Why Labour’s balancing act is so fraught
Labour accepts loss of control over immigration, Keira Knightley on JK Rowling boycott and the worst magazine cover of all time
The debate about borders and immigration is rarely out of the news at the moment.
As Labour struggles to get to grips with the issue, yesterday the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, accepted the government has “lost control” of the borders.
This tactic of saying “yes it’s broken, but we’ll fix it” has also been deployed when discussing the economy.
It will only work if the government can actually fix it, and unfortunately for Labour there’s little patience from an electorate who had already lost it with the previous Tory leadership.
We’ve seen three key stories on this topic developing this week:
A 26-year-old man who travelled to the UK by small boat was jailed for five years for threatening to kill Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Fayaz Khan, who has a distinctive AK-47 tattoo on his face, posted a TikTok video last year in which he pointed to his face tattoo and said he was going to “pop pop pop” Farage. After a judge at Southwark Crown Court sentenced him, Khan, who is from Afghanistan, said: “I am not guilty, I want to fix my life. I want to go back to Afghanistan. I want to go back to my country, to see my family. I am not here because I want to kill him. I have a son. You want to fuck my life because you want to be prime minister, you want to put me in prison?” Speaking outside court, Farage said: “So I’ve got mixed feelings. It was right to bring this case, I’m happy with the sentence. I’m happy with the win, but I repeat, in 18 months time this violent criminal will be free on our streets.”
The government has said that it will do “everything” to ensure Khan does not stay in the country once he is released. Farage has pledged to form a returns deal with Afghanistan should he win the next election - something that has been criticised because it would require diplomatic relations with the Taliban, a group responsible for ripping up the rights of women and girls. This week Farage again pointed to the example of Germany, which has been deporting Afghan nationals to Afghanistan after negotiating a deal with the Taliban, without officially recognising it as a government.
Some people have drawn comparisons between Khan’s case and that of Lucy Connolly, the British woman jailed for a tweet during the Southport riots that called for burning down hotels of asylum seekers. They criticised Farage for the hypocrisy of platforming Connolly at his party conference, while condemning Khan for his crime. There are some significant differences between Khan and Connolly’s cases, although that certainly doesn’t excuse either of their crimes. Khan’s case was a direct threat to kill, while Connolly’s charge was incitement (she urged others to commit violence), and Khan has convictions for 17 prior offences, including threatening behaviour, vandalism and carrying a knife in public.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood told European allies, including from the West Balkans, visiting Britain yesterday: “The public rightly expect that their government will be able to determine who enters their country, and who must leave. Today, in this country, and I know in many if not all of yours, that is not the case. And the failure to bring order to our borders is eroding trust not just in us as political leaders but in the credibility of the state itself.” She has called for more international cooperation over the issue. The Western Balkans is a major transit route for people smuggling across borders, the Home Office says, with some 22,000 people transported last year. She and other ministers are hoping to work within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), perhaps making changes to how it is applied, while the Conservatives and Reform want to be rid of it altogether.
The government has announced migrants will need A-level standard English to work in the UK. While LBC poked holes in the plan by vox popping Brits in London with questions from an A-level English exam - and finding many couldn’t get the grammar correct - the home secretary says “it is unacceptable for migrants to come here without learning our language, unable to contribute to our national life”.
While Labour talks about frameworks like the ECHR and due process, populists like Farage and Donald Trump offer a single seductive promise that they can simply tear it all up.
This week the Trump administration revoked six visas from people who had posted on social media celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was shot and killed during a college campus event. He doesn’t worry about the accusations of ignoring people’s right to free speech. On immigration he has carried out mass deportations that have seen families separated and people with no criminal convictions removed to countries to which they have no connection. This is the sort of action Reform is suggesting it could take if the party wins the next election.
If Labour can’t show it can deliver control - of borders, laws or even language - voters may turn to those who offer a far more aggressive solution.
It’s also worth noting this week that former PM Boris Johnson defended his record on immigration during a chat with the Telegraph’s Daily T podcast. He’s been blamed for the so-called “Boriswave” of migrants who arrived during his premiership after his post-Brexit relaxation of visa rules. Net migration added 2.6 million people in the four years since Johnson launched his “Australian-style” points-based system. Johnson said: “We took back legal control. Yes, it’s true that if you look at the immediate post-Covid year, we had several things coming together at once. The Ukrainians, the Hong Kong, Chinese, and a load of EU students coming back in to finish their courses. What people don’t look at is the previous year when we had the lowest ever.”
