Mahmood v Hermer

Immigration reforms are dead on arrival.

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After the omnishambles pre – budget Labour have come out swinging on immigration. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood MP is in no mood to compromise. She is going to introduce reforms to the House of Commons in an attempt to shut down the out of control immigration numbers, by introducing a system close to Denmark.

Mahmood found her inner Farage, “I can see — and I know my colleagues can — that illegal migration is tearing our country apart. It’s our job as a Labour government to unite our country and if we don’t sort this out, I think our country becomes much more divided.”

Even in her constituency of Birmingham Ladywood, one of the most diverse areas of the country, Mahmood said that migration was causing problems. “I think that people rightly feel that the pace and the scale of what we’ve seen is out of control. It’s putting a huge amount of pressure on communities,” she said. “My patch is 70 percent non-white, but immigration is something that’s causing just as much concern here as it does all across other parts of the country.”

The changes Mahmood wants to introduce are significant. They include increasing the time an asylum seeker must be in the country before claiming indefinite leave to remain from about 5 to 20 years. The new 20-year qualifying period will apply to those who arrive illegally, such as in small boats or in lorries and claim asylum, or those who overstay their visas and then claim. It will be the longest route to settlement in Europe; Denmark is second, with an eight-year pathway.

The 20 year time period can be reduced if you enter specific work or study routes, which seems like a good way to undermine the entire system if you ask me.

“Mahmood will also revoke the statutory duty to provide support for asylum seekers. The government intends to use legislation to repeal a European Union directive that underpins the requirement.

Housing and weekly allowances will be removed from those who have a right to work and can support themselves but choose not to. Those who break the law will also face having their support withdrawn.”

I find it amazing that there is still an EU directive on the books that imposes a statutory duty to provide benefits to asylum seekers. So you break into Britain on the back of lorry and the EU says you have to be given benefits and accommodation. Isn’t this kind of stuff the reason why the whole country was torn apart over Brexit? That directive should have been revoked the minute Brexit was finalised by the Tories.

Mahmood will also announce reforms to the application of key elements of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including article 8, the right to a family life. She is expected to raise the need for international reform of article 3, covering torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Both have been blamed for hindering Britain’s ability to remove illegal migrants and failed asylum seekers.

Mahmood is loving Denmark right now. Labour have decided to try to make Britain a hostile environment for asylum seekers, which is fine by me. But then they probably should not have dumped the Rwanda scheme at a cost of at least £700 million and the huge amount of Parliamentary time used up to get the damn thing passed.

Now two years after dumping Rwanda, Britain is to make like Denmark. Denmark, although much smaller, is a good example of how illegal immigration can be reduced when there is a will.

In the year to June, a total of 111,000 people claimed asylum in the UK. In the year ending March, 172,798 people were granted Indefinite Leave to Remain.

In contrast, in Denmark (population of 6 million) from Jan to September there were only 1490 applications for alyssum. Last year Denmark granted asylum in only 860 cases. (860!)

We can also compare this to Ireland (population of the Republic is 5.4 million) according to me who took it from the Sunday Times a while ago.

The Sunday Times: “Last year 18,555 people came here seeking international protection, after more than 13,000 applied for asylum in each of the two previous years.” For clarity.

2024 – 18,555 claimed international protection in Ireland.

2023 – 13,000 claimed international protection in Ireland.

2022 – also 13,000 came (which seems a bit off to me.)

Now before you all get super-duper excited, remember these new Mahmood rules will only apply going forward. So the 30,000 lovely Afghanis that were actually flown into Blighty will stay.

In Ireland we are only at the ‘let’s have a heated debate’ part of the debate. Tánaiste Simon Harris has been kite flying for the last two weeks saying immigration numbers are too high which as you can imagine triggered a lot of pushback. Some even called it “dog whistling.”

Dog whistling is that handy phrase you deploy to call something racist even though there is not evidence of it being racist. You cannot point to anything explicitly racist about the policy. There are people who, despite not being racist themselves, will say that what other people say is racist because they have special powers of understanding.

Simon Harris is ‘dog whistling’ using his powers of telepathy or pigeon carrier or white smoke to all the raging racists out there that he’s about to get a whole lot more racist. Racist up to his eyes is Simon (Simon Harris who doesn’t believe in anything ever, other than power. Everyone knows that.)

The lefty can sense this, he understands this magical signal from the politician in question. Lefty understands the racist undertones in what politicians are saying, even though he himself is not a racist. Sure.

Where was I? Mahamood has gone full Trump by also announcing a “Trump-style visa ban on three countries Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo” if they do not start taking back more illegal migrants and criminals. Great stuff, fabulous keep going. Now I am always one to take the win when it comes but this has a long way to go before it becomes an actual legislative win.

The Home Secretary Mahmood will now have to deal with all the ‘pushback’ from the media and those in her party. The airwaves will be filled with those who think this is racist, the Refugee Council telling us long stories of woe about whatever Afghani male of 22 who broke into the back of the lorry. For some reason we are supposed to care about him over and above all the other people who care about. I don’t, so dry your eyes.

Photo by Jannik on Unsplash

I do care about the 33 year old woman who was allegedly raped on a beach in Brighton by “two Egyptian citizens and an Iranian, who all arrived in Britain via small boats.” Of course they did.

Radio 4 will get on some charity worker to tell us why we should prioritise the safety of military aged men such as Karin al-Danasurt, 20 and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, both Egyptian citizens and Abdulla Ahmadi, 25, an Iranian living in Crewe. They were each charged with two counts of rape.

On and on and on it will go. Then there are Labour’s own left wing MPs who will try to sink this legislation like they did welfare reform. It has got to get through the government lawyers led by Attorney General Lord Hermer KC, past the first, second and third reading of the House of Commons, past the House of Lords, all the way to the desk of the King for Royal Assent.

And then, should this thing get through all that without amendments designed to kill it, it must survive the attempt by the army of human rights lawyers trying to bring it down by judicial review on the other side.

In fact you can bet your bottom pound that this will end up Strasbourg as Lord Sumption explained on radio 4, “Now, if we pass an act in the UK that tells judges to interpret the convention in a particular way and the Strasbourg court says it should be interpreted in a different way, then the Strasbourg court will hold us to have violated the convention, we will then have a direct conflict between our international obligations under the convention and our domestic legislation.”

International obligations? Remind me again what AG Lord Hermer KC said about international law – oh that the UK would always abide by their international obligations. Britain must uphold international law and that this was a fight with the Tories he was willing to have.

Hermer: “I’m not really sure what they’re driving at. If they are criticising the government because it wants to comply with international law, if they want to pick a fight with the government because it says international law is important and that we want to uphold international law, then that’s a fight I’d quite look forward to.”

The reality is Mahmood’s proposed reforms are very unlikely to get past AG Lord Hermer KC. Here he is in 2023 podcast discussing how to bring down the Rwanda Bill. He says at the end of the podcast that he hopes there will be pushback both before and after the bill is passed. It was the first thing Labour dumped when they got into power.

Lord Hermer KC is now the Attorney General and will be advising the government on the legality of Mahmood’s reforms including their compliance with international law which Hermer views as absolutely fundamental.

Sorry, but these proposed reforms are dead of arrival despite the headlines.