Mahmoody Blues

Is Shabana Mahmood really as tough as they claim?

Beneficent and gracious, our new, vibes based Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has spent his first two weeks in power showering a grateful nation with endless bounty; £2 buses! 20p off energy bills! Expensive free social care for all! A fancy fat farthing for every struggling pub!

So far, he’s managed to avoid most journalists’ interviews, all parliamentary questions, and any democratic scrutiny, so we can’t be exactly sure which destructive, calamitous, wealth-chomping route, his grim grinning government will take, as it trundles Binbag Britain ever closer to its doom.

His strategy seems to be; house the homeless, help the hapless, and hire the hopeless.

We can perhaps gain a little insight by taking note of which also-rans, second raters, no hopers, makeweights, and hasbeens, he has retained from Keir Starmer’s freakshow of failure.

And which ghastly inadequates, petty crooks, innumerate midwits, time servers, envy peddlers, yes men, lightweights, and nobodies, Burnham has dusted off, revivified, and promoted up the Labour ranks, to form his piss poor pretorian guard.

First the good news. After years of stinking up the place with his lunatic Net Zero policies, Ed Miliband has been sent into exile, like a latter-day Edward de Vere. Only to be replaced at Energy by the equally unhinged Maitta Fanbullah. A far left enviro-zealot, and fan of Universal Basic Income, (for you certainly, though I expect not so much for her), who can’t get through the first paragraph of a New Statesman interview without railing against ‘middle class white men’- you know, the sort of guy her new boss is pretending not to be.

Misery mongering maths mangler Rachel Reeves has been replaced by Jon Healey. A wizened walnut of a man who looks like he’d be more comfortable with a knotted hanky on his head in a 70s public information film about Seaside Safety, than driving our economy, full tilt, into a landfill.

John Healey and friend, enjoying a day at the beach.

Convicted fraudster Louise Haigh has been elevated to Burnham’s consigliere. While in other news ministers have been issued strict instructions to hand in their phones before cabinet meetings. Not for security reasons, but just to stop Louise Haigh from nicking them.

Meanwhile, Wide Faced Wes Streeting, a man so transparent and shallow that leading Tibetans predict he will be reincarnated as a puddle, has been made Defence Secretary. That distant sound you can hear, is Putin shaking in his boots.

Our Ange is back as Secretary of State for Housing. The very same role she was forced to resign from in disgrace last year, after she was caught dodging her property taxes failed to understand the basic tax rules which applied by her own department.

Rayner was even handed a whopping £17,000 government pay-off for the inconvenience of getting found out. Because that’s just how things work, for people who aren’t you.

Now Ange is refusing to pay it back on the grounds that vapes don’t buy themselves you know Babes. Or something.

But by far the most interesting appointment was no appointment at all.

Shabana Mahmood retains her role as Home Secretary.

I put my hands up. I had Shabana down for Chancellor. I didn’t think there was any way that Burnham would replace ‘the first female chancellor’ with a fella. Even Wes. And I figured that at the Treasury, Mahmood’s ability to at least project no nonsense practical efficiency, would be usefully deployed as a counterpoint to Burnham’s profligacy, and as a bulwark against bond market wobbles.

But anyway, I was wrong. Which shows what I know. So to be honest, you might as well stop reading now.

Just like his predecessor, (Keith something? It’s already becoming a sort of dull blur), Burnham seems keen to silo off Britain’s immigration crisis with his Home Secretary. Presumably so that at a moment of maximum political peril, Mahmood can be jettisoned, her ‘far-right’ policies along with her, like Scotty ejecting an overheating warp core in Star Trek, all without contaminating the Burnham brand.

Meanwhile we are constantly reminded by the mainstream press, political commentators, and Mahmood herself, that when it comes to illegal immigration, Labour’s past and future Home Secretary is tough, uncompromising, and effective.

Truly a girl who gets it done.

But is she really? I’m not so sure.

