“When is a gift not a gift?” - A memorable quote the 2021 remake of Dune gave the world is the rhetorical question posed by its main villain character, Baron Harkonnen
A quote equally applicable to reality today, where the side-promotion of Shabana Mahmood from her ministerial brief at the Ministry of Justice to become the UK’s first female Muslim to take charge at the Home Office was not met with the usual celebratory reception from the public gallery about glass ceilings being broken at one of the four great offices of state. Instead, the vast majority of public reaction was of either indifferent cynicism towards the latest Cabinet reshuffle being characterised as shifting deckchairs on the Titanic, or outright racism and religious bigotry decrying Mahmood’s appointment as Home Secretary symbolising Britain’s “reverse colonisation” to the dark forces of Muslims and Islamic fundamentalism.
Perhaps in an effort to pre-emptively spike any narrative that her Muslim faith and Pakistani family heritage would somehow make her more biased in favour of leniency and liberalisation of British immigration and asylum policy, Mahmood’s first public announcement as Home Secretary was that she would move “further and faster” to cut the number of migrants and refugees who have arrived to the UK through euphemistically-termed “irregular” routes such as rubber dinghies crossing the channel and operated by human trafficking/smuggling criminal networks. To this end, Mahmood announced that the UK would seriously consider suspending visas for countries that delay or refuse returns of their citizens who have no right to remain in the UK.
This threat to suspend visa access for legal travel to the UK as a bargaining chip in negotiating asylum and refugee issues with foreign countries is the latest entry in the history of the UK’s “hostile environment” government policy which was officially introduced in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May under the coalition Tory-Liberal Democrat government which sought to make the country as unattractive and untenable as possible for potential future and current illegal immigrants to reside and make a living in.
It should be of interest to note that whilst the “Hostile Environment” policy will forever be associated as part of the Tory political legacy in British society, the term itself actually came from a Labour immigration minister. After his appointment as immigration minister a year earlier, Liam Byrne announced in May 2007 the first policy of fining rogue British employers employing illegal migrants and overstayers with prophetic words of “trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally”. Mahmood now follows in the footsteps of Yvette Cooper who as the first Labour Home Secretary in over a decade presided over a renewed drive to rollback a brief relaxation of the “Hostile Environment” policy during the Johnson and Sunak years of Tory rule between 2019 and 2024.
Quite how Shabana Mahmood plans to do this remains unclear, considering the various different visa categories for work, leisure, and student applicants that currently exist as well as the differences in demand for each individual visa type from different countries. The practical and effective diplomatic repercussions from resorting to such negotiation tactics also remains unclear, considering that the top two countries from which illegal migrants in the UK hail from are Pakistan and Afghanistan respectively, with Bangladesh and India completing the statistics of the Central and South Asia subcontinent being the greatest source of asylum seekers in the UK.
Which brings us to the part about Shabana Mahmood being appointed by Sir Keir Starmer. Some public accounts opine that Mahmood becoming Home Secretary serves a beneficial political purpose for the Labour government to act tough on immigration and asylum policies, given the overt racial and religious demographic preponderance of non-Caucasian races and Muslims that make up the masses of illegal migrants and asylum seekers entering the UK. The fact that Mahmood is seen as a loyal political ally of Starmer, having played the role of fixer in coordinating Labour’s national electoral campaign leading up to the 2024 general election which featured campaign promises to reduce net migration, increase scrutiny and prosecution of illegal migration organised crime entities, and fast-track processing of asylum applications, also firmly suggests that Mahmood is seen as Starmer’s “fixer” of thorny political issues.
With Mahmood’s long-established credentials as a Muslim who has spoken openly about her faith to the extent of it being central to her life and the main motivation for her entering public service and joining politics, perhaps having a Muslim and female Home Secretary be the face of aggressive and punitive immigration and asylum policy changes to tighten the spigot of foreigners entering and staying in the UK (be it legal or otherwise) would defuse any potential accusations of the UK government and British society being made up of white people and led by white politicians being racist or xenophobic to outsiders. The classic example of the trope “I’m not racist, because I have minority-race friends!”.
For make no mistake. If there is a single political decision made by Sir Keir Starmer during his time as Prime Minister that is most illuminative of his character and that of the government he leads, it must surely be this mother of all poisoned chalices given to Mahmood. Mahmood is now faced with a political lose-lose scenario almost certain to bookend her political career, thanks to the febrile political mood within British civil society and her own circumstances of past rhetoric and individual birth identity of Pakistani Muslim heritage.
In the 2024 general election, Mahmood survived a political scare when she saw her vote majority share cut by an astounding 40%, with most of it going to a sectarian political candidate by the name of Akhmed Yakoob who hoovered up protest votes from Muslim voters in Birmingham Ladywood where Mahmood was seeking reelection. This was political damage she barely survived considering the thumping overall victory of Labour nationally, purely on the basis of sectarian protest votes against Mahmood for not defying the Labour party whip over the issue of Palestine despite her being otherwise outspoken in her pro-Palestine political activism. Could Mahmood weather being the lightning rod for Labour when it comes to targeted religious and racial-based backlash against deliberate immigration and asylum policymaking and not potentially pay for it with her own personal political capital?
And nothing more needs to be said about how Shabana Mahmood could go as hardline as she wishes as Home Secretary, and still will never be seen to be doing enough or not being racially or religiously-biased in favour of her Pakistani and Muslim kith and kin by the British political right. It’s not within her power to win their approval or support, and their very objection to her on the basis of her racial heritage and religion will inevitably also extend to secular government policy on an issue that has unavoidable racial and religious aspects to it.
Above all else, Shabana Mahmood’s appointment as Home Secretary by Starmer has provided unexpected insight into the nature of a man whose political reputation, according to critics, is that of a careerist politician most describe as being ruthless without fear nor favour when the time calls for it.
A man who deliberately decides to place a British woman of Pakistani heritage who has spoken openly about her Muslim faith as the fronting face of a country’s internal policing, immigration, and asylum policy currently criticised as being performatively cruel and institutionally biased against Muslims and racial minorities on the left and being incompetent and overly permissive to non-White, non-Christian asylum seekers and immigrants and their “un-British” values from the right, is a man with a deeply cynical calculus towards life and those he calls his friends and colleagues around him.
Because no decent human being would ever put others they value and respect as a friend or work colleague in a lose-lose conundrum, or use them as a lightning rod for race and religious-baiting political toxicity whipped up by career politicians such as Nigel Farage or sectarian figures such as Akhmed Yakoob.
With friends like Starmer, nobody needs enemies.
Andy Wong is a freelance journalist based in Birmingham. Since 2023 he has written on politics and society, and also publishes on Substack as The Narrative Shaper.