Tommy Robinson claims victory for Labour's immigration plan

0:01This is a Global Player Original Podcast. We must now go further. We need to reduce the numbers coming here illegally. We need to remove more people who have no right to be here. We will always be a country that gives sanctuary to those fleeing danger. But we must restore order and control. That's a video that the Home Secretary, Shibana Mahmood, has posted online. The soft music is hers, but the hard message is unmistakable. And it's winning new admirers. One of those was Tommy Robinson, who's written on X, the Overton window has been obliterated. Well done, patriots. Will Tommy Robinson and his Overton window be a deterrent to asylum seekers or will it just scare the hell out of Labour MPs?

0:52Welcome to The News Agents.

0:58The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. And after what must rank as one of the most dismal weeks in a whole lot of dismal weeks for Keir Starmer with the kind of leadership challenge that wasn't, the U-turn on whether income tax would go up in the budget. I think Labour thought they could be on the front foot this weekend with Shabana Mahmood's proposals to tighten the immigration system to curb illegal immigration. She has unveiled a series of properly tough new measures, and this includes making refugee status temporary and quadrupling the length of time it takes to gain permanent status in Britain from five years to 20.

1:38So in other words, you don't get permanent status until you've been in the UK for 20 years. And if you come from a country which has been deemed unsafe, but is later qualified as safe, you might be returned, whatever that does to your family status, your employment status or the community cohesion that goes with it. So those seeking asylum in the UK could be deported back to their home country once it is deemed to be safe. You can see what she's doing here. It's clear what she's doing here. She's trying to get a grip on the problem that polling suggests is pretty much the number one issue for many in the UK.

2:20And she is trying to get ahead, quite frankly, of the parties of the right, namely reform, and show that Labour can get a grip on illegal migration. she's talking about here by showing that they're not scared of tough measures. Now, on the one hand, it's quite interesting that the Conservatives and Reform don't really have a bad word to say about this, except that they think it might not work. And at one point, Richard Tice of the Reform Party was asked whether he would actually welcome the Home Secretary in. You've had a lot of defections to Reform recently. If Shibana Mahmood wanted to join Reform, would you have her?

3:00Well, obviously, you should have to go through the usual vetting process. But people have got to believe in our principles and our values. That's the key thing. And I think that's why people are coming over to us. They're furious about what's happening to our country. And look at the number of council by-elections we're winning. In fact, just in my conclusion... Well, we do love a reform vetting process. But essentially, Shabana Mahmood's not making a secret of this. She's saying if Labour doesn't sort it out, then whatever comes after will be harder and crueler and less efficient. That's how she's trying to sell it to her party.

3:32She's promising for those who are nervous about what this looks like, there will be more safe and legal routes to the UK. This is part of her pitch. So in other words, she wants to prevent asylum seekers from crossing the channel in small boats and says there will be a way of getting into the country if you do it properly. And she's made no pretense of the fact she's been inspired by Denmark, a very tough approach to immigration. The Denmark policies have proved pretty popular at home, have kept that government in power. But Denmark is geographically and indeed socially in a very different place to the UK.

4:05So it doesn't necessarily translate wholesale onto these islands. Yeah, it's sort of 20 past one on Monday lunchtime. Shabana Mood hasn't yet stood up in the Commons to formally kind of unveil the proposals. But already we know that 15 MPs have come out against them. And there are some eye-catching stuff in there, which you think that is just there to get headlines in sort of right wing tabloids, like potentially taking the jewellery from people arriving in this country to pay for their asylum accommodation. You know, really, are we going to have officers at the border saying, right, give me your wedding ring?

4:44OK, give me your wallet. Oh, not family heirlooms, apparently. Yeah, not family heirlooms. Yeah, just the rest of your jewellery. OK, so, I mean, you know, you think, really? I mean, I think you have to put that in a box of, yeah, things are never going to happen. This was imported wholesale from Denmark. And the Danish prime minister at the weekend, former Danish prime minister, was talking about this being something that had left people very uncomfortable and they barely ever used it. So I think you're right. It sounds like a Daily Mail headline. It sounds like something that says we're going to make life really uncomfortable for you because we don't want you sponging off the state.

