Is Mahmood right to use Trump’s playbook to curb small boats – or playing straight into Nigel Farage’s hands?

It would be wrong to dismiss the government’s plans out of hand but the home secretary is taking Labour to a strange and dangerous place by trying to out-populist the populists, says Sean O’Grady

Are the wrong people applauding what the home secretary calls the “most sweeping changes to our asylum system in a generation”?

Nigel Farage, perhaps a little mischievously, says that Shabana Mahmood “sounds like a Reform supporter”, albeit adding that the European Convention on Human Rights and her own unreliable backbenchers will thwart her plans.

In fact, Mahmood is talking about sanctions against certain countries – Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo are named – that are reluctant to accept their returned citizens. And there is every reason to suppose that Mahmood will do what she has promised to do – “whatever it takes” – as she presses on with her programme.

‘Any political party seeking to serve the public cannot dismiss the public’s concerns. Some of the measures Mahmood has announced are both long overdue and should command widespread support’ (PA)

The obvious political problem for Mahmood is not just that she finds herself in strange, uncomfortable company, but that whatever she does to the asylum system will never be enough for some in society. Turning to the Donald Trump playbook won’t attract the disaffected classes back to Labour, while it will simultaneously alienate the very people Labour should be able to rely on. In other words, you cannot out-Farage Farage himself.

But it would be wrong to dismiss the government’s plans out of hand. If it does not find an effective way to restore control of the UK’s borders – a challenge that was spectacularly mishandled by the last Tory administration – its prospects of winning the next election are zero. Worse, it could well result in a victory by Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Maybe a better way of approaching this is to leave the political “messaging” and “positioning” and ask a more straightforward question: will the Mahmood reforms actually work?

Mahmood definitely “gets it”. She seems to understand better than any other leading Labour politician what the challenge and the danger is. In her own words: “This is a moral mission for me, because I can see illegal migration is tearing our country apart.”

Now that’s an excellent start, because any political party seeking to serve the public cannot dismiss the public’s concerns. Some of the measures she has announced are both long overdue and should command widespread support. Perfectly reasonable people lose faith in the asylum system if they feel it is being gamed by constant spurious claims such as last-minute recourse to the modern slavery laws; and if they perceive that irregular migrants are being fed and looked after in hotels better than homeless veterans, to use the populists’ trope (in truth, no one should be left destitute).

The critical question is, how soon will the so-called asylum hotels (and houses of multiple occupation) be closed down? These sites have become such a lightning rod for protest, concentrated hatred and far-right agitation that the government cannot stick to its timetable of clearing them by the end of the parliament. It’s difficult to see how Mahmood can satisfy this public demand as rapidly as she needs to.

There’s also the awkward reality, faced by all her predecessors, that the European Convention remains international law and the judgments of its courts are binding. Maybe the changes she’s planning to the conventional and domestic law will do the trick, as they have in Denmark, but that’s by no means a given.

What’s more, the removal of a right to housing and social security for refugees who have a right to work, but cannot, will no doubt be popular in some quarters, but will inevitably lead to destitution – which means more people living on the street and turning to crime.

As for the new rule that citizenship can only be gained after 20 years, and the prospect of settlement in the UK possibly revoked every 30 months, these are hardly conducive to “integration” or the fostering of shared values. It would, practically speaking, induce people fearful of deportation to evade the authorities and not to lead normal settled lives.

But the real test is whether the home secretary’s radical package will make a blind bit of difference to the average young man hanging around in Calais waiting to get aboard a boat for England. Frankly, I doubt it. Experience tells us that new laws and rules have a minimal effect, either on the genuine refugees – who may well have no other route to asylum – or on the economic migrants. They will simply continue to take their chances – to make a fully clandestine landing, melt away into the grey economy, crime and slum housing in the expectation they may eventually be discovered and removed.

The lesson and the advice is this. By all means Mahmood should try to make the system work better, ease the tensions and emulate the apparent success of Denmark. But her policy and bright political future will be finished if she doesn’t think the measures through and she overpromises only to underdeliver.