Is Shabana Mahmood the next prime minister?

Only Keir Starmer can solve Labour’s immigration bind

It’s not nonsense, quite. But there has been too much cavorting on the heads of pins about the rival tribes in government. (That old jug-eared creature in the New Statesman may have been partly to blame.) Blue Labour, Old Labour, New Labour. Yadda-dadda. But the constraints are still the constraints. The choices don’t change.

Much more important than the factions are the barriers of governance, the limits of the possible. One is: if Britain’s borders are not secured against high-volume migration and the abuse of legal migration isn’t confronted, then it’s game over and Nigel Farage will be the next prime minister.

Two: if people don’t have more money in their pockets by the time of the next election, and the government is losing any grip of public spending, then ditto.

You can rail against mimicking Nigel Farage, or brief against the pesky Office for Budget Responsibility. You can foam in righteous fury about the Tory legacy. Foam away. You’re quite right. But these, folks, are the facts.

The Budget can be left for another week. Meanwhile, there is a huge battle coming over migration policy. A raft of dramatic measures is being swiftly drawn up in the Home Office, where ministers express their outrage about the way the visa system has been exploited, so that people on post-Brexit social-work visas have moved straight into the black economy and drug gangs.

Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, is also reviewing Britain’s modern slavery legislation after she accused many migrants of making “vexatious, last-minute claims” and of mocking the law.

She intends to have two major reviews of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 3 prohibits in all cases not simply torture but also “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, which she believes is being used by courts to avoid sending convicted criminals back to jail in their own countries. Article 8, on the unqualified right to family life, is also seen as being used far too widely to avoid deportations.

Then there is the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which defines a refugee as somebody with a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group or political opinion.

Again, ministers feel that it’s being used too widely, while migrants’ rights groups say it unfairly and unjustifiably excludes economic migrants, whose situation may be just as dire.

So, reader: do you think that cutting through this thicket to limit those with the right to live in the UK – so that voters actually notice – is going to be straightforward for a party that has been committed throughout its history to human rights, is led by a former human rights lawyer, and that contains a strong internationalist tradition on its back benches?

I agree: it’s going to be bloody. Mahmood’s key argument is that the scale of migration means there is no choice – and her colleagues in Europe feel the same way. Unless laws change and treaties are pruned, the entire postwar settlement will soon be torn down by pro-Russian, radical right-wing parties across Europe. And that is exactly how they see it, too, in Denmark, Italy, Germany and France.

What, then, of obvious counter arguments about playing the devil’s tunes: that, just as the Prime Minister openly calls his Reform opponents’ policies racist, he himself is adopting policies that aren’t so different?

Here is where the political messaging needs to be not just good but brilliant. In truth, there is a world of difference between trying to close down migration routes that are being exploited and ending the appeal of ID-free working and benefits, and, on the other side, a mass deportation strategy aimed at entire communities, including people who have been legally settled here for years, to our economic advantage.

But in our hysterical political atmosphere, the difference is easy to miss. We can see the struggle with words, as Keir Starmer both adopts the Mahmood recipe as politically essential and yet still finds his inner human rights lawyer recoiling.

He said after the Labour conference closed that he “might” need to look again at the interpretation of international laws. Because of the new experience of mass migration, “We need to look again at the interpretation of some of these provisions, not tear them down.”

The first part of the sentence is abstract and cautious but the last four words come from the heart. Isn’t that the problem? There is no point tightening migration rules if the country doesn’t notice them. But if every proposed change is balanced against the alarm of going a step further, then today’s changes will come over as grudging compromises or, worse still, a weaselly acceptance that the enemy is right. To win consent you must have clear policies, with real consequences, and then you must sound like you mean it.

Shabana Mahmood does. Everyone is noticing. She is already being talked about as the next prime minister, the obvious person to replace Starmer if he fails. This is, of course, a huge danger for her. Right-wing applause not only makes her taste like too-bitter medicine for Labour people, but it will increase cabinet jealousy. Meanwhile, at conference, Wes Streeting, her natural ally/competitor made a speech that sounded very much like that of a future prime minister.

How does Starmer regard Mahmood? He appointed her. Yet they barely know one another and their interactions have been awkward. By contrast, Richard Hermer, the Attorney General, a fierce defender of international law and process, is a genuinely close friend of the Prime Minister. The two are said to be in touch multiple times on many days, by text or WhatsApp. “With Keir,” says a minister, “you always need to know who has been in his ear last. It will often have been Richard.”

So, the Home Secretary will have to go directly to Starmer, probably repeatedly, to get his full buy-in. And if he gives it to her, he will do so, despite knowing it makes him even more unpopular inside his party.

If Tony Blair or Gordon Brown had been in that position, they would first have thrashed out the arguments, brutally and frankly, inside cabinet committees; then committed themselves and made the case, ad nauseam, in public. But across Whitehall, they say Starmer actively dislikes frank, testing policy arguments with his ministers; and that once he’s made an argument, he thinks he doesn’t need to make it again.

Colleagues blame his distaste for deep policy argument for poorly prepared, “untested, uncooked” announcements emerging on everything from the recognition of Palestine to digital ID cards. “He really doesn’t like sitting around with half a dozen or a dozen of us, having a proper argument,” says one. Another talks of the paradox that Starmer can be deeply attentive and empathetic, but only with small groups: “There is a rule of three or four. Above that, he begins to disconnect.”

That is more serious than perhaps it sounds. When Starmer has really thrashed arguments through and knows exactly what he wants to say, as in his Liverpool conference speech, he is convincing and authentic. In the weeks ahead, first with migration, and then with the Budget, he will need to learn quickly from that success. This autumn, Labour is emerging, perhaps too late in the day, with better policies, and a stronger cabinet. But it will get nowhere without a coherent, unembarrassed message from the conflicted gentleman at the top.

[Further reading: Can Shabana Mahmood save Labour?]