5:14I mean, that's the message she's trying to send out. Yes, exactly. I think the other thing about it is that, you know, we keep talking about the push factors in migration and the pull factors. And the pull factors are, you know, the perception that Britain is too soft to touch. And therefore, if you can get the message out there that we're coming after your jewellery as well, there may be that will act as some kind of deterrent of people thinking, God, do I really want to come to this country? She's also coupling it with some sort of pretty tough messaging on some of the African countries saying, look, you've got to start taking back people we reject.

5:44Otherwise, we're going to stop migration altogether from those countries. Well, take visas away and take diplomatic status away from Angola, Namibia and the DRC. And that is very kind of Trumpian in some ways. It's saying, right, OK, you're not playing ball. No one's coming in from that country anymore. And so I think there is toughness there. But the politics of it is absolutely right. Shabana Mahmood profoundly believes that if she doesn't do this, if Labour don't do this, then the argument is lost to reform. And in three years time, whenever the election is, reform will be the next government and introducing it on their terms.

6:20So the thing this reminds me of is, do you remember the monster raving loony party who came up with that idea that they would cancel Trident, but pretend that we still had Trident. So it would sound like a deterrent, but not waste money. I think it was the monster raving loony party. And there is something in the rhetoric of this. Exactly. Don't ask about it. We haven't got one, but we'll pretend we have. I think there was something in the language that the Home Secretary is using now, which is trying to sound really tough, but possibly without the appetite to enact all this. And I think that's where the rub goes.

6:56If reform put this on their manifesto, you kind of know they do it because I don't think they come to this from any particular place of compassion. Or they would argue their compassion is for the British people, not for the asylum seekers or not for people trying to escape war and genocide in countries further afield. I think the trouble with Labour and with this sort of unwieldy, big backbench of Labour is that they don't really want to be the party that hates on foreigners. They don't really want to be the party that sounds like they're going to take people's jewels or they're going to deport people as soon as they can, or they're going to stop them becoming part of a community because they don't really want them to feel at home.

7:40And so you've got this slight schism, I think, which is the language has to sound really tough and really bullish and really strident in what it's suggesting will happen. But I don't know how much appetite there really would be to deport people back once they've been here 15 years if a country stopped being at war. I think the other practical thing about the Labour Party right now, which is why part of the reason why I think that it's ungovernable and that the government is governing so badly, is that so many of the newly elected Labour MPs who are on wafer thin majorities worked in the voluntary sector before they became MPs.

8:20And they're looking at the polling data right now and they're thinking, OK, I'm in parliament for three years and then I'm out on my ear and I'm going to have to find a job. And do I want to vote for something where when I go back to my old employer at an immigration charity or whatever it happens to be, they turn around to me and say, but you voted for those proposals. You're not coming back here. It was exactly the same with the welfare reform proposals in the summer where enough Labour MPs thought, geez, I've worked for the charities that are supporting the disabled or whatever it happens to be.

8:51I'm not voting for this. That is a crazy place to be, though, because either you come into government to govern and you believe that you're going to be given a second chance to govern if you get things right, or else you're thinking about the job that you're going to do when you lose your seat. That cannot be that cannot be how the cabinet functions. But I think it speaks to the total lack of self-confidence among Labour MPs in their own government right now. Or the opposite. They're already thinking like that. Yeah, or the opposite, Soaps, to be honest, which is that they keep on beating the government down, whatever it tries to do.

9:24It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. So exactly. So they stop the welfare reforms from happening. They get the winter fuel allowance reinstated. It looks like, you know, we're a week away from the budget. It looks like they're going to get the child cap lifted. Then you've got this slight, almost an alternative power base, right, within the party itself saying we're going to stop whatever the prime minister suggests. And so far, they've actually been quite successful. As I say, the Labour government cannot govern because the back benches are ungovernable. And I think that this is a real problem for them.

