Shabana Mahmood to sacrifice ‘bourgeois support’ over migrants
The home secretary will warn Labour MPs that the party will lose the next election unless they speed ahead with her hardline immigration reforms. Shabana Mahmood will begin introducing sweeping changes to asylum laws next week despite significant opposition from dozens of Labour MPs.
In a speech, she will attempt to minimise internal opposition to her reforms by arguing that they are “entirely consistent” with Labour’s core values. Mahmood will warn that failure to take radical action to reduce legal and illegal immigration will cost Labour votes to right-wing parties who will exploit growing anger with much tougher policies.
Several Labour MPs have blamed Mahmood’s immigration reforms for the party’s resounding defeat by the Green Party in Thursday’s Gorton & Denton by-election. The reforms include plans to scrap permanent refugee status and to double to ten years the amount of time some foreign nationals must wait before they can settle in the UK.
However, sources close to Mahmood have hit back at suggestions that Labour is losing votes to the Greens on immigration and pointed to polling that found Green voters supported her reforms.
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Polling carried out by the More in Common think tank found that Green voters were among the biggest cohort that supported Mahmood’s asylum reform to replace permanent refugee protection with temporary status.
A source close to the home secretary said: “The Green Party’s position of open borders is not supported by the country. In fact, it’s not even supported by their own voters.”
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Mahmood will use her speech to offer a “vision that sets a path in between that of Reform and the Greens”, the source said. She has deliberately chosen a centre-left, progressive think tank to make the speech, which will be aimed squarely at sceptical Labour MPs.
Mahmood will spell out the consequence of inaction by pointing to Reform UK’s plans to create a new deportations agency to identify, detain and deport every illegal migrant in the UK, which she will compare to President Trump’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) teams to round up undocumented migrants.
She will also target Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, over its plans to welcome more asylum seekers to the country and scrap the new 10-year rule for settlement.
A source close to Mahmood said: “If we do not restore order at the borders, ensuring fairness to local communities and protecting public services and the welfare state, and encouraging contribution and integration, the alternative is the far right raising the drawbridge and bringing havoc and chaos to Britain’s streets with ICE-style raids dividing our communities.
“Put simply, without bold action on migration, the entire future of Britain’s asylum system, the Labour Party and its values will be in jeopardy.”
The source added: “The alternative under Polanski is open borders, fuelling the trade in human trafficking and placing huge strain on communities and public services. Both seek to promote and profit from division within our communities.”
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Reform UK has dismissed the comparisons with ICE, insisting that officers would not be armed and would not be instructed to use force to detain migrants.
Mahmood visited Copenhagen in Denmark this week to learn how the Social Democrat Party increased its majority and crushed its hard-right challengers after implementing a hardline programme of immigration reforms, which drove the number of asylum claims to a 40-year low.
Her team has branded it the “Danish miracle” that offers Labour a blueprint to defeat Reform UK at the next election. Government sources pointed to how the Danish Social Democrats publicly admitted betraying their working-class communities and won them back by prioritising their wishes and “deliberately sacrificing some bourgeois support” in the process.
Speaking to The Times during her visit to Copenhagen, Mahmood said: “The levels of illegal migration are putting immense strain on our country, and our public services, creating division within communities across the country. Illegal migration is undermining the contract between government and its citizens, eroding support for the asylum system entirely.
Shabana Mahmood: Racism will rise unless we tackle immigration fears
“But Denmark shows us how to be firm but fair: removing the incentives that draw illegal migrants to their borders while providing refuge to those in genuine need. That is why we will follow the Danish model to restore order and control to our borders.”
Her speech follows weeks of private discussions with Labour MPs to minimise the rebellion. Ministers still expect about 40 MPs to oppose the changes.
Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, said that Mahmood’s hardline policies and rhetoric on immigration had cost the party votes in the Gorton & Denton by-election and said it was wrong of her to characterise her plans as progressive.
Creasy told The Times: “A progressive doesn’t speak to somebody who is fleeing rape or persecution in warzones and say: ‘Don’t get comfortable, don’t feel safe here, don’t rebuild your life.’ But that is the consequence of what the current home secretary is suggesting.
“It is difficult to see why Denmark, which has a very different culture, economy and physical location, is the right model for us to copy. I can only urge the home secretary to be true Labour, not Blue Labour, for the sake of our society and our economy,” she said.
Andy McDonald, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough & Thornaby East, said that Labour “can’t beat Reform with a Reform-lite agenda” and urged Sir Keir Starmer to ditch the immigration reforms.
