Shabana Mahmood has flushed out the left’s lunatics

It’s hard to keep track of where the far-right threat is meant to be coming from these days. We’ve all grown used to hearing about the alleged goose-stepping tendencies of Reform UK and Nigel Farage. Now, there is a new, highly unlikely face of fascism in the UK – and it is apparently at work in the halls of power already.

Step forward Labour home secretary Shabana Mahmood – a centre-left, second-generation migrant and moderate Muslim – whose plan to tighten the rules on illegal migration is said by critics to have been ‘inspired by Donald Trump, backed by Tommy Robinson, channelling the Nazis’. ‘We have seen this with Nazi Germany. We are seeing it in 2025’, warned Green Party leader Zack Polanski on Newsnight last night in response to Mahmood’s reforms. Ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana blasted the plans in parliament as ‘straight out of the fascist playbook’, while current Labour MP Nadia Whittome has accused the UK home secretary of ‘laying the foundations for the far right’.

It seems all Mahmood needed to do to earn the ‘Nazi’ moniker was to propose a series of reforms to the UK’s asylum system. This is a system that anyone with her head screwed on knows is now dangerously dysfunctional. It has become an open door for illegal migration and all its baleful consequences – from organised crime and urban decay to seemingly random, brutal acts of violence against unsuspecting members of the public.

Mahmood’s proposals aim to reduce the pull factors drawing vast numbers of illegal migrants to the UK. These include tightening the criteria for gaining asylum, reducing the number of appeals for failed asylum claims, making refugee status temporary rather than permanent, threatening visa bans on countries that refuse to retake their own citizens, and forcing asylum seekers to pay for the cost of processing their claims and housing them (potentially by expropriating their assets). Whether you agree or disagree with Mahmood’s plans, think they are too harsh or don’t go far enough, there is no denying that they are not – in any conceivable way – fascistic, far right or reminiscent of the Nazis. In truth, they were inspired not by the Third Reich, but by social-democratic Denmark, whose centre-left government has taken the surprisingly novel approach of listening to the public’s concerns about illegal immigration.

Arguably most offensive among Mahmood’s announcements to left-wing backbenchers was her promise to remove people from the UK who have no right to live in the UK. In other words, under the new system, asylum seekers whose claims fail would be encouraged to leave – or, failing that, forcibly deported. Of course, the average man on the street might be shocked to learn that this isn’t happening already. Yet for what poses as the left today, Mahmood’s commonsense pledge to actually enforce immigration law is tantamount to ‘appeasement’. For Your Party co-chief Jeremy Corbyn, this is an attempt ‘to appease the most ghastly right-wing forces’. For Labour MP Cat Eccles, Mahmood is up to something far more sinister. She is trying to ‘appease’ – horror of horrors – ‘the electorate’, who are seemingly too stupid or evil to recognise the untrammelled benefits of allowing illegal immigrants to roam around in Britain indefinitely.

Whatever happens next with these reforms, whether they make it through parliament, whether they succeed or fail if implemented, Mahmood has certainly done us all a service in flushing out the left’s apologists for Britain’s broken asylum system. Those accusing the home secretary of fascism really are defending the indefensible. They have outed themselves as both contemptuous of the voters and their concerns – and as dangerously naive or ignorant about the UK’s border crisis.

After all, who other than the Labour and Green left could possibly justify the continued presence in the UK of someone like the late Abdul Ezedi? The Afghan illegal migrant failed twice to gain asylum, only receiving it on his third attempt – and this was after he had racked up two separate sexual-assault convictions. He then went on to throw alkali on a female refugee and her children, before killing himself.

What normal, sane person in Britain seriously believes it was right not to deport twice-failed asylum seeker Emad Al Swealmeen? The Jordanian posing as a Syrian had served time in a Middle Eastern prison and had even been sectioned in the UK for brandishing a knife, before he blew himself up outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Who in their right mind genuinely believes it was ‘progressive’ to allow Somalian small-boat migrant Haybe Cabiraxmaan Nur to roam freely for five months after his asylum claim was rejected, allowing him to murder Gurvinder Singh Johal, a complete stranger?

It seems only the Zarah Sultanas, Zack Polanskis and Nadia Whittomes of this world are so morally and politically lost as to believe the comfort of illegal migrants should come above the safety of the British people. To think it is ‘fascistic’ for the state to do its job properly, by maintaining the border and upholding the law. To take the side of people traffickers and crime gangs over law-abiding, working-class citizens. It’s not Shabana Mahmood who should be ashamed – it’s her hysterical, virtue-signalling critics.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.