Keira Knightley gets straight to the point on gender debate
Another topic that is frequently in the news and being battled over on social media is the often-toxic conversation about gender and transgender people’s rights.
At the centre of this row is the disagreement over whether someone can ever change their gender, and whether they should be able to access single-sex spaces based on a gender that is not their biological sex.
Just a couple of weeks ago we saw Harry Potter author JK Rowling hit out at actress Emma Watson, who starred in the movie franchise, for saying she still has love for the writer, having spent several years backing a movement that has issued death rights to Rowling.
It is a topic that some politicians and public figures fumble over when asked to address whether women can have a penis, or indeed if it’s OK to think they cannot, and we’ve had four examples of this in action this week.
First of all, there was Green Party leader Zack Polanski on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored show. Polanski, who took over as leader last month, has been hailed this week for having boosted the fortunes of the Green Party, which reached 100,000 members for the first time. On the subject of gender, the Greens have been firmly in the camp of allowing self-identification. When asked if a woman can have a penis, Polanski said “yes”. He also said “a woman is a gender” and “gender is a spectrum”. Morgan went on to push Polanski on the Supreme Court ruling, which found that for the purposes of the Equality Act, gender refers to biological sex. Polanski said he knows better than the Supreme Court.
The conversation Polanski had with Morgan is interesting because it highlights some key conflicts in this debate. Polanski tries to argue that there are other issues which present far bigger threats to women’s safety, such as policing and domestic violence. Few would disagree with those being important issues, but feminists have argued that their rights to maintaining single sex spaces should not be dismissed because other issues exist.
In another conversation, also on Morgan’s show, California governor candidate Betty Yee was cornered on the topic and ultimately suggested the Olympics should be gender neutral. Yee said: “I just want them (transgender women) to be able to participate.”
Next there was Green MP Sian Berry. A group of radical trans activists vandalised the Brighton Centre, ahead of a feminist conference attended by women with gender critical beliefs. Rather than condemn the vandals, Berry said the feminists should never have sought to hold their event in Brighton in the first place. “Events that inflame division and create tension should be guarded against,” she tweeted, before rounding off the post with the statement: “The choice of Brighton was clearly provocative from organisers and the problems caused predictable.” Berry was widely criticised for her remarks, which people said appeared to advocate for free speech rights being ignored where violence has been threatened by another group.
A clip of actress Keira Knightley discussing a new Netflix project sees her asked about the backlash against JK Rowling and people who associate with productions based on her work. She was asked if she was aware that some fans are calling for a boycott of a new audio adaptation of the books, which Knightley is appearing in as Professor Umbridge. Knightley said: “I was not aware of that, no. I’m very sorry. I think we’re all living in a period of time right now where we’re all going to have to figure out how to live together aren’t we? We’ve all got very different opinions so I hope we can all find respect.” The fallout from Knightley’s brief comment has seen her praised for defending someone’s right to an opinion on Twitter and slammed as a transphobe on Bluesky (where liberals flocked to in the wake of the Trump election win).
For some, refusing to affirm another person’s identity is seen as violence, while for others, being told to suppress biological reality is seen as censorship and an erosion of hard-won rights.
Knightley’s call for respect might sound naive in an age of outrage, but she’s right about one thing: we’re all going to have to live together.
The loudest voices have defined the conversation so far, but it feels like we are coming to a turning point on this subject.
Going back to the ECHR, Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, warned Britain could be in breach of the convention if it enforces a Supreme Court ruling allowing women’s toilets to remain single sex, a senior European official has warned. He told MPs that upholding the ruling could lead to the “widespread exclusion” of transgender people from public life. This has led Tory shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick to repeat calls for the UK to leave the ECHR.
The Times reported that home secretary Shabana Mahmood “fundamentally disagrees with the assessment” made by O’Flaherty and warned “it doesn’t help sustain public confidence in the European Convention when the council is seen to intervene in domestic politics and national security”.
Some argue the legal frameworks constricting the government from acting on immigration and the gender debate are a gift for the rise of Reform and those calling for a massive overhaul of the system.
The immigration and gender debates expose the same underlying issue: a public that is losing trust in the system.
When people lose faith that governments can act decisively or fairly, they start looking for those who promise to tear the system down - this is exactly what happened in the US election.
