The first by-election victory for the Green Party was a seismic enough event. It overturned a Labour majority of more than 13,000 votes in a constituency which had been a safe Labour seat since Labour’s wipe out at the hands of the National Government in 1931 in the aftermath of Ramsey MacDonald’s desertion of Labour over cuts to unemployment benefit in that year’s emergency budget.
This was only the second by election since 1945 in which neither of the Big Two parties of government finished in first or second place. In this respect, the Labour loss was qualitatively different to its defeats in the 1980s to the breakaway Social Democratic Party; to the SNP in Hamilton in 1967 or Govan in 1988 or the usual mid-term kickings that unpopular governments receive. It was a real alarm signal; that Labour’s traditional electoral coalition of manual working class, progressive middle class and BME voters was sundering past the point of return. The former segment is deemed to be switching to Reform UK, much of the middle segment and the South Asian Muslim portions of the BME electorate have gone over to the Greens in what is now an era of five party politics in England (Labour also faces nationalist challenges in Scotland and Wales.). The issue of migration with all the emotivism of the ‘small boats’ imagery; nativist fears for the safety of ‘our women and girls’ at the hands of male predators from ‘alien’ cultures; sympathy for the plight of migrants and refugees and abhorrence of the racist tenor of migration discourse is a major pivot on which debates on Labour’s hang. It is in this context that the latest migration proposals by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood need to be understood.
But for the outbreak of the Iran war, the roll out of the Home Secretary’s latest migration policy would arguably have been the top political story coming as it did in the wake of Labour’s chastening defeat in Gorton and Denton. There are five key changes to existing asylum and refugee support. Firstly, under the new rules, those granted refugee protection will have this reviewed every thirty months whereas before refugees were granted five years leave to remain and after that could apply for indefinite leave to remain. Now should their country of origin be no longer deemed as dangerous, the government can return them. These changes have been signed into law by Mahmood without the need for a vote. In practice, many refugees will continue to qualify as such given the intractable nature of conflicts in countries such as Sudan and Eritrea along with the continuing conflicts across the Middle East.[1]
Secondly, on visas, Mahmood has temporarily halted new study visas for students from Cameroon, Sudan, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, as well as skilled worker visas from Afghanistan only on the grounds that the high numbers of arrivals on those visas who went on to claim asylum and the refusal of those countries to take back people whose claims had been rejected. Critics point out that Mahmood has just closed off a set of safe and legal routes for people who come from these four countries where conflict, war and human rights abuses persist. Thirdly, the Home Office is piloting a new scheme in which 150 families of failed asylum seekers resident in hotels will be offered payments of up to £40,000 to return voluntarily to their countries. These families have already been identified, contacted, and have seven days to accept the offer or face forcible removal.[2]
Fourthly, the government is changing the law so that it no longer has a legal duty to provide financial support to asylum seekers, and will now stop payments to anyone working illegally, convicted of a crime or of independent financial means. Provisions have existed for many years granting asylum seekers the right to work if their initial asylum claim has not been determined after twelve months of their own, though Mahmood is now expanding the number of jobs for which they can apply. In practice, however, individual asylum seekers will have to receive permission to work from the Home Office. Finally, Mahmood is doubling the length of time required before many migrants can acquire settlement rights from five to ten years. Refugees and those accessed benefits after being granted limited leave to remain may have to wait twenty years.[3]
In the aftermath of the Gorton and Denton by election defeat, Mahmood’s migration proposals are acting as lightening rod for backbenchers in the PLP and even some on the front bench who are urging Keir Starmer’s government to tack left in order to claim back those progressive voters who, it is feared, are deserting Labour in droves to the Greens and Liberal Democrats and who have been dismayed by the lack of a progressive offer after Gorton and Denton and who were distinctly unimpressed by Starmer’s response in the form of a letter to MPs in which he repeated his “extremist” attack line on Zack Polanksi’s party due to its advocacy of drug liberalisation and withdrawal from NATO while not mentioning anything about the cost of living.[4]
Just as the government’s welfare reform proposals last year galvanised concerned MPs into action, so a similar process is unfolding with migration and asylum. A letter drafted by Tony Vaughan, MP for Folkestone and Hythe (coincidentally or not, an embarkment point for the traffic of small boats across the English Channel) has attracted the signatures of a hundred of his PLP colleagues, says that the proposals undermined the government’s commitment to integration and social cohesion, saying that “we can change our immigration system for the better without forgetting who we are as a Labour Party” and that public confidence in the asylum system would not be restored “by threatening to forcibly remove refugees who have lived here lawfully for 15 to 20 years.”
