A treat for fans of funeral pyres in the Commons today as Shabana Mahmood gave her much anticipated statement on changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain for migrants. After taking a supposedly hard line under Sir Keir, the arrival of the Great Triviality into Downing Street – accompanied by Miatta Fahnbulleh, Paraffin Powell and Big Ange, all of whom are said to be less than impressed with the Home Secretary’s past tone, has seen Shabana melt from hardliner to marshmallow.
The statement majored on ‘fair play’. Mahmood claimed to be achieving this by altering the financial and time requirements to earn indefinite leave. It was originally the case that she wanted to make 15 years the number required for ILR: but today, for care-workers, this plan was scrapped. She made some almost comic statements such as implying that the welfare state was some sort of ‘option’ for migrants to call upon – as if some were ever not going to call upon it. She made out that requiring care workers to earn at least £25,000 was some sort of ‘tough cookie’ proposal – when it is less than the new minimum wage.
Inevitably, she focused much on the care sector, saying they had ‘answered our call’ – making liberal use of the language of Windrush. Later, however, Mahmood noted that roughly half of the care workers who’d responded to her consultation said they planned to exit the sector after obtaining ILR. Thus, presumably, defeating the entire point of such a visa. Perhaps those who answered the call thought it was actually for someone else?
‘Robert Jenrick asked why the Home Secretary hadn’t considered her position in light of the U-turn. Cue more abuse – and a non-answer.’
In his response, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp accused Mahmood of obliterating her reputation as someone willing to do something about immigration. He highlighted just a few of the system’s current absurdities, such as the fact that we have awarded 106 high-skilled visas to a kebab shop. If an individual behaved like the British state does in light of such obvious scamming, they’d have their bank account signed over to a relative with lasting power of attorney, their driving licence taken away and a ‘NO ROGUE TRADERS’ sticker put on the frosted glass of their bungalow.
Yet for most of the government benches this was all borderline racist flapping. Bassetlaw MP Jo White giggled all the way through. Others smirked or howled or chatted to each other, as if this wasn’t the main political issue facing the country but a Karaoke number they didn’t much care for.
Chief among those not taking things seriously was Mahmood herself who appeared extremely smug for someone who had just climbed down on much of what she had previously promised. Her only response to Philp was ‘the Tories were worse’, and ‘you should apologise’. She refused to engage with ‘political rhetoric’ when asked why she’d U-turned on her previous position. Peter Seller would have been proud: ‘no political rhetoric in Parliament’ was all a bit ‘no fighting in the war room’. This is one of the most damaging aspects of the Boriswave – anything less than the insanely high watermark of Johnson’s time can be spun as some sort of victory, or ‘being hardline’.
The other is that nobody on the opposition benches can make any point about the current situation being a disaster without baboonish yelling erupting from the government benches about the Tories’ own catastrophic record. Few Conservative MPs turned up to speak. Sir Edward Leigh sighed, through the bellowing, that no amount of ‘sackcloth and ashes’ would seem to be enough. The long shafting of the Johnson years continues – but in this respect, as with so many things, he managed to put party before country.
With the Tories MIA, it fell to Reform to provide opposition to the madness in front of them. Robert Jenrick asked why the Home Secretary hadn’t considered her position in light of the U-turn. Cue more abuse – and a non-answer.
The Lib Dem interventions were mostly about how this was all really a Brexit problem. Even Mahmood managed to score points off this; finally confronted with people less in touch with reality than she was. Amusingly one Lib Dem MP had found himself in the real crucible of the debate – somehow stuck between the Gaza Independents, Jim Allister of the Traditional Ulster Voice, Reform and Jeremy Corbyn. The SNP tried to make a case that any retrospective action against those already here was ‘unfair’ which given they want to turn Hadrian’s Wall into the Mac-Maginot line is a bit rich.
By far the highest attendance came from Labour, though almost all their MPs seemed to suggest that this obvious softening of the Home Secretary’s position didn’t go far enough. The gulf between the views of the British public and those of their elected representatives has never felt wider than on this issue. This House of Commons today, again and again, churned out absurdly pro-mass migration views that reflect a small minority even among Labour and Lib Dem voters.
Pre-eminent among these abdicators from reality was the reliably wrong Stella Creasy, who had come dressed as an evacuee and shook her head in purse-lipped fury, as if Mahmood were Mussolini. Emily Thornberry – the only Marlboro Red ever to be given a Damehood – growled a question about when a Pakistani constituent could claim disability benefits for his son, while John McDonnell purported to misunderstand the new times to earn ILR. These people presumably won’t be satisfied until there are no immigration rules whatsoever. One almost wishes it were so – just to make them live with the consequences.
Comments