Shabana Mahmood and the Politics of Extortion

Labour's strategy of telling its supporters to back Reform-style policies, or get a Reform Government, is the politics of the protection racket and it is not going to work

The Home Secretary will on Monday unveil what she promises will be “the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times”.

According to the BBC, Shabana Mahmood will announce that she is removing the right of all refugees to remain permanently in the UK, as she declares that “the era of permanent protection for refugees is over”.

The policy and rhetoric is as cruel as anything announced by Nigel Farage. Yet the Home Secretary is planning to sell it to Labour MPs by suggesting that it is the only way to prevent a Reform Government.

“If you don’t like this, you won’t like what follows me,” she will say.

There is only one way to describe this. It is the politics of the protection racket.

It is telling Labour MPs and voters that the only way to avoid getting what they really don’t want, is to keep stumping up for something else that they also don’t want.

Here’s why it won’t work.