LONDON — It’s a decade since Britain’s Labour Party caused uproar simply by printing “controls on immigration” on a mug. Ten years, it turns out, are a long time in politics.

Shabana Mahmood, Labour’s new interior minister, unveiled hardline plans Monday to shake up Britain’s immigration system that make the 2015 mantra look positively tame.

Under her proposed reforms, refugees in Britain who arrived on small boats will have to wait up to 20 years for permanent settlement and could be deported if the situation in their home country improves. Those with valuables will be forced to fund the cost of their own accommodation.

The tribunal appeals system, which features judges prominently, will be replaced with a streamlined system staffed by “professionally trained adjudicators.” And ministers are promising to ramp up the forcible removal of entire families to their countries of origin, if they do not accept “financial support” to go voluntarily.

The home secretary is “beginning to sound as though” she is applying to join Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK, his gleeful deputy Richard Tice told a Westminster press conference Monday.

With Mahmood clearly spoiling for a fight with her own ranks, some colleagues to her left flank are making the same comparison.

Yet despite the backlash, many other Labour MPs now believe measures like this necessary to confront a rising public backlash over immigration in many European nations. Mahmood, said one official, is concerned that public anger is turning into hate.

Labour aides also argue they could be running out of time, as opinion polls project a victory in 2029 for Reform — whose immigration plans would go far further.

One government frontbencher (granted anonymity, like others in this piece, to speak frankly) argued the change had been driven by the “the visibility and tangibility of policy failures” on small boats, and the growing use of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers.

They added: “We may be in a world where we have to deliver a system we’re not quite comfortable with — or surrender the right to deliver a system to people who don’t think the system should exist. That’s a really uncomfortable place to be.”

‘Like a drowning man’

None of this eliminates the very real anger from Labour’s left-wing MPs — who were already concerned about votes bleeding away to the Green Party — and the likely uproar from its left-leaning grassroots.

“The Starmer administration is like a drowning man,” a discontented Labour MP said Monday. “It just doesn’t have the ability to be able to make the argument that it is doing this from a progressive perspective. Where they’ve landed themselves politically, it’s not a place where you can bring people with you.”

“The party won’t wear this — not just MPs, the wider party,” a second MP on the party’s soft left said.

“The rhetoric around these reforms encourages the same culture of divisiveness that sees racism and abuse growing in our communities,” backbench Labour MP Tony Vaughan, who was only elected in 2024, argued on X.

On one highly emotive point, officials were forced to clarify Monday that the Home Office would not seize migrants’ sentimental jewelery. That came overnight news stories suggested such items could be taken to contribute to migrant accommodation costs.

The clarification did not come before MPs took to social media to speak out. “Taking jewellery from refugees” is “akin to painting over murals for refugee children,” another backbench MP, Sarah Owen, said, referencing a controversial order under the Conservatives to cover up cartoons at an accommodation centre for unaccompanied child migrants.

The first Labour MP quoted above said that while many of his colleagues were seeing voters switch to Reform UK, a “hell of a lot of people” are going to the center-left Liberal Democrats and the Greens. “The tone that we’ve taken on immigration and asylum will hurt us as well,” the MP added. 

‘Moral duty’

Government figures strongly disagree with the criticism — and think they have the public in their corner on this one.

They sought to highlight More in Common polling that suggested even Green voters would support some individual measures that are used in Denmark — such as only granting asylum seekers temporary residence (50 percent support, 25 percent oppose.)

A third, supportive MP on the right of the party pointed out there were “no surprise names” among those who had broken ranks to criticize the government’s plans.

Mahmood insisted Monday the government has a “moral duty” to fix Britain’s “broken” asylum system. “Unless we can persuade people we can control our borders, we’re not going to get a hearing on anything else,” former Minister Justin Madders told Times Radio.

It is an “existential test of whether we deserve to govern this country,” a serving minister said. They warned that if Starmer fails, the outcome in policy terms could be “a whole lot more drastic.”

Noah Keate contributed reporting