He said: “Focusing so negatively and aggressively on migration is a sign of political weakness and a capitulation to Reform’s poisonous agenda. It betrays Labour values and it distorts and distracts government focus from addressing the cost of living crisis and undermines public services by attacking their workforce. The party has to change direction, change the economy for the better of the majority of society.”
Another Labour MP said: “If Shabana thinks she’s helping Keir by having this fight, she’s not. She’s pouring petrol on the divisions in the parliamentary Labour party and the widespread unhappiness with how we are doing things.”
Mahmood will be able to bypass internal opposition to some of her reforms by simple changes to immigration rules, which means they can be implemented as early as next week. Some will not even require parliamentary backing.
However, wider reforms, such as the overhaul of the asylum appeals system, will require primary legislation, which will come in the form of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill in the King’s speech in May and is unlikely to be implemented until summer 2027 at the earliest. These are likely to face a Labour rebellion in both houses of parliament.
Mahmood wants to import the “Danish miracle” to Britain. That’s the term her team have given to the lessons they learnt on a fact-finding visit to Copenhagen this week where they heard first-hand how a left-of-centre party managed to defeat a right-wing populist party flying in the polls by adopting a hardline series of asylum reforms.
The home secretary’s aides also point to how the Danish Greens also hardened their own approach to immigration, as they prepare to make the case to Labour MPs that going tough on asylum can help fend off the challenge from Reform UK and the Green Party.
In the mid-2010s, the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party was rising in the polls, peeling working-class support away from the Social Democrats.
Seeking a way back to government from four years in opposition, the leader of the Social Democrats, Mette Frederiksen, published a pamphlet that sent shockwaves through the Danish left.
Titled Retfaerdig og Realistisk (Just and Realistic), it sought to win back the working-class communities that had deserted the party in droves. It said: “You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.”
Those two sentences guided Frederiksen’s migration policies that followed and her party’s journey back into government.
Her former chief of staff, Martin Engell-Rossen, explained recently that the party did not abandon its social democratic values of protecting people fleeing danger, but said: “Migration numbers were simply so big that they could not be dealt with in a way that is sustainable for the welfare states of Denmark and other European countries. We understood even then that the migration model was broken and we needed to come up with an alternative.”
Frederiksen argued that while Denmark would not stop providing support to those fleeing danger, protection would only be temporary and would last only as long as their home country remained unsafe.
Refugees would only be able to apply for permanent settlement after eight years and only if they fulfilled a list of criteria including at least three-and-a-half years of full-time employment, Danish language qualifications and not claiming any benefits.
Frederiksen also banned refugees bringing other family members to join them for their first three years in Denmark, which was reduced to two years after the Danish government lost a legal challenge at the European Court of Human Rights.
Other punitive measures included the so-called jewellery law which enabled the authorities to confiscate valuables from asylum seekers to cover the cost of their stay in Denmark. There were only 17 reported instances of the law being applied in its first six years.
More recently the government has denied welfare payments to migrants who have been drawing benefits for three to four years and cannot speak Danish proficiently, unless they work at least 37 hours a week.
In reality, very few asylum seekers have been returned to their home country even after it has been deemed safe, as Denmark did with Syrian refugees from Damascus and the surrounding province in 2021.
Last year fewer than 200 refugees have returned to their native countries. Those who decline to do so — 330 at the last count — are left in legal limbo, living in removal centres and unable to take jobs or draw social benefits.
However what is undeniable is the fact that asylum claims in Denmark plummeted to a 40-year low in 2024. Last year there were a total of 1,961 asylum applications in Denmark. The Danes receive five times fewer per capita than in the UK.
Three years after starting to introduce their radical reforms, the Social Democrats won a resounding victory against the Danish People’s Party — running on the campaign message “you didn’t leave us, we left you” — deliberately sacrificing some bourgeois support in order to win back working-class support. Frederiksen won the election in 2019, and re-election in 2022.
Mahmood, while not adopting all of Frederiksen’s reforms, believes that the measures pursued by the Danish Social Democrats created the deterrent effect that is needed in the UK to make Britain a far less attractive place to claim asylum and believes that they offer the blueprint for Labour’s own battle with the far-right.
The home secretary also believes that her reforms can help Labour’s battle against the resurgent Greens. Her team pointed to how the left-wing Green Party hardened its own stance on immigration and won support as a result. The Danish Greens endorsed measures such as tighter oversight of religious schools, easier expulsion of foreign criminals and controlling arrival numbers to improve integration, while still backing quota refugees, and resisting repeated benefit cuts for refugees.
The day after Mahmood left Copenhagen, Frederiksen called a snap election on March 24 — one that will be watched closely by Labour election strategists.