SONALI: MESSAGE OF HOPE

Shabana Mahmood is already the third British Asian woman to be a home secretary talking tough on asylum. That shows how much ethnic diversity in high office has accelerated. No Asian woman had ever been an MP before Mahmood and Priti Patel were elected in May 2010. But that Mahmood is so closely following Patel’s agenda now casts doubt on how far the Labour government’s new asylum proposals can deliver control in the Channel or rebuild public confidence in the system.

Mahmood’s core mission is to grip the asylum issue: she declares her reforms to be the most significant since the 1950s. Yet, they are uncannily similar to Priti Patel’s new asylum law in 2022 – which also proposed asylum seekers getting only 30 months of temporary protection. Suella Braverman then went even further – pledging that no asylum claims would get heard at all. By memory-holing these efforts, Mahmood misses crucial lessons of why they failed. If “pull factors” of the UK asylum design were the key to small boat arrivals, Patel and Braverman would have stopped the boats before the election.