But for the outbreak of the Iran war, the roll out of the Home Secretary’s latest migration policy would arguably have been the top political story coming as it did in the wake of Labour’s chastening defeat in Gorton and Denton. There are five key changes to existing asylum and refugee support. Firstly, under the new rules, those granted refugee protection will have this reviewed every thirty months whereas before refugees were granted five years leave to remain and after that could apply for indefinite leave to remain. Now should their country of origin be no longer deemed as dangerous, the government can return them. These changes have been signed into law by Mahmood without the need for a vote. In practice, many refugees will continue to qualify as such given the intractable nature of conflicts in countries such as Sudan and Eritrea along with the continuing conflicts across the Middle East.[1]
Secondly, on visas, Mahmood has temporarily halted new study visas for students from Cameroon, Sudan, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, as well as skilled worker visas from Afghanistan only on the grounds that the high numbers of arrivals on those visas who went on to claim asylum and the refusal of those countries to take back people whose claims had been rejected. Critics point out that Mahmood has just closed off a set of safe and legal routes for people who come from these four countries where conflict, war and human rights abuses persist. Thirdly, the Home Office is piloting a new scheme in which 150 families of failed asylum seekers resident in hotels will be offered payments of up to £40,000 to return voluntarily to their countries. These families have already been identified, contacted, and have seven days to accept the offer or face forcible removal.[2]
Fourthly, the government is changing the law so that it no longer has a legal duty to provide financial support to asylum seekers, and will now stop payments to anyone working illegally, convicted of a crime or of independent financial means. Provisions have existed for many years granting asylum seekers the right to work if their initial asylum claim has not been determined after twelve months of their own, though Mahmood is now expanding the number of jobs for which they can apply. In practice, however, individual asylum seekers will have to receive permission to work from the Home Office. Finally, Mahmood is doubling the length of time required before many migrants can acquire settlement rights from five to ten years. Refugees and those accessed benefits after being granted limited leave to remain may have to wait twenty years.[3]
In the aftermath of the Gorton and Denton by election defeat, Mahmood’s migration proposals are acting as lightening rod for backbenchers in the PLP and even some on the front bench who are urging Keir Starmer’s government to tack left in order to claim back those progressive voters who, it is feared, are deserting Labour in droves to the Greens and Liberal Democrats and who have been dismayed by the lack of a progressive offer after Gorton and Denton and who were distinctly unimpressed by Starmer’s response in the form of a letter to MPs in which he repeated his “extremist” attack line on Zack Polanksi’s party due to its advocacy of drug liberalisation and withdrawal from NATO while not mentioning anything about the cost of living.[4]
Just as the government’s welfare reform proposals last year galvanised concerned MPs into action, so a similar process is unfolding with migration and asylum. A letter drafted by Tony Vaughan, MP for Folkestone and Hythe (coincidentally or not, an embarkment point for the traffic of small boats across the English Channel) has attracted the signatures of a hundred of his PLP colleagues, says that the proposals undermined the government’s commitment to integration and social cohesion, saying that “we can change our immigration system for the better without forgetting who we are as a Labour Party” and that public confidence in the asylum system would not be restored “by threatening to forcibly remove refugees who have lived here lawfully for 15 to 20 years.”
