Following her appointment as home secretary earlier this month, Shabana Mahmood was touted by many observers as a “hardliner” on migration. Yet just as many have dismissed the very idea of a Labour politician taking a sufficiently hardline approach to securing Britain’s borders.

Now Mahmood has launched an “urgent review” of the country’s modern slavery laws in the wake of the first “one in, one out” deportation flight taking off without any migrants on board (two migrants have since been successfully deported). The Home Secretary accused asylum seekers of submitting “vexatious last-minute claims” and making “a mockery of our laws and this country’s generosity”.

Labour’s internal debate and range of viable fixes for the asylum problem are narrow: the party is constrained by the intellectual inclination of both its membership and the Government front bench. The immigration system is plagued by systemic issues: the legal architecture migrants use to ensure they are able to remain, and the generous entitlements from which they benefit once they are settled. Addressing these issues would come into conflict with other important Labour values, such as upholding international law and the current system of human rights, not to mention liberal welfare provisions.

There is widespread