9:56And I suspect part of the problem that Labour is going to run into now with these changes to the asylum system, to immigration and the way that Shabana Mahmood is trying to introduce these measures. So is there an alternative vision that Shabana Mahmood could have used that would have made her backbenchers happy? I mean, that is the big question, right? Is there something that is not so strident and not so sort of threatening that would have actually been supported by the country and got her backbenchers on side? I think there are two different questions. There's a policy question and there's a politics question.

10:31The policy question is probably that there are things around the margins that might make a difference. But the politics of it is that I think it is so toxic now. And I think the British people look at votes arriving and think this is totally bloody unacceptable. I want a government that can deal with it. And this is the Tories tried. The Tories tried. They failed. Labour have come in. They failed as well. Right. Reform. Go on. You have a go. And I think that that is the political question that Shabana Mahmood and Keir Starmer are trying to address right now. Yeah. And I think I think what she's picked up is the deterrent megaphone, isn't it?

11:06She's trying to what Farage used to do in the old days, which is sort of stand on the cliffs of Dover and say, go home, go back, don't come. I think in policy terms, that's kind of what she's aiming for right now. I think that's exactly what she's aiming for. But as I say, it's going to run into resistance. Well, in a moment, we will speak to Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow Labour, who is one of Shibana Mahmood's critics.

11:34News you can trust and the conversations that matter. With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks. My American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardiff. Discover how today's story affects your life. Listen on our free Global Player app or the new LBC app. LBC, leading Britain's conversation.

12:02The News Agents. We are joined now by Labour MP Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow. And I think to put it mildly, you have come out against the proposals from the Home Secretary. Why? Because I'm really worried that actually they could make a really difficult situation worse. Let me be clear. I agree we need much better control of our borders. I recognise that how we deal with refugees, how we deal with immigration, two very separate but important issues, is a challenge and one that we've got to get right. But I fear both the analysis as to what is driving refugees and the response could actually end up exacerbating rather than addressing those concerns.

12:46And that isn't the progressive or frankly practical way forward. But isn't the situation we're in at the moment that Labour support goes down and down, reforms goes up and up and you have to do something? Well, I've never believed in letting Mr Farage write policy. That's why I don't want to see him be prime minister. I want to see an effective response to the challenges that we see. So let's take some of the things in question. Absolutely, we are seeing more applications to the UK relative to the EU. but people watching this may want to think about why that might be the case because the home office data and the home office research itself says it's not because so-called asylum shopping takes place it's not that people sit and peruse the different policies but in the last five or six years obviously and I would say this is chair of the layman of Europe once we've left the European Union working with our colleagues on tackling issues around border control has become substantially harder from practical things like we don't have the same data sets and data access that we used to have, so we don't know who's been refused asylum in other countries, to those joint operations to tackle those groups.

13:52And you've heard people talking about returns agreements and the Dublin's agreement. Of course, not being part of those makes it harder to manage the flows of people who are travelling in distress, and that is what you are seeing now. Polling on this by More In Common suggests there is huge public appetite to see a policy like this enacted. Isn't the problem that every time the government comes up with something that does look brave and bold and direct, backbenchers, people like you, just make the government's life impossible and you wreck their chances, frankly, of ever being able to carry out what they've been voted in to do?

14:30Well, our job is obviously to scrutinise policy and to raise the right concerns. So let me be clear about what my concern is. My issue is that if you want to have better border controls, you do those at the border, penalising people that we know are refugees, that we've recognised have refugee status, by removing their ability to rebuild their lives, achieves very little. If anything, it then creates a whole new group of people in our society who are in a more precarious position. Anybody who's ever dealt with the UKBA, and Jack Straws used to say to me, there's left and right in Parliament and people have to deal with the UKBA and people who don't, know that the complications from having an uncertain status in this country are legion, where they're getting a job, getting a bank account, being able to have a mortgage.