In the same vein, for the campaigning MP Stella Creasy, opposition to the proposals represented “True Labour not Blue Labour” (the socially conservative and economically dirigiste faction to which Mahmood belongs and whose most high-profile figure was the departed Svengali Morgan MacSweeney). In her opinion “There’s no ‘fairness’ in repeatedly spending money on asking victims of trafficking and civil war if they are still in that category’ or in ‘keeping Ukrainians, Iranians [and] Afghans alike in a perpetual state of war.’ She also warns of “the inevitable Windrush-style scandal coming that none of us stood on a manifesto to implement.” For Sarah Owen, a leader of the Tribune group of centre-left Labour MPs, the spectre of Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention of children arises with the proposal to deport children and families and that “Moving the goalposts who have upped their lives to work in and for our country is unjustifiable.”[5]
The urgency to court progressive voters through oppositional stances on Mahmood’s asylum and immigration policies is, for their proponents, starkly highlighted by data circulated by senior Labour politicians suggesting that Labour could drop from first to fourth place in London in the forthcoming local government elections in May, losing control of all but two of their councils, with the Greens surging into first place. A new data modelling technique from the data firm Bombe, which correctly predicted the Gorton and Denton by-election result, forecasts that Labour, which holds 21 boroughs in London, could lose flagship authorities such as Hackney and Lambeth to the Greens. Labour is projected to lose more than half its council seats in the Prime Minister’s backyard, Camden, which would fall to no overall control. Labour could be left with an outright majority in only Newham and Redbridge councils. The Greens, if they were to run candidates in every ward, could also take Lewisham, Waltham Forest, and Greenwich, as well as Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow, and Brent. According to the Bombe model, Labour could lose more than half of its council seats in the capital – 741. The Greens would pick up 530, the Tories 77 and the Liberal Democrats 72. Nine boroughs would be no overall control, with Greens the largest party in four, Labour in two and one each for Reform and the Tories. The Lib Dems and Labour would have the same number of seats in Southwark, while the Tories and Greens would be neck-and-neck in Westminster.[6]
This chronicle of carnage foretold represents for Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, an “existential threat” for Labour in May and who warns “If we don’t unite progressives, we risk opening the door to the darkness and division of Reform.” For Tony Travers, professor of government at the London School of Economics, this prospective “political earthquake” for Labour is the consequence of the national party having “taken London for granted for years” and summoning “all their efforts on targeting Reform-prone areas” which has led “to this huge flank exposed on their left.” In the words of one Labour source “the dead end of McSweeneyism must be abandoned before it’s too late.” There has to be a thumbs down for those like the departed Chief of Staff “who ridicule Labour values and think we can afford to sacrifice our core vote by mimicking the performative cruelty of Suella Braverman.”[7]
As well as electoral calculus, there is an overwhelming moral imperative for the Hundred to oppose the Mahmood proposals when one considers the explicitly racist history of British immigration policy. For by increasing periods for application for UK citizenship and rights to remain by decades and by preventing family unions for so many categories of migrants, this Labour government seems determined to replicate the “hostile environment” for refugees of Theresa May when she was Home Secretary which created the conditions for the Windrush Scandal. And in relation to the Caribbean, the Home Office is continuing with the policies that have fractured generations of families. Take the case of eight-year-old Lati-Yana Stephanie Brown left destitute in Jamaica after the devastation of Hurricane Melissa in late October. But after her UK-resident parents appealed for the Home Office to speed up her visa application, officials rejected it and Lari-Yana has been left to sleep on the floor of her elderly grandmother’s destroyed home[8].
