THE home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is being promoted as possibly the right person to oust Sir Keir Starmer from No 10 on the strength of changes she is making to the immigration system.
In a piece headlined, The unstoppable rise of Shabana Mahmood, the Daily Telegraph said: “Against a backdrop of Labour leadership plots, the ‘political star’ has emerged commanding and passionate – everything Starmer is not.”
It is intriguing to learn that one of the first to support her was Rishi Sunak, who overlapped with her at Lincoln College, Oxford. She was there from 1999 to 2002, graduating with a law degree. Rishi was at Lincoln from 1998 to 2001 and got a First in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).
She canvassed his support when she ran for junior common room president.
“I do remember canvassing Rishi for his vote and he did say yes,” revealed Shabana.
Shabana’s parents are from Mirpur in Pakistan.
According to the Telegraph, “in the early Noughties, Labour party campaigners would gather over a plate of samosas at the home of Mahmood and Zubaida Ahmed. The Kashmiri couple emigrated from Pakistan and largely raised their four children in Small Heath, except for a seven-year stint in Saudi Arabia shortly after Mahmood was born, where her father worked as a civil engineer.
“Upon arriving back in Birmingham, Ahmed bought the Al Salama Food Store – a corner shop which his wife ran, selling penny sweets, fruit and vegetables. He, meanwhile, became embedded in local politics, eventually serving as chairman of the Birmingham branch of Labour.”
Her constituency, Ladywood in Birmingham, was previously represented by Clare Short, whom I first met when she an aide to Alex Lyon, a home office minister (the couple later married).
In the 1970s, Brian Walden, who became a famous TV interviewer, was MP for Ladywood.
It was also Neville Chamberlain’s seat. In 1924, the future prime minister came within 100 votes of being beaten by the Labour candidate, Oswald Moseley, who went on to set up the British Union of Fascists eight years later.
The Telegraph noted that “amid mounting public anger over the asylum system, Mahmood told a Lib Dem MP that unlike him, she had personal experience of how divisive migration was because she had regularly been called a ‘f**king P**I’.”
Rishi would point out to her that her logic is a tiny bit faulty, because she seems to suggest the immigration system needs to fixed in order to pacify people like her abuser.
I think what she means is that Britain needs to be in charge of who enters the country. Few other nations would accept thousands of people arriving by boat, and the priority should be to target the people smugglers.
Migration is a complex problem, with movement of people caused by factors such as war (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya among others) and climate change. They easily find jobs in Britain because “approximately 10.9 million people aged 16 and over in the UK do not work, consisting of around 1.79 million unemployed and 9.08 million economically inactive people”.
With an ageing population, even Nigel Farage will probably be cared for by a foreign nurse when he eventually finds himself in hospital.
