Does Labour’s new home secretary signal a harder line on immigration?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, who is the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood?

0:21It was the biggest cabinet shake-up of Keir Starmer's premiership so far. A reshuffle that switched the chairs of some of the government's most high-profile ministers. And the biggest changes in the Home Office. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, became the Deputy Prime Minister, moved to justice. Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, going to the Home Office. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, moving to the Foreign Office. Shabana Mahmood is now the first Muslim woman in one of the great offices of state. She's a central figure on Labour's right, known for her relatively hardline views on immigration and asylum.

1:01I am very clear I have one top priority in this job, and that is to secure the borders. I will do whatever it takes. And for those who've worked with me already in government and in my previous brief, I think people can tell I'm not the sort of person that hangs around. Labour are hoping she'll hold off critics and reform. But others fear she could further alienate Labour's progressive left.

1:26So who is Shabana Mahmood? And is she the right choice for this febrile moment? From The Guardian, I'm Lucy Hoff. Today in Focus, can Shabana Mahmood help Starmer steady his ship?

1:45Peter Walker, your senior political correspondent at The Guardian. Before we come on to Shabana Mahmood's political career and her rise to Home Secretary, tell us a bit about her early life before she went into politics. She's got a really, really interesting life and one that places her at the centre of what a modern Labour Party is, with some slightly kind of old-fashioned roots too. She is the daughter of parents who are first-generation immigrants from the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. She grew up in Birmingham, except for five years when she was young, where she was in Saudi Arabia, where her dad worked as a civil engineer.

2:26And when they got back to Birmingham, when she was about seven or eight, her dad continued working as a civil engineer, but her mother and also to an extent her dad ran a family shop in a small heath area. And it was a rough enough area that one of my colleagues wrote a profile of her recently and apparently found out that her mum used to keep a cricket bat underneath the counter just in case. So it's this mixture of very classic second generation immigrant origins, but also her dad, when he was back in the city, was very influential in the local Labour Party. So she was imbued with the Birmingham Labour Party, which is a particular kind of strand of Labour life from a very young age.

3:05Tom Watson, the Labour Formula deputy leader who had a Midlands seat, has recounted coming around to a parent's house to chat to her dad when she was quite young. When she'd come in, they'd ask what her views were and she knew what was going on and seemed basically sharper than the rest of them. That's what he seemed to think. And it's worth lingering, I think, on the area of Birmingham where she was growing up in the 80s and 90s. There were very high levels of crime at that point, weren't there? So what do you think prompted her interest in politics off the back of that? The trajectory that she took through the law, even though she didn't do criminal law, and then into being Justice Secretary, Home Secretary after that, is interesting because she's not been afraid to take reasonably robust views on crime, which, you know, for some people in the Labour Party isn't necessarily an easy thing to do.

3:55Upholding justice is the ideal that has guided my life. It ties together both where my family came from and the great nation that we chose to call home. And so I will fight for it every day. Coming from the background that she did, it gives her a kind of kinship with people who grew up in cities and towns and they worry about what's often called low-level crime. People hanging around street corners causing trouble, shoplifting, all that kind of stuff. And that's something that she would very much have a sense of from where she grew up.

4:33So we get the sense of Shabana Mahmood as a very bright, very politically engaged young girl growing up in inner city Birmingham. But then she went on to Oxford University, didn't she? How did her politics continue to form while she was studying? You know, she studied law and then she went on to train as a barrister after that. She did win one election. She was elected to head of the junior common room at Lincoln College, Oxford College, where one of her nominees was a young Rishi Sunak, even though their politics were obviously very different at the time. But then she went on to practice law.

5:07Then she became an MP very, very young by the time she was 29. So that's the sort of thing you only do with politics as a big part of your life. Yeah, so she entered politics in the Labour safe seat of Birmingham Ladywood. I do hereby declare that Shabana Mahmood is duly elected as the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood constituency. constituency. It's a very particular constituency, isn't it? Tell me about the significance of being selected there. Well, this was not only certainly at the time a very, very safe Labour seat, but it was the seat for many years of the former Labour cabinet minister and Blair cabinet minister, Claire Short.

5:44So being basically handed the keys to that was a sign of someone who the Labour big wigs expected to be in Parliament for a long time and would have hopes that they do something good with it. And how would you describe her political identity as she entered politics in the 2010s? And how did she fare in the Corbyn years? She's always been known as someone who is, to an extent, on the right of the Labour Party. She's been officially associated with Blue Labour. I have a natural affinity for the faith flag and family element of Blue Labour. Again, if you take a look around my office, it probably says quite a lot of that to you too.