But the rejection was based on factual errors, according to Lati-Yana’s mother Kerrian Bigby. Correspondence with Dawn Butler, her MP, raised concerns about “misrepresentations” in the decision notice including the claim that Bigby does not have full parental responsibility, which she says is false. The doubling down by the Home Office on this decision speaks to the historical truth and reality that Britain’s immigration system routinely separates children from their parents with little regard for the trauma that follows in its wake.[9]
In Caribbean history, family separation was built into the slavery system. And by the effects of the 1971 Immigration Act which made it harder for “New” Commonwealth citizens to enter the UK and the intergeneration scars caused by the leaving behind of thousands in the Caribbean including the “barrel children,” sustained by love, yet carrying the weight of separation have lasted to this day. The author Nadine White relates how her father never came to terms with his separation from his parents right up to his death at the age of 49.[10]
For the author and journalist George Monbiot, a descendant of East European Jewish refugees, the current discourse and received prejudices around migrants bear more than uncanny echoes of migration policy and debate almost exactly a century ago. For in 1924, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought to appease right wing opinion Sir William Joynson-Hicks as home secretary. Having in the words of Martin Pugh in his 2005 book Hurrah for the Blackshirts! “established himself as an unapologetic antisemite,” in post he “raised the hurdle” for immigrants to achieve “naturalisation” (equivalent to indefinite leave to remain) “from five to 10 years, and to 15 years for Russians”. “Russians” tended to mean Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms and other persecutions. As the historian David Cesarani has noted, the home secretary “issued instructions to immigration to increase their vigilance and never to give the benefit of the doubt to an alien attempting to enter the country.” He visited the ports “to examine the tighter procedures and encourage officials to greater zeal.” While the current incumbent at the Home Office may not be taking quite such a hands-on approach, and while Shabana Mahmood’s pronouncements may lack the explicit nativist prejudices of Joynson-Hicks, there is more than an echo of history in her policies.[11]
The zones of public opinion then, as now, were flooded, Steve Bannon-style of the ordure of paranoia, misinformation, and nativist prejudice around immigrants. The right wing press had for two decades led hues and cries around the “flood” of “aliens” and “undesirables”, code for Jews who were seen as “un-English”, refusing to assimilate, who “leeched” off the state, were threats to “white women”, were blamed for housing shortages and unemployment and put out conspiracies about the creation of a Jewish world order. Fast forward a hundred years and right-wing media spaces are agog with accusations that Muslims and immigrants fail to assimilate; that they are a threat to white womanhood; take jobs and houses from the natives and that Muslims in Britain seek to create an Islamic world order in the form of a global caliphate.[12]
Economic metrics also stack up against the Home Secretary’s new immigration and asylum regime. For new visa restrictions have hit middle-skilled jobs across a wide range of industries faster than domestic training and higher wages can address the problem. A growing number of job vacancies have emerged for butchers, chefs, cancer scientists, deckhands, and sheepshearers. Net migration has fallen by 78% in two years, dropping from a record peak of 944,000 in early 2023 to about 204,000 in the year ending June 2025. A report from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory found little evidence to support the government’s belief that employers would train and rely on domestic staff. It found that labour shortages are driven by poor pay and conditions, not just lack of skills, leaving sectors such as social care in limbo without domestic reform.[13]
Professor Samra Turajlic, director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, in referencing the loss of a prospective scientist to her research programme due to the cumulative cost of visa fees, healthcare surcharges and uncertainty over settlement, writes that the proposed changes to indefinite leave to remain are stoking anxiety. The doubling of the waiting period for settlement from five to ten years would affect the majority of internationally recruited researchers at her institute. Arguing that stability is a necessity for long-term scientific success as scientific breakthroughs develop over many years and that it is necessary for UK remaining globally competitive when recruiting international talent, Professor Turajlic emphasises that the current five-year pathway to settlement must be retained for scientists, along with the three-year fast-track route for those on global talent visas.[14]
It is to be hoped that these moral, economic, and political arguments against the Home Secretary’s migration proposals gain greater traction and will reach critical mass within the Parliamentary Labour Party and wider sections of the labour movement. After all, to quote Harold Wilson, the Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.
