disfigure our home beyond recognition. But our government, civil servants, human rights lawyers, and professional activists do. They just want to reduce our resistance to the policy by managing public perception, and so seek to remove the most offensive visual reminder of how open our borders are.

Mahmood is assisted in her kayfabe by Labour’s demented backbenchers and impulsive parties on its left flank. Devouring mother Stella Creasy has already condemned Mahmood’s proposals as “not just performatively cruel, [but] economically misjudged”. (Yet again, principles of fiscal restraint only apply when immigration restrictions are proposed.) “In reality,” Creasy writes, “if this policy becomes law the UK will require ICE-style raids to remove people – and their children.” If only our government were as good as Creasy’s fevered imagination fears. When Mahmood mentioned that the Greens’ deputy leader opposed 600 illegal migrants being moved into her constituency, Bristol MP Carla Denyer jumped up and down like Rumpelstiltskin. The juvenile liberalism of Parliament gives Mahmood the aura of a based heel turn, while she quietly continues betraying the public.

Lacklustre opposition is provided by Kemi-come-lately: who yet again complained about Labour lacking “a plan”, while her own promises to remove a meagre 150,000 per year. Reform’s mass deportations plan remains in embryonic stages. Only Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain has produced a comprehensive proposal to remove millions of foreign criminals from our country, via enforced returns and a hostile environment which encourages self-deportation. I suggest that the Home Secretary get acquainted with the report. There’s no excuse not to implement its findings.