6:21Which is this slightly weird bunch. Well, I say weird because there's no necessarily definition of what they are or who they're for. Blue Labour is a group of people that call for a more communitarian politics, a recognition of our rights and responsibilities to each other. You know, long before Blue Labour, they were Red Dory. You know, it's a thing that's been happening in our politics for a while. So she was on the right and she was very, very clearly tipped as a rising star. She had a junior shadow ministerial post after 2010, within six months, and she had a whole series of shadow ministerial posts up until 2015.

6:59But Jeremy Corbyn took over and whilst some people like Keir Starmer, who are ostensibly of the right or centre right, kind of held their noses and kept French bench jobs, she supposedly said to him that serving in his shadow cabinet as a shadow minister would make her miserable and him miserable too. So she sat on the back benches and she was on the back benches for all the time that Corbyn was in power. But then when Keir Starmer took over, she was catapulted back to the front ranks. What was it about the Starmer project that called her back to frontline politics? Well, I think there's a couple of reasons, one of which is just more ideology connected to the way she was, even though Keir Starmer, with those who have memories long enough to look back to kind of 2019, 2020, will remember he stood on a relatively left-wing platform but then he conveniently dropped large parts of it the moment he actually took the job over so she was very much more ideologically aligned to him but also this very practical power focused you know we're here to win elections not hold rallies which is starmer's criticism of the corbyn years that kind of approach very much ties into this attitude which really the birmingham labor party has got they're used to running the council and Birmingham City Council is this slightly weird beast.

8:17It's the biggest council in Europe. And a lot of the stuff that happens in terms of exercising power happens through struggles within the Labour Party. So she came from a background which was used to having influence and power and she would have wanted that. And she became close to one of the great power brokers in the Labour Party, Morgan McSweeney, during the election campaign. Is that right? So from 2021 to 2023, she was the coordinator for national campaigns for the Labour Party, which is a shadow cabinet job. If you look at the spread of the results in the areas that we're winning, we're winning all over the country.

8:54And I think that puts us on track for a majority at the next election. It's one where you don't get a lot of visibility, but you get to have a very, very big say on what goes on within a party. Not just how elections are won or lost, but the candidates, that's the policy, all that kind of stuff. And there is also an argument that Starmer is only really in the position he's now because of what she did. In 2021, there was the battle in Spen by-election in Yorkshire. And this was when the Conservatives were rampant. And basically, this was such a safe Labour seat. There was a lot of talk that if Labour lost this, then there might be a leadership challenge to him.

9:30But with a lot of help from her, they got over the line. Kim Leadbeater. She won the by-election by just 323 votes. So even though by the time of the general election she'd given up that job, she was the shadow justice secretary. Her influence was still very, very big within the machinery that got Labour into government. And she's been brought up with a strong faith, hasn't she? Her parents are both practising Muslims, as is she. She's spoken about the centrality of that faith to her working life. Faith is the central core of who I am. My parents are Muslims and they raised me as a Muslim. I'm a Muslim on my own account because I have my own conscience and my conscience calls me to God.

10:14How have we seen that in action, would you say? Well, it's interesting in that she's quite a mixture. She's very open about the fact that she's a Muslim, a practicing Muslim, and the Muslim of faith is a very, very key element of her life. It is the thing that grounds me in my life. And it's where I draw my sense of duty and public service from, you know, my understanding of Islam, how I have practiced Islam my whole life. And this has led to reaction on the kind of hard Ryan fire, which is basically quite racist, of people saying, oh, no, we've got someone who's a Muslim who's in charge of our laws.

10:46You know, how can that be the case? But in terms of how she is a politician in the Labour Party, she's quite a secular figure. She's a lot of fun. She was known to swear and stuff like that. So she doesn't have this kind of demure kind of appearance to her. She's just another politician. I think probably the only actual manifestation of her faith in terms of political decisions came in a non-government thing when the assisted dying bill was in the Commons. Both the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, and the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, have said they'll vote against. She said the state should never offer death as a service.

11:23She was known to be one of two cabinet ministers, her and Wes Streeting, who were very obviously opposed to her. And they're both cabinet ministers who have very public religious faith. Shabana Mahmood is one of the most vocal pro-Palestine voices in the current Labour Party. It is an outrage to adopt a position that says that the people of Israel can have self-determination, but the people of Palestine cannot. That is not acceptable. And we cannot allow the continued degradation and denigration of the fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people. But she nearly lost her seat in last year's general election to an independent pro-Gaza candidate and in the end won, but by a very, very reduced majority.

