Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is introducing new policies to attack refugees and asylum seekers. The headline measures are as follows.
Making refugee status temporary, so refugees need to re-fight their case for staying in the country every 30 months. The time until permanent settlement is doubling from 10 to 20 years. Financial support is being withdrawn from any refugees who can legally work or have committed a crime.
And most shockingly, the government is planning to test the use of financial incentives, paying up to £40,000 to asylum families to leave voluntarily.
Pleasing nobody
These policies are incredibly reactionary. They go much further than previous Tory home ministers like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, with their failed schemes to ship refugees to Rwanda, or house them on boats. So why is Mahmood pursuing them?
On the one hand, she is pandering to the pressures from Reform, to which Labour are losing support. Therefore, these policies are largely a continuation of Mahmood’s attempt to position herself as a hard-line ‘law and order’ figure.
At the same time, she juxtaposes herself to the real pressures coming from Zack Polanski’s Greens, who are also rapidly eating into Labour’s traditional voter-base. Mahmood warns that “Polanski calls for the most expensive and expansive migration policies anywhere in the world”.
She therefore sums up her reactionary policies as both necessary and reasonable; between the extremes of Reform and the Greens. Or, in Mahmood’s own words, between a “nightmare on the one hand, fairytale on the other”.
If we retreat to the comfort of fairytales, a nightmare will follow, as those who follow us will have none of our restraint. pic.twitter.com/ZFEWRv3d3p
— Shabana Mahmood MP (@ShabanaMahmood) March 9, 2026
Flowing from this logic comes her weird ideas like ‘civic nationalism’, which she counterposes with Reform’s apparent ‘ethnic nationalism’. In other words, she is trying to carry out the culture war, yet in a more ‘progressive’ seeming way – or at least in a way which is less overtly offensive.
But Mahmood’s culture war is a self-destroying strategy, because it opens up further attacks from several angles. The right-wing media have attacked Mahmood for her use of financial incentives, such as The Sun framing it as “golden goodbyes” with taxpayer money.
Labour backbench MPs, meanwhile, have been watching the success of the Greens, such as in the Gorton & Denton by-election. Some face being unseated by Green candidates in the next election. They are desperate to change this, and know these policies mean harm to their careers.
Labour MPs like Stella Creasy and Sarah Owen – hardly left-wing rabblerousers – have criticised the ruthlessness of Mahmood’s asylum policies. Their feelings are not the exception. Over 100 Labour MPs have signed a letter criticising the changes.
Their letter states: “We can change our immigration system for the better without forgetting who we are as a Labour Party.”
Behind these words, their fear of the Greens displacing them in the next election is palpable.
Class war not culture war
The Labour Party cannot fulfil any serious reforms which materially improves the lives of working class people in Britain on the basis of British capitalism. Instead, just like the Tories before them, they pander to the worst prejudices in society, for lack of anything else as an alternative.
Their government and party propaganda tries very hard to show that they are tough on crime, deport plenty of immigrants, and keep communities ‘safe’. Keir Starmer does the same with the military, using their social media to pump out TikTok edits of Starmer surrounded by fighter jets and army soldiers.
@uklabour🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
On the other hand, Mahmood also thinly veils her reactionary politics with cynical identity politics. She has the gall to claim she is carrying out these racist policies so that “those like my parents, who sought a new and better life here, worked hard, played by the rules… can find a home.”
More Labour means guaranteeing that it will always be true that those, like my parents, who sought a new and better life here, and contributed to our national life can find, in this country, a home.
And that children of theirs may unthinkingly call themselves English, or a… pic.twitter.com/gsHeVhsvay
— Shabana Mahmood MP (@ShabanaMahmood) March 9, 2026
But such reactionary policies, propaganda, and fearmongering has limits. Those wanting reactionary policies on immigration will vote for Reform. And those alienated by those same policies will turn to the Greens, or not vote at all.
The twin underlying pressures behind the rise of Reform and the Greens really represent millions seeking a political alternative beyond the status quo: to worsening wages, unemployment, higher rents, crumbling hospitals and schools, and generalised social decay.
Mahmood’s policies will hurt – and already are hurting – the most vulnerable layers of society. And by legitimising anti-migrant sentiment, she will embolden the right even further. Labour’s policies will please nobody, and anger everybody.
In turn, communists must use this example to not only expose the culture war, but turn it into a class war.
