Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has said that every woman travelling illegally to the UK will probably have been raped on the journey.
It is a startling statement. Firstly, for what is implied. The trafficking operation bringing dinghies to our south coast is, the Home Secretary now admits, not merely facilitating illegal migration, it is also exposing women to the most appalling sexual violence. Her comment, made in a Leading podcast interview with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, was also a whisker away from admitting that very many of the small boats arriving here may contain rapists.
Second, it is remarkable that she was able to say it. You can only imagine the hysteria from much of the political establishment if someone on the right had made the same observation. There are some facts which become respectable only when uttered by a Labour politician.
What use is compassion if you’re horrified by the consequences of a policy while remaining doggedly attached to its causes?
It is plainly deeply inhumane to allow the continuance of a human-trafficking operation that is causing women to be raped on an industrial scale. It is utterly grim and serves to demonstrate the moral vacuity of those on the left who are not only eminently relaxed about the small boats, but appear determined to institute measures that would incentivise yet more people to make the journey. What use is compassion if you’re horrified by the consequences of a policy while remaining doggedly attached to its causes?
Mahmood does not need to lecture the rest of us about the sexual violence associated with the small-boats issue. It is not the Labour camp who have for years been talking about the consequences of uncontrolled migration, people-smuggling and culturally backward attitudes towards women. And it was disappointing that she has not spoken out about the other bit of endemic sexual violence – you know, the bit being perpetrated by these small-boat people on British women and girls once they arrive here.
If Mahmood is right that rape is so ubiquitous along these routes that, ‘You can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey’, this is an argument for destroying the business model altogether. We should be putting the same determination into stopping this human trafficking operation as this country once put into abolishing the slave trade.
And yet instead, all we got from Mahmood’s love-in with Alastair and Rory were comments from Mahmood pointing to the contradictions and farce of Labour’s approach to illegal migration.
The Home Secretary has of course proudly declared the opening of her new ‘safe and legal routes’. Universities, companies, charities and communities will be able to sponsor refugees. This is Labour’s answer to illegal immigration: recklessly opening the border to all and sundry in a somewhat tidier fashion. Come, come, form an orderly queue.
Elsewhere, Mahmood basically concedes the logic behind the Rwanda scheme. The government, she says, is looking for ‘safe return hubs’ and third countries to deport migrants to. In other words, if migrants know that the end result of their journey will be removal somewhere where there aren’t three-star hotels and NHS dental services laid on, it stops people from making the journey.
Mahmood acknowledges that this was where the Tories ‘were trying to get to with Rwanda’ and then dismisses it out of hand. All we get from Mahmood is pronouncements on third-country schemes that sound suspiciously like the third-country scheme Labour spent years denouncing.
Then there is Palestine. Mahmood spoke about having pressed the previous government to take a stronger position over Gaza i.e. to bash the Israelis a little harder. You can have every sympathy for Palestinians caught up in war whilst being honest about the risk these people pose. Many will emerge from that brutal experience radicalised, hostile towards Israel and Jews, or sympathetic to Hamas. Human suffering deserves compassion; but national security and societal cohesion require judgement. These are two sentiments that Labour politicians struggle to keep in their heads at the same time.
There is a final thing to say. The illegal immigration crisis afflicting this country is causing deep societal fractures. Labour claim to want to avoid the sort of divisive rhetoric they say worsens those schisms. But Mahmood’s willingness to denounce what she sees as her political enemies was striking: ‘I think that people who sort of pontificate a lot about the Judeo-Christian tradition tend not to be very good Jews or Christians themselves.’ Of the ‘far right’ balaclava-wearing men, meanwhile, she says: ‘They’d kill me in a minute if they could, and they’d definitely kick me out of my own country.’ You can be against these masked protests without fanning the flames by baselessly accusing people of wanting to murder you. A Home Secretary concerned about social cohesion might begin by resisting the temptation to speculate publicly about which of her fellow citizens would like her dead.
Mahmood was meant to be the tough one. There have been moments when even those on the right have looked at her and wondered whether Labour had finally produced a Home Secretary prepared to grapple seriously with the illegal migration issue. But while she is clearly under no illusions about the horrors of this continuing people trafficking operation, she doesn’t appear able to do anything much about it.
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