12:08Has that impacted her political standing in any way? I think it's really interesting because she's still very, very highly thought of and tipped as a possible future leader. But one of the things you need to think about from a future leader is, is their seat actually safe? And Birmingham Lady Award was ridiculously safe for the previous couple of elections. Her majority had been nearly 30 ,000. But the pressure over Gaza, even though, you know, as you said, she's been quite a vocal voice on this, meant her majority was reduced to only 3 ,400. And one of the Gaza independents came second. And they're still going to be pushing.

12:44So at the next election, there's a chance she could lose a seat.

12:55So, Shabana Mahmood then became the first British Muslim woman to hold the cabinet position of Justice Secretary. I, Shabana Mahmood, do swear that in the office of Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain... How did she fare in that role? This has been an incredibly difficult job because the Ministry of Justice now is responsible for the prisons in England and Wales and everybody knew that prisons were basically completely full. If we fail to act now we face the collapse of the criminal justice system and a total breakdown of law and order. This was something that the Conservatives knew about and kind of had slightly deliberately not done anything about because the only thing you can do to release some of the pressure on prisons is politically unpalatable stuff like she did of early releasing some people from jail.

13:48You also have to govern the country in a way that doesn't, in a way that doesn't risk the total collapse of the criminal justice system. To be honest, of all the things that happened in the early days of the Labour government, it was probably handled about as well as it could have been. And there were inevitably a lot of stories, particularly in the right-wing press, about domestic abusers being released early and their victims not knowing about it. There was always, you know, hiccups which take place. But he was one of those things where there almost literally was no choice. They didn't really run this country.

14:17They gave up on the job. He never rolled up his sleeves and put in the hard work to get the job done. That's why we inherited prisons on the brink of collapse. And that's why I'm now unwinding all of the mistakes that his party made and the guidance that they welcomed. The other interesting thing that she did in her Justice Secretary career reasonably early on was the sentencing council, this Quangor, which advises judges on the sentences that they should pass, raised the idea of having one of the factors that they should consider would be the ethnicity or the faith of the person who is potentially going to jail.

14:52Because, you know, as we all know, there's been plenty of reports in the past that have shown that if you are from a particular background, then your chances of going to prison, particularly for a long time, are much greater than if you're not. And in some ways, this was a slightly obvious, if small, illiberal thing to do. but she immediately quashed it and said no they can't do that. I thank the sentencing council for putting a pause on their guidelines whilst parliament has its say. I believe that we must reverse them and reassert that no race or religion should receive preferential treatment before the law.

15:24And the reason for that was just because it meant that Robert Jenrick, who was and is the shadow justice secretary, would have been able to carry on this talking of this quote to two-tier justice. and it would have been politically potentially quite toxic at this time when there was a lot of discussion about the kind of relative sentences people get. To be fair, a lot of it is ill-informed, but her political antennae were acute enough to realise it would have been a very, very difficult thing. All of which will serve her enormously well as the new Home Secretary from everything you've been saying, taking difficult decisions and managing somehow to get them by the public or get them by the press.

16:02Tell me about why she was selected to be Home Secretary. I mean, the short answer is no one really knows. A lot of the reshuffle was very, very broad, but a lot of it involved moving existing cabinet ministers between jobs. And there's some of them who've publicly or privately said they weren't quite sure why it took place. The rationale for it appeared to be twofold. I mean, Yvette Cooper is an expert on this. She'd been the shadow Home Secretary. She'd chaired the relevant Commons Committee, so she knew the Home Affairs Brief inside out. So there was a sense in number 10 that it was almost like two things, one of which would be potentially just to change things up a gear, to have someone new who could kind of bring new ideas.

16:42I have one priority. I have to secure our borders and I will do whatever it takes to get the job done. But also Siobhan Mahmood is, she can talk like a human being and she can talk in something that isn't a soundbite. And, you know, she can express the anxieties, particularly about immigration and crime that some Labour politicians can't do. If you ask my constituents, they want a fair managed migration system. They think there should be rules. Most of them will say they came in on the basis of really quite strict rules that they followed to come to this country to work and make a life for themselves.

17:13And they want that sense of fairness for everybody that might come now or in the future. are. But the caveat to all this is that immigration, and particularly small boats, is the policy area for which there is not really an easy answer. We're talking about global forces, and all the parties, Labour to an extent, certainly the Conservatives and certainly Reform UK, will happily claim to have an answer which will, quote, solve it within months. But no one does, no one serious actually believes that's the case, because it's an almost insoluble task. So as you say, Shabana Mahmood is stepping into this role at a very and I think particularly challenging time to be in the Home Office.