The urgency to court progressive voters through oppositional stances on Mahmood’s asylum and immigration policies is, for their proponents, starkly highlighted by data circulated by senior Labour politicians suggesting that Labour could drop from first to fourth place in London in the forthcoming local government elections in May, losing control of all but two of their councils, with the Greens surging into first place. A new data modelling technique from the data firm Bombe, which correctly predicted the Gorton and Denton by-election result, forecasts that Labour, which holds 21 boroughs in London, could lose flagship authorities such as Hackney and Lambeth to the Greens. Labour is projected to lose more than half its council seats in the Prime Minister’s backyard, Camden, which would fall to no overall control. Labour could be left with an outright majority in only Newham and Redbridge councils. The Greens, if they were to run candidates in every ward, could also take Lewisham, Waltham Forest, and Greenwich, as well as Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow, and Brent. According to the Bombe model, Labour could lose more than half of its council seats in the capital – 741. The Greens would pick up 530, the Tories 77 and the Liberal Democrats 72. Nine boroughs would be no overall control, with Greens the largest party in four, Labour in two and one each for Reform and the Tories. The Lib Dems and Labour would have the same number of seats in Southwark, while the Tories and Greens would be neck-and-neck in Westminster.[6]
This chronicle of carnage foretold represents for Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, an “existential threat” for Labour in May and who warns “If we don’t unite progressives, we risk opening the door to the darkness and division of Reform.” For Tony Travers, professor of government at the London School of Economics, this prospective “political earthquake” for Labour is the consequence of the national party having “taken London for granted for years” and summoning “all their efforts on targeting Reform-prone areas” which has led “to this huge flank exposed on their left.” In the words of one Labour source “the dead end of McSweeneyism must be abandoned before it’s too late.” There has to be a thumbs down for those like the departed Chief of Staff “who ridicule Labour values and think we can afford to sacrifice our core vote by mimicking the performative cruelty of Suella Braverman.”[7]
As well as electoral calculus, there is an overwhelming moral imperative for the Hundred to oppose the Mahmood proposals when one considers the explicitly racist history of British immigration policy. For by increasing periods for application for UK citizenship and rights to remain by decades and by preventing family unions for so many categories of migrants, this Labour government seems determined to replicate the “hostile environment” for refugees of Theresa May when she was Home Secretary which created the conditions for the Windrush Scandal. And in relation to the Caribbean, the Home Office is continuing with the policies that have fractured generations of families. Take the case of eight-year-old Lati-Yana Stephanie Brown left destitute in Jamaica after the devastation of Hurricane Melissa in late October. But after her UK-resident parents appealed for the Home Office to speed up her visa application, officials rejected it and Lari-Yana has been left to sleep on the floor of her elderly grandmother’s destroyed home[8].
But the rejection was based on factual errors, according to Lati-Yana’s mother Kerrian Bigby. Correspondence with Dawn Butler, her MP, raised concerns about “misrepresentations” in the decision notice including the claim that Bigby does not have full parental responsibility, which she says is false. The doubling down by the Home Office on this decision speaks to the historical truth and reality that Britain’s immigration system routinely separates children from their parents with little regard for the trauma that follows in its wake.[9]
In Caribbean history, family separation was built into the slavery system. And by the effects of the 1971 Immigration Act which made it harder for “New” Commonwealth citizens to enter the UK and the intergeneration scars caused by the leaving behind of thousands in the Caribbean including the “barrel children,” sustained by love, yet carrying the weight of separation have lasted to this day. The author Nadine White relates how her father never came to terms with his separation from his parents right up to his death at the age of 49.[10]