Remember, this hard nosed Home Secretary represents a government which during a housing crisis of its own making, (also big shout out to the Tories for doing their bit, and it was a big bit), decided to hand an entire estate full of brand new £250,000 houses, over to illegal immigrants.

And only U-turned when locals got wind of it and kicked up a stink.

And she’s the takes-no-shit Home Secretary of a British government which is paying the French £662 million to ‘stop the boats’, even as we learned this week, that as long suspected, French border police have been told explicitly by the very people we’re paying, not to stop the boats.

But maybe I’m being unfair. Both these policies predate Mahmood, and she has recently dazzled us with a tsunami of tough proposals designed to bring down the numbers of asylum seekers flooding across the channel.

So in the spirit of fairness and impartiality, let’s take a look at a couple.

In an effort to discourage foreign freeloaders, Mahmood has announced that from now on asylum seekers will be ‘forced’ to pay back £10,000 of their hotel costs before they can be allowed to settle in Britain. I believe this is an excellent proposal, but with two minor caveats.

A.) It is utter nonsense. B.) It will never ever happen.

Not only is £10,000 a tiny fraction of the £140,000 the average asylum seeker costs the economy over their long, taxpayer funded lifetime. But you don’t have to be Lord Hermer (Sacked Yes!!!!. Come on Andy!!) to know that any half decent human rights lawyer could burn through £500,000 of legal aid in a single afternoon, arguing that such unenforceable demands would be an unacceptable breach of an Eritrean rapist’s human rights.

And even if the courts did upheld the order. Which they would never ever do. Where exactly does Mahmood suppose this mythical £10,000 is coming from? From a Somalian soldier’s bulging Bitcoin wallet? An Afghan goatherder’s Space X shares? A Sudanese sex offender’s babysitting money? I doubt it.

This idea also seems a bit of a Trojan Horse; an excuse to issue work visas to asylum seekers. Ostensibly so that they would be able to ‘pay their own way’. Of course doing so would simply provide activist judges with yet another pretext to let them stay, while creating a whole new pull factor for other potential migrants.

Perhaps Mahmood’s most madcap proposal is her plan to halt the flow of asylum seekers entering the country, by importing more asylum seekers into the country.

The Home Secretary is promising to vastly expand the use of that favourite progressive totem, the shibboleth of ‘safe and legal routes’.

And to ensure that only the brightest and best Iraq torturers, Eritrean sex pests, and Somalian warlords make it to these shores, a new scheme will allow vape shops, money launderers, and Turkish barbers businesses, charities and community groups to ‘sponsor’ an immigrant, and so choose, who exactly gets to come.

Mahmood is at pains to point out that the sponsors will be responsible for the immigrants’ upkeep, housing, and good behaviour.

Yes, for a year.

After which they will no doubt be dumped on the British taxpayer, to make way for the next lucrative shipment of indentured human chattel.

We’re also assured that the government will be ‘relieving pressure’ on the overwhelmed asylum system by leaving the ECHR and overhauling asylum laws creating a new, Independent Immigration Appeals Authority.

Where who gets to stay (everyone) and who is asked to leave (no one) is to be decided by a ‘specially trained’ panel of laypeople, recruited from a wide range of diverse backgrounds, professions, and local communities.

Sounds good.

So who exactly will get to sit on these ‘people’s panels?’

You might assume people from those communities worst affected by asylum seeker hostels, hotels, and HMOS will be handed priority seats. Surely those citizens who have had hundreds of incompatible, often violent, and anti social foreign men, dumped on their doorstep should probably be the ones who get to decide who gets to stay.

Or how about populating these committees with the good people of Clacton, Southport, Ulster, and Southampton? Those are ‘local communities’ which seem keen to express an opinion on this issue.

Of course these people will never get a look in.

Because if you think any of these august panels will boast a single person who can even bear to look at an England flag without retching, then I have a safe and reliable £5m Ajax reconnaissance vehicle to sell you.

Instead these committees will be captured out of the gate, stuffed to the gills with a hand picked coven of shrill voiced Guardian readers, Hope Not Hate apparachiks, self appointed ‘community leaders’, activist charities, open borders lobbyists, and hands-in-the-till ‘stakeholders’.