17:53There is current furious and mainstream criticism of small boat crossings, of asylum hotels, however unfair those criticisms may be. How is Labour trying to tackle this issue? I think it's incredibly difficult because the number of small boats day by day, week by week, is a factor of the weather, which no politician can control at all. I mean, the other parties are saying that they're going to do stuff which would just be incredibly draconian and incredibly difficult to do, including leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. And Shibana Mahmood has said that she would be potentially amenable to changing the way the European Convention on Human Rights is interpreted in UK law.

18:34We won't be leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. That has other consequences that we think are not in our national interest. But we absolutely see the case for reform, primarily in our domestic legal framework, tightening up the rules. In the end, this is about how you strike the balance between human rights on the one hand and securing our borders. But again, there is an element of you're just trying to do about 50 different tweaks around the edge and hope it eventually adds into something that makes a difference on numbers. So what you're left with is this slightly boring stuff of helping the French crack down on gangs and getting people into boats in the first place.

19:12Encourage the French to have a more robust approach to stopping people when they're already in the water. There's complicated legal reasons why that's difficult now. But then also to try and avoid the pull factors to get people here. The idea that if you get here, then there's no guarantee that you can actually claim asylum. And so they have introduced this quote one in one out system in a deal with France. Some of those hoping to make a fresh start in the UK instead became the first to be detained under the government's new one in one out scheme. They would, it confirmed, be sent back to France within weeks.

19:46This has only just got off the ground and hasn't really done a vast amount. And it's just an incredibly difficult thing. So the government has just tried to make the first deportations under the new one in one out rule that was agreed with France back in August. Immediately, they've hit legal difficulties with an appeal of one of the asylum seekers, whose lawyers said that he was a victim of human trafficking. How has Mahmood responded? The response has been a furious one. She's obviously noticed the fact that there have been headlines in writing newspapers about, you know, supposed chaos of this one in, one out thing.

20:24And she released a very, very strongly wording statement. She said, Migrants suddenly deciding they're a modern slave on the eve of their removal, having never made such a claim before, make a mockery of our laws. And so she's going to fight to end what she called vexatious last minute claims. Now, obviously, people who deal with claims like this say that this is perhaps unfair because often people who do arrive in the country via slavery means will not necessarily understand what the laws are and might not be able to make a claim like this until the last minute. So as language goes, particularly from a Home Secretary on the Labour side, it was very robust, very tough.

21:03Are you surprised by the strength of that reaction? Does it seem unusual from Mahmood or is this the kind of thing you think we can expect from her? Six months ago, I would have been very surprised by this. It's the sort of thing that a Conservative Home Secretary would have said. But the mood on migration and on asylum in particular and the language on it has just shifted further and further towards this kind of thing. So I'm not surprised because there is such media pressure on them to not only be tough, but to look tough. And the Modern Slavery Act was brought in by then Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015.

21:40And there was a lot of political consensus around it at that time. From a Labour minister, this does seem particularly like a very hard line to take. What's been the reaction? Well, the other interesting thing is that Mahmood said, or rather the Home Office also said, that they're going to look into the operation of the Modern Slavery Act and basically whether it can be tightened up to make it more difficult for people to make claims under this. And this would be a politically quite contentious thing. I mean, even in the Conservative Party, May would not like that, you would imagine. and some people in Labour would find it quite tricky that people who have genuinely been trafficked into the country, it would be quite a controversial thing to do.

22:22And Enina Lyons, who's the anti-slavery commissioner, has already come out and criticised her for this comment about vexatious last-minute claims, saying it was quite a worrying thing and she'd be worried about the impact on people who have been trafficked into the country if this is the kind of language being used. And what do you think it tells us about how hard line she's willing to go in the Home Office? I think it's early days. It's one thing sending out a press release with a tough quote in and promising to review a law. It's something else to actually do stuff that would have very real life implications and might cause concern, not just amongst charities and refugee groups, but among quite a few Labour MPs.

23:04Is she just going to be someone who's willing to give tough quotes, which will give a headline to the Daily Mail? Or will she actually go further? Does she actually want to do definite things that would mimic reform or conservative policies? And, I mean, the slightly unsatisfactory answer right now is a bit too early to tell. Coming up, does Shabana Mahmood risk alienating Labour's left?

23:41We spoke earlier about Mahmoud's vocal pro-Palestine rhetoric. She has, of course, however, been left with Yvette Cooper's decision to prescribe the group Palestine Action, a decision that's led to thousands of people being arrested, including pensioners, people holding simple placards and even holding up a cartoon from the magazine Private Eye, wearing Palestine scarves. It's a situation that's felt increasingly untenable. I'm wondering, given what we know about Mahmoud's more vocal support on Palestine than perhaps her predecessor, how she'll manage that situation? I don't think she's got any choice.