Britain’s first female Muslim Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood had a rough start on Saturday, with over 1,000 illegal migrants arriving after crossing the English Channel from France on her first day in office.
Mahmood, a former pro-Palestinian activist whose Pakistani parents migrated to England from Mirpur in the disputed Kashmir region, was tasked by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on Friday to run the Home Office, the cabinet department tasked with controlling immigration and protecting Britain’s borders.
It came amid the forced Downing Street reshuffle sparked by the scandal-induced resignation of former Deputy PM Angela Rayner over the socialist politician’s failure to pay full property taxes on the purchase her second home.
The ensuing musical chairs resulted in former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper — who oversaw a record-setting pace of illegal Channel crossings — being moved to the Foreign Office, and Justice Secretary Mahmood being elevated to the position of Home Secretary.
While she has been portrayed so far as being more hawkish on the border than Yvette “refugees welcome” Cooper, Mahmood’s voting record demonstrates that she consistently opposed stricter border and asylum controls, according to the parliamentary tracking website They Work For You.
The newly-minted Home Secretary’s tenure got off to a choppy start on Saturday, with broadcaster GB News counting 1,096 illegal boat migrants being brought ashore by the Border Force at the port of Dover. According to calculations from the news outlet, it takes the total illegal Channel crossings to over 30,000 since the start of the year.
Beset by internal chaos and mounting public anger over mass migration, Starmer has reportedly appointed Mahmoud with the brief to get tough on migration.
According to The Telegraph, this will supposedly include the expansion of a Conservative-era scheme to house supposed asylum seekers in makeshift camps on military bases rather than putting them up in hotels at taxpayer expense.
Currently, there are over 32,000 migrants being accommodated in more than 200 hotels across the country. This has sparked nationwide protests in the wake of a sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by an Ethiopian migrant living in the Bell Hotel in Epping just days after crossing the Channel illegally.
Labour will also reportedly seek to ink a returns deal with Germany, as it has done so with France. The so-called ‘one in, one out’ framework allows for the UK to send back illegal migrants to Paris in exchange for taking in allegedly vetted asylum seekers living in France. While boat migrants do not set sail from Germany, it is believed that the deal would refer to migrants who passed through the country into France before crossing the Channel.
It has also been reported that the government will seek to make changes to the Tony Blair-era human rights codes and potentially issue judicial advice on how to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to allow for more deportations in general.
However, it is unlikely that the left-wing government will actually withdraw from the ECHR and its associated court in France, as has been called for by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. While the legacy media has attempted to criticise Mr Farage for his hardline stance of saying that all illegals should be detained and deported, including sending Afghani women illegals, the Reform leader told Sky News on Friday: “I am more concerned about the rights of British people, than those who come here illegally.”
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