Mahmood's migration measures signify a crunch moment for the government, writes Andrew Marr
The Home secretary Shabana Mahmood today laid out the most radical plan yet to remove refugees’ rights to stay here permanently.
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It will take not five but 20 years to win settled status. As soon as a country is deemed safe, asylum seekers from it will be deported back there.
Mahmood’s package of measures includes the right of the state to seize assets, including jewellery, from migrants, ending what she calls Britain’s excessive generosity.
It’s a crunch moment for the government.
Lots of labour MPs hate these proposals – performative cruelty, politics of the gutter, stop scapegoating, racist.
But Sir Keir Starmer has made it clear that the numbers coming across the channel constitute a national emergency which has to be tackled.
From the point of view of Labour, all the wrong people are cheering.
Tommy Robinson celebrated the news, saying “well done patriots”. Nigel Farage said the Home Secretary sounded like a Reform supporter. Perhaps most ominously of all, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader said she wanted to help.
And let us be real. This, today, is a massive victory for all of those who waved English and British flags outside asylum hotels; for the politicians and broadcasters who supported them; and those all around the country who said to pollsters that they were going to vote Reform.
The so-called Overton window – the limits of the acceptable, if you like – have well and truly shifted.
Well, that is how a democratic or plural society changes direction.
The question now is whether Keir Starmer comes under such pressure from his own party that he U-turns, drops or waters down today’s plan – or even ditches the home secretary.
Personal opinion, based on nothing more than instinct, but remembering his changes of direction on benefit cuts, winter fuel payments, and income tax – if he does, he’s finished as prime minister.
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