A senior Home Office official, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive policy details, estimates the changes could extend to thousands of individuals. They would not rule out asylum seekers deemed to have broken the law being forced into destitution and rough sleeping in the process.
Mahmood will address critics who will balk at this by arguing that if citizens don’t trust the state to fix what is one of their top priorities then “there is no space for Labour values” to be realized.
“Restoring order and control at our border is not a betrayal of Labour values, it is an embodiment of them, and it is the necessary condition for a Labour government to achieve anything it hopes to,” Mahmood is expected to tell the center-left IPPR think tank, according to extracts released in advance.
She will add: “A loss of control breeds fear, and when fearful people turn inwards their vision of this country narrows. Their patriotism turns into something smaller, something darker, an ethno-nationalism emerges. The idea of a greater Britain gives way to the lure of a littler England. And other voices – voices to the far right – take hold.”
‘Soft-left’ jitters
But Mahmood’s pitch may fall on unreceptive ears in her own party. The bulk of Labour MPs on the party’s so-called “soft-left” have only been made more jittery by the catastrophic defeat inflicted on them from the left in the Gorton and Denton by-election last week.
In that contest, the triumphant Greens appealed to younger progressives as well as Muslim voters to overturn nearly a century of Labour representation in the south Manchester seat. Even worse, Farage’s Reform came second, pushing Keir Starmer’s ruling party into a distant third.