For the author and journalist George Monbiot, a descendant of East European Jewish refugees, the current discourse and received prejudices around migrants bear more than uncanny echoes of migration policy and debate almost exactly a century ago. For in 1924, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought to appease right wing opinion Sir William Joynson-Hicks as home secretary. Having in the words of Martin Pugh in his 2005 book Hurrah for the Blackshirts! “established himself as an unapologetic antisemite,” in post he “raised the hurdle” for immigrants to achieve “naturalisation” (equivalent to indefinite leave to remain) “from five to 10 years, and to 15 years for Russians”. “Russians” tended to mean Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms and other persecutions. As the historian David Cesarani has noted, the home secretary “issued instructions to immigration to increase their vigilance and never to give the benefit of the doubt to an alien attempting to enter the country.” He visited the ports “to examine the tighter procedures and encourage officials to greater zeal.” While the current incumbent at the Home Office may not be taking quite such a hands-on approach, and while Shabana Mahmood’s pronouncements may lack the explicit nativist prejudices of Joynson-Hicks, there is more than an echo of history in her policies.[11]
The zones of public opinion then, as now, were flooded, Steve Bannon-style of the ordure of paranoia, misinformation, and nativist prejudice around immigrants. The right wing press had for two decades led hues and cries around the “flood” of “aliens” and “undesirables”, code for Jews who were seen as “un-English”, refusing to assimilate, who “leeched” off the state, were threats to “white women”, were blamed for housing shortages and unemployment and put out conspiracies about the creation of a Jewish world order. Fast forward a hundred years and right-wing media spaces are agog with accusations that Muslims and immigrants fail to assimilate; that they are a threat to white womanhood; take jobs and houses from the natives and that Muslims in Britain seek to create an Islamic world order in the form of a global caliphate.[12]
Economic metrics also stack up against the Home Secretary’s new immigration and asylum regime. For new visa restrictions have hit middle-skilled jobs across a wide range of industries faster than domestic training and higher wages can address the problem. A growing number of job vacancies have emerged for butchers, chefs, cancer scientists, deckhands, and sheepshearers. Net migration has fallen by 78% in two years, dropping from a record peak of 944,000 in early 2023 to about 204,000 in the year ending June 2025. A report from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory found little evidence to support the government’s belief that employers would train and rely on domestic staff. It found that labour shortages are driven by poor pay and conditions, not just lack of skills, leaving sectors such as social care in limbo without domestic reform.[13]
Professor Samra Turajlic, director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, in referencing the loss of a prospective scientist to her research programme due to the cumulative cost of visa fees, healthcare surcharges and uncertainty over settlement, writes that the proposed changes to indefinite leave to remain are stoking anxiety. The doubling of the waiting period for settlement from five to ten years would affect the majority of internationally recruited researchers at her institute. Arguing that stability is a necessity for long-term scientific success as scientific breakthroughs develop over many years and that it is necessary for UK remaining globally competitive when recruiting international talent, Professor Turajlic emphasises that the current five-year pathway to settlement must be retained for scientists, along with the three-year fast-track route for those on global talent visas.[14]
It is to be hoped that these moral, economic, and political arguments against the Home Secretary’s migration proposals gain greater traction and will reach critical mass within the Parliamentary Labour Party and wider sections of the labour movement. After all, to quote Harold Wilson, the Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.
References
[1] Diane Taylor and Kiran Stacey. Asylum system in flux. Refugee status and visa brake applied. The Guardian. 6 March 2026 p.15
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ben Quinn Analysis. Backbenchers riled over what party says on migration – and what it doesn’t on economy. The Guardian. 6 March 2026 p.15
[5] Kiran Stacey and Diane Taylor. Mahmood mimics Trump with her refugee proposals, say Labour MPs. The Guardian. 6 March 2026 pp. 1 and 14
[6] Pippa Crear. Labour ‘must court progressives to avoid catastrophe. The Guardian. 7 March 2026 p.14
[7] Ibid
[8] Nadine White. Whitehall is still tearing Caribbean families apart. Guardian Opinion. 2 December 2025 p.3
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] George Monbiot. It’s 2026 – time to stop putting new gloss on old bigotries. The Guardian Journal. 5 March 2026 pp.1-2
[12] Ibid, p.2
[13] John Simpson & Catherine Nellan. Immigration revolt against Mahmood’s plans grows. The Observer. 8 March 2026 p.12.
[14] Samra Turajlic. Offer scientists stability or the UK will lose out in economic growth and health. The Observer. 8 March 2026 p.32
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