15:16People who we know are refugees, we've agreed that they are victims of torture, victims of trafficking, that they have been persecuted in their own home countries. To say to them, actually, will always make it uncertain whether or not you can rebuild your lives. Well, frankly, it's a recipe for having to end up spending more on supporting those people rather than them being able to contribute to society. I am absolutely ruthless that the progressive response is integration and it is to make it easier for people to be able to contribute to the countries that then become their home nations. I frankly don't think the British public have the stomach for the kind of ice-style raids that this would require to remove people who might have been here for 15 years, 20 years, and their children, for whom this is now their home nation, who might be running your local businesses, they might be your workmates, They might be people that your children are friends with.

16:05So the reality of this falls apart on hard contact with the people we're talking about. You don't think that the government is really going to enact ISTAR raids, do you, Stella Kwesi? Well, at the moment, we've still not got clarity about whether they are going to commit to child detention. But of course, the people that you are talking about here, because very few civil wars are short term. You know, if you are a victim of trafficking, that does not stop after 30 months, which is when they want to reassess these things. And frankly, for somebody like me, if we are going to spend nearly a billion pounds reviewing and repeatedly reviewing people's immigration status, I'd much rather that went into enforcement at the border.

16:42I think that's a much more effective use of funds than chasing people and making them more likely to be part of our shadow economy because they can't get a job, because they can't settle their status in this country. Look, you use the language about Shabana Mahmood's proposals as being performatively cruel. I mean, isn't the language you're using incendiary and tendentious in putting it in those terms? And frankly, invoking ICE raids, some people would say that that's performative too. Well, I mean, the Home Secretary has been clear that she is intending to send a message that she believes is a deterrent.

17:19As I say, the Home Office research shows that that's just not how people make a decision about where they seek sanctuary. But there is also a reality to this. How do you want it to work? Because as I say, if we think about, say, the Ukrainian community, the 250 ,000 Ukrainians that came here four years ago, whose children are now at British schools, it's unlikely there's going to be an end to the crisis in Ukraine anytime soon. But if there were, under this sort of policymaking, we would be saying to those people, right, you have to go home. I don't think people who set their children up in school are going to go home easily.

17:53Yeah, but that's the bit you're forgetting, which is there was a safe route for Ukrainians. And what the Home Secretary is saying is we need to have more safe routes. We are welcoming. We want to be a proper place of welcome to refugees who have come through established routes. And we will have more of them. I have always been somebody who's campaigned for safe routes as the most cost effective way to manage this. That's why I'd like to see us working with our French counterparts to process people in Calais. I think that's the biggest way that you dispel people wanting to get onto a boat at the hands of a trafficker.

18:25But there is a fundamental inconsistency here, isn't there? Either we are suggesting that too many people are seeking sanctuary in the United Kingdom, or we're saying what we need to do is have more safe routes. Now, I actually think safe routes plus international agreements means that we can much better manage the numbers of people in this world who are fleeing persecution. It's one in eight now. And I think that's the way forward. And what I want to be able to do to present to the British public is a plan I know will work as well as be humane. And the two go hand in hand because there is nothing in the moment of saying, look, when you're here and we accept that you're a refugee, you'll never be able to have a stable life that will actually change the reasons why people run in the first place.

19:07That's what you've got to get to grips with. Do you believe Shabana Mahmood's proposals have the support of a majority of Labour MPs? I genuinely don't know, John. We've only just seen them. You're talking to me at Monday lunchtime. Obviously, it's going to be a statement this afternoon. I can absolutely see there's a group of people who want to support them. I fear also that they're getting intertwined with a separate debate that we need to have about immigration, that we need to have about what is the right balance for people being able to come work, study, leave, enter and be part of this country as well.

19:37I also know there are a lot of people who are deeply uncomfortable at the idea that we would somehow be frisking people at the border to see if we can remove their jewellery, because that's the way we want to manage somebody who is a victim of torture or somebody who's been raped as a weapon of war. Did you see today that Tommy Robinson is one of those who does support this move? Mr Robinson is Mr Robinson. What I care about is what is the progressive and effective way to reform our immigration and our asylum system so they can actually be the things that we need them to be in a modern world. Nobody is doubting that this is more complicated, that, you know, we've seen a lot more instability in the world that's driving people from areas because of groups like Boko Haram.

