Shabana Mahmood: Is She as Tough as Reported?

The Home Secretary's Struggle with Deportation Policy

As a teenager, Shabana Mahmood was inspired by the deeply principled hero of the hit TV series Kavanagh QC. Watching the fictional barrister champion equal justice, the grammar school girl was inspired by his courage – and set her heart on a career in law. Unlike the prime minister and so many of his friends, Mahmood would not go on to specialize in human rights. Instead, she focused on indemnity law – an expertise that might come in useful as her department’s flagship “one in one out” deportation deal with France descends into farce.

If only Emmanuel Macron were forced to compensate the British taxpayer for his part in the scandalous failure to stop the flow of migrants to the UK, we might all feel a tiny bit better. Instead, his administration continues to take our cash while sending more migrants our way – and our supposedly “hard as nails” new Home Secretary is reduced to raging against the machine.

A Flawed Deportation Agreement

It is now more than two months since Sir Keir Starmer announced his flagship returns agreement with France, the only specific policy he has come up with to address the Channel boats crisis, beyond his laughable pledge to “smash the vile people smuggling gangs” behind the crossings. After robotically repeating this phrase for a year, during which time the people traffickers only got bolder, increasing boat sizes and passenger loads, he placed his hopes in an initiative which is even more challenging to explain with a straight face.

Under the bizarre “swap a foreigner” scheme, the UK is to accept one pre-approved asylum seeker from France for every chancer we send back. Again and again, voters were promised that the first deportations were “imminent,” only for protesters, charities and human rights lawyers to block planned deportations. After a week of shambles, in the tiniest of triumphs, yesterday the Home Office finally managed to get a single migrant onto a Paris-bound flight. Unbelievably, there are no guarantees from the French that the individual in question won’t simply make his way back.

At this pitiful rate of one deportation a week, it will take more than 150 years just to remove the 8787 Channel migrants that have arrived since July, when the policy was announced.

The Home Secretary's Response

While her officials thrash around like a shoal of fish enmeshed in a human rights net, the Home Secretary herself has resorted to lashing out at the migrants themselves, accusing those who lodge spurious last minute legal challenges of “making a mockery of our laws.” What on earth does she expect – honourable behaviour? In the fight to secure our borders, we are up against the desperate, the criminal, and the opportunistic. Aided and abetted by “refugees welcome” charities (some, irony of ironies, funded by the Home Office itself) of course they are going to fight dirty!

Channelling her inner Kavanagh QC, Mahmood proclaims that she will “robustly defend the British public’s priorities” – when she knows full well that she can’t. Baring precisely no teeth – having been (like all her recent predecessors) defanged by our continuing membership of the European Convention on Human Rights – she is less paper tiger than cuddly koala.

A Questionable Reputation

It is not hard to see what the Home Secretary is trying to do as the policy collapses around her: claw back some credibility, by pretending to position herself on the side of the British people against fake asylum seekers aided by lefty lawyers. The trouble is that she makes a hopelessly unconvincing champion of the cause. This is after all the same woman who dismissed the Rwanda scheme as an inhumane “gimmick,” repeatedly opposing deportations and off-shore schemes during the Tory years. As Shadow Justice Secretary, she voted against the 2023 Illegal Migration Act.

In Mahmood’s defence, she has been in the job less than two weeks. Her appointment in the re-shuffle triggered by the resignation of Angela Rayner was accompanied by much Labour briefing about how tough she is. Welcoming her new role, a gushing Wes Streeting went so far as to describe her as “hard as nails.” Quite what this reputation is based on is hard to ascertain. Perhaps it is something to do with her support for chemical castration for sex offenders? A pilot scheme for volunteers is one of her more interesting legacies as Justice Secretary.

Her suggestion that this radical approach to serial rapists and paedophiles might one day become mandatory takes (so to speak) some balls. Here’s hoping that when it comes to the Channel migrant crisis, she makes like her hero Kavanagh, and surprises us all.