Whether it’s over borders, identity or the ECHR, the danger for Labour is that frustration is fast becoming the most powerful political force in Britain.
The List
The government has released witness statements by its deputy national security adviser given for a now-collapsed trial of two men accused of spying for China. The government has been accused of deliberately failing to provide evidence that China is a national security threat in order to avoid wrecking diplomatic relations with Beijing. The CPS has said that the case against Christopher Berry and Christopher Cash collapsed because prosecutors needed to be able establish China as a “threat”. Witness statements from the government failed to do that. Starmer told the Commons yesterday that evidence provided by the deputy national security adviser was based on government policy under the Conservatives between 2021 and 2023. Starmer told the Commons yesterday: “Let me say this; to be clear, had the Conservatives been quicker in updating our legislation, a review that started in 2015, these individuals could have been prosecuted and we would not be where we are.”
An Oxford University student has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after footage of a man chanting “Gaza Gaza makes us proud, put the zios in the ground” went viral. The media has named Samuel Williams, a philosophy, politics and economics student at Oxford, as being in the video shot at a demonstration in London on Saturday. A spokesman for the university said: “While the university cannot comment on individual student cases, it has the power to take immediate and proportionate action including, as appropriate, suspending a student from membership of the university, whenever serious concerns are raised. Oxford University is unequivocal: there is no place for hatred, anti-Semitism or discrimination within our community, and we will always act to protect the safety and dignity of our students.” The word “zios” refers to zionist, which is a person who believes in the existence of a Jewish state. This chant has been interpreted as a call for the murder of Jewish people.
There were joyful scenes this week as all remaining living hostages held by Hamas were released and reunited with their loved ones. Among them was Avinatan Or, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival along with his girlfriend Noa Argamani on October 7. Noa, who was filmed begging “don’t kill me” as she was kidnapped by Hamas, was freed by the IDF from Gaza in June last year.
As part of the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, 1,700 Palestinians detained during the war in Gaza were released, as well as 250 prisoners convicted of serious crimes such as murder. Freed prisoners have claimed they were subjected to torture during Israeli detention.
Long-time CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour has apologised after she said that freed Israeli hostages were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan” during a live broadcast as hostages were released on Monday. She said her comments were “insensitive and it was wrong”.
The future of the ceasefire is uncertain. Masked Hamas fighters have been filmed executing Palestinians in Gaza City as they seek to regroup against rival powers. truce. At least six Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in northern and central Gaza, according to a hospital morgue and Palestinian rescue services in the territory.
The Israeli military said it opened fire on people it considered a threat who were approaching the line of control in Gaza.
Donald Trump has been riding high on the global praise for his work on the Gaza ceasefire. While experts say there are many obstacles before a lasting peace can be established between Israel and the Palestinian people, Trump has been credited for ending the fighting and getting all remaining hostages released. This week’s Time magazine praised the president for his achievement, but Trump denounced the cover as “the Worst of All Time”. In a post on Truth Social, Trump complained about the image selected: “They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird! I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?”
If you want a little drama in your politics then you can always count on Your Party. Fresh from their epic falling out, party front-people Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana appeared at a series of public events to rally support. The New Statesman reported the pair could not even share a green room, choosing to be kept separate when not on view. First there was confusion over the name (it’s not actually called Your Party, and they’ve still not picked one), then Corbyn and Sultana had a very public falling out after she tweeted a link to a membership page and that resulted in Sultana announcing legal action against Corbyn. She’s since likened her and Corbyn’s relationship to that of Oasis’s Gallagher brothers. The New Statements wrote that “the Gallagher brothers actually achieved something” before they fell out.
The Watchlist
Slow Horses (Apple TV+). The British spy drama returns for a fifth season. I’ve enjoyed the series in a very low-key way. The show is plagued by annoying characters and irritating traits within the characters that are more bearable. This season seems to be mostly focused on the computer
Celebrity Traitors (BBC). I rarely enjoy a celebrity version of a reality TV show. However this is brilliant and I am hooked. The cast is (mostly) superb, particularly Alan Carr who injects new fun into the concept of being a Traitor.
I am not a Trump fan, to put it mildly. But the Time magazine pic was objectively bad. It was dramatic, sure, but no one of a Certain Age looks good shot from below. I can't name what some people call Trump's 'neck region', but yikes! It was probably especially painful for Trump because he holds the cover of Time in such high esteem (as we all used to do, back in the day, when it really was the ultimate magazine cover of note).