All this is coming at a time when the Department of Justice is fighting tooth and nail to hide from you the government statistics which would reveal which foreign nationals are committing the most crime.

Spoiler Alert: It ain’t the Norwegians.

With new Justice Minister Alex Norris’ (Nope, literally no idea) department working hard to

‘overturn a ruling by the Information Commissioner that data revealing the full scale of foreign offending in England and Wales from 2018 to 2024 should be published’.

That the government, Labour and Tory, has been so desperate to hide these figures from the public, and instead flood us with misinformation, propaganda, and platitudes, tells its own story.

If the numbers weren’t potentially explosive. If there really was no migrant crime wave. Then they wouldn’t need to cover it up.

The government is justifying hiding this information from you on the grounds that

‘some of the data could lead to the identification of individuals in breach of their rights to privacy if it was published’.

Right.

So just to clarify, this is the same government which is so unconcerned with your right to privacy, it is aggressively and enthusiastically implementing legislation to effectively grant itself the power to read your messages and e mails, trawl through your photos, and bug your phone, whether you are being investigated for a crime or not.

And yet has taken to the courts to forcefully defend the privacy and sensibilities of foreign-born crooks, drug dealers, and sex offenders.

And call me a monster, but I don’t have a huge problem with the public being able to easily ‘identify’ violent criminals, groomers, and rapists, who the authorities might be moving, under cover of darkness, into an HMO in their street.

This is not ‘right-wing scaremongering’, this is our own government, using the full force of the law to conceal a genuine and growing threat, from the British people.

But don’t take my word for it, our enemies will tell you themselves.

We might not consider ourselves to be at war with Iran. But rest assured, Iran considers itself at war with us. And to prove the point the Iranian government has been boasting how it is literally exporting terrorists to Britain using the small boat route.

Still our ruling class refuses to listen. Even when the terrorists themselves helpfully go out of their way to explain their intentions and motivations.

Last week in Berlin, a self-professed member of an ‘Islamist group’, drove into a Pride March, killing one and injuring dozens of others. A couple of days later a crazed knife man ran through Paris, stabbing women at random, helpfully explaining as he went that

‘Allah commanded me’

Of course no one in authority was listening.

Florian Nath, the Berlin police spokesman, claimed that when it came to Islamist Abdul B, the Pride attacker,

“we still have no information whatsoever regarding his specific motives… “

And then Labour MP, Kate Osborne stepped in, seeming to suggest that such atrocities are the inevitable consequence of the proles being allowed to watch GB News. Claiming that,

‘GB News sprouting nonsense broadcasting content’ contributed to ‘language that attacks and vilifies the LGBTQ+ community’.

Thanks Kate, but sorry, and I don’t mean to yuk your political yum, but perhaps the ‘LGBTQ+ community’ closely allying itself with Islamists, homophobes, and wife-stoners might actually be more of an issue.

In the end, it wasn’t the far-left’s enemies who attacked the Berlin Pride parade. It was its friends.

Let’s leave it there.

Mahmood might sound tough on illegal immigration, but she seems more concerned with providing ‘safe new routes’ to Britain, than she is stopping the current flow across the Channel.

She’s busying herself tinkering with some marginal consequences of our open borders, rather than taking steps to close them.

While failing to remove a single one of the countless incentives past governments have put in place, which attract these people to Britain in the first place.

We’ve all seen the tens of thousands of African migrants literally swarming into the Spanish territory of Ceuta over the last few days.

We’re told most have now returned home, (really?) but those who do reach the European mainland won’t just be making their way to Madrid, Rome, or Paris. Many will be headed straight to Calais, no doubt with the full-throated assistance, of the well-enumerated French authorities.

We can only thank our lucky stars that when they inevitably arrive opposite these shores, someone as tough, forthright, and effective as Shabana Mahmood, will be standing strong and resolute, high on the cliffs of Dover to welcome them stop them.

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LSO

R.I.P. Rod Liddle