Labour must back Mahmood or hand No 10 to Farage

SHABANA Mahmood is about to discover something every Home Secretary learns sooner or later you can't fix Britain's asylum system without upsetting the people in your own party who think the last decade never happened.

- Esther Krakue

The moment she so much as hinted at going “full Danish”, Labour's backbenchers responded exactly as expected. Not with a sober conversation about the scale of illegal migration or the reality facing local councils and communities but with a meltdown that suggests many of them still live in a moral universe completely adrift from voters.

If Mahmood's reforms are blocked, Labour will deserve to lose every seat they have. Because at some point, you cannot keep telling the country its concerns are invalid while performing political theatre about “compassion” from the safety of leafy constituencies.

The public can see the gap between rhetoric and reality. They also know that the same MPs who love a “refugees welcome” placard are mysteriously absent when asylum accommodation is proposed anywhere near their own patch.

It's always someone else who should take responsibility. Someone poorer. Someone without the luxury of pretending this is all harmless.

This is what Mahmood is up against. She is proposing things that should have been done years ago: ending automatic routes to settlement, regular reviews of asylum status, tightening the rules around family reunion and closing loopholes that allow people to drag cases out indefinitely. None of it is radical. Much of Europe already operates this way.