It doesn’t take Alan Turing levels of decoding skill to decipher the message that Sir Keir Starmer sent to the Home Office in his ministerial reshuffle. Much of the ministerial team of the former home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has been transferred to other duties, indeed to the four winds across Whitehall. As a vote of no confidence in her it couldn’t be more painful.
Dan Jarvis remains as a minister of state, but even he has been given a parallel ministerial role close to the prime minister in the Cabinet Office. The new group of ministers at the Home Office may not be household names even in their own kitchens, but around Westminster and around the party they are known for their impatience over the lack of progress on ending the small boats and asylum hotels crisis. Indeed, Mike Tapp, MP for Dover, can claim that he’s on the “front line” of this most controversial of issues.
Like a failing business or a football club facing relegation, or, for that matter, a political party facing electoral oblivion, the prime minister has “sacked the board” and appointed one of his most effective colleagues to the task of sorting out the perennially troubled Home Department – Shabana Mahmood, one of the few senior ministers to have shone since the general election, notable for putting her shadow counterpart, the increasingly maverick Robert Jenrick, firmly in his place.
It has even been said that the very future of the Labour government lies in the hands of Ms Mahmood and her team, and that may be no exaggeration, given the level of public concern about irregular migration and the shortage of accommodation for asylum seekers. With the economy and the NHS, where Labour has at best enjoyed mixed success, immigration and particularly so-called “illegal” migration is plainly one of the electorate’s key concerns. The question is whether Ms Mahmood can succeed where so many of her predecessors, of both main parties, have failed.
To be fair to Ms Cooper, some of the measures that were needed to reduce the pressure on the system were already on the way when she received the dreaded call from the Downing Street switchboard. Ms Cooper had already agreed the “one in, one out” treaty with France, announced a “clampdown” on family reunification rules, discussed ways to move asylum seekers more quickly out of hotels and into camps, streamlining the immigration appeals process, increasing processing rates and deportation, and, like Ms Mahmood, talked about changing Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and its counterpart in UK law, to reduce abuse. The outgoing home secretary even talked about third-country processing of claims, within months of cancelling the Rwanda scheme. Ms Cooper may or may not have been as effective as Downing Street desired, nor as powerful a communicator as some colleagues, but she was trying to implement the prime minister’s policies. It was never her fault that Sir Keir’s “smash the gangs” hasn’t yet proved to be a spectacular success.
In any case, Ms Mahmood and her team will inherit the progress that Ms Cooper made, but they know that they will need to do much more and have to “sell” their policies much more aggressively. In this task, they are faced with significant moral, practical and political challenges.
First, the government needs to make clear that it is not about to end the right to claim asylum, even as it bears down on abuse of the system and seeks to modernise the European Convention. That is a principle no British government should discard. At the moment, for example, as The Independent has highlighted, there are brave Afghan former soldiers who fought alongside British forces in the Afghan conflict presently threatened with being returned to the Taliban, and near-certain torture and execution. Like those admitted under the Hong Kong, Syrian and Ukrainian migration schemes, the UK’s proud record of protecting the vulnerable from genuine persecution cannot be dishonoured, even if public pressure and sheer numbers require it to be limited. Thus, even as the government “gets tough” on small boats, it would be reassuring to see safe and secure routes established for genuine refugees, even if eligibility has to be restricted.
Second, if, as the defence secretary John Healey confirms, there are to be military or other camps used to rehouse irregular migrants, they should be made clean and humane, and nothing like the shameful experiments in recent years, such as the Bibby Stockholm modern-day prison hulk, or dilapidated ex-army barracks. These will necessarily take time to construct, with or without military help.
Third, the government needs to understand that it can never out-Farage Farage. Just as he did during the Brexit referendum campaign a decade ago, the leader of Reform UK is making wildly unrealistic claims about easy answers to irregular migration, which, had they been remotely feasible, would have been implemented long ago by a succession of desperate Conservative and Labour ministers. He now says that he alone can “stop the boats” within two weeks of passing legislation, and is prepared to invade French sovereign waters to do so. Apart from anything else, Mr Farage seems not to have noticed how many “illegal” immigrants simply overstay their visas. For that, he has no answers, just as he has none for the entirely clandestine traffic that would occur if surrendering to Border Force to claim asylum was impossible.
It is also true that although Labour is losing some support to Reform UK, it is also seeing its 2024 voters defect to the Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP and the putative Jeremy Corbyn party. In other words, a needlessly harsh new immigration regime might alienate as many voters as it would attract.
The answer to this conundrum – as with the NHS, schools and the economy – is that much-used word “delivery”. Close the asylum hotels – hardly ideal for anyone concerned – reduce the flow of people making the dangerous Channel crossing – some 1,097 migrants crossed on Saturday – deport those with no right to be in the UK, and the task of persuading concerned citizens that their anxieties are being listened to will become much easier, and the protests will subside. But there’s also a job to be done in ending the current wave of propaganda, social media myths, Islamophobia and the demonisation of innocent migrants, refugees or otherwise, by cynical politicians who know well how to farm grievances. Fortunately for Sir Keir, Team Mahmood seems up for it.