20:17That's why I'm also a supporter, frankly, of aid investment, because tackling conflicts at source is one of the best ways that you stop people running in the first place. The idea that Mr. Robinson or Mr. Farage's response is what we should judge our metric by doesn't belie the good nature of the British public who don't want to see a system that can be abused, but do want to see us supporting people. And I think we'll recognise that instability is not part of integration. Do you think their support will scare off your colleagues? May not be how you want to judge your immigration policy, but it will be quite a stark reminder for some in your party that this appears to be playing into the hands of people like Tommy Robinson.

20:57Do you think it will change the numbers on who supports it? I think the honest truth is that for many years, the Labour movement has been talking about having a debate about both asylum and immigration. but we haven't actually got into the weeds of it and that's what we need to do now. For example, I'm somebody who says that we should disassociate student numbers from our immigration numbers because it makes no sense to me to count in the same group of people, those people who might be fleeing persecution, yes those people who might come on a humanitarian visa like a Ukrainian or somebody from Afghanistan and somebody who's coming to the UK to take advantage of one of the best higher education systems in the world and then ultimately goes back to their home nation.

21:35These are the sorts of questions we haven't, if we're honest, grappled with over the last decade. And I think the reality is now we need to do so so that whatever policy we come up with, it doesn't matter what Mr. Robinson or Mr. Farage say, they are not driving it. Can I just ask you a question on a slightly wider level? You said you didn't know the mood of backbenchers about this policy because it's only being unveiled now. but in more generally I mean last week we had the kind of psychodrama created in Downing Street about whether there was going to be a challenge to Keir Starmer and what West Streeting was up to and what Shabana Mahmood and others were up to and then we've also had Rachel Reeves talking up income tax rising and then you turning on that leading to uncertainty on the markets.

22:19What is going on with the government? I think it's a fair question I'm not going to soft soap you John. There is a challenge right now which that sentimental point about politics which is what is the purpose of you what are you trying to achieve and that's look that's how I see these issues around immigration and asylum as well it's not about whether you're hard or soft it's actually about what you stand for and how you then make things apply my honest concern John is that there are an awful lot of people in politics right now and I see them both uh in my political opponents in the greens and reform but also sometimes uh in government who act like kind of people who fill in those forms saying they could beat Serena Williams at tennis or they could outrun a bear.

22:57We probably need less bravado and more focus on detail and evidence to be able to get policy right. People like myself on the back benches are absolutely ruthless in wanting a progressive, bold Labour government, but we also know we need to meet that test too. What does this government stand for? You just raised the question yourself. So look, this is a Labour government. I tell you what I think a Labour government should stand for in terms of what social justice is. I also recognise that is a debate in point and today is a good example of that. I don't think what has been brought forward to date will be a progressive immigration and asylum system and I'm including that one that is functional and will actually work and I think we need to have that debate.

23:36I also recognise we need to have that debate over the future of our economy, how we make growth grow in a world that is this uncertain, how we support people to lead better lives and tackle that cost of living crisis. Those things are interrelated. I absolutely give credit to Keir Starmer that he's not the sort of man who says he could outrun a bear. But I do recognise that ideas are the foundation of how social justice happens. Has he got any? Has he got any bears or any ideas? Ideas. Yes, he has. But I do think and I do recognise we are not at our best as a labour movement right now. We're not having the debates that we need to be able to have.

24:12and I fear the consequence of that is the sort of policy making you see today which has some good elements. I do think there are some things that Siobhan Mahmood has got right but we need to work on them and that's what people like me intend to do. We intend to be voices for what would be a better way forward, what really is true Labour and not blue Labour. We promise to let you go, Selah, thank you very much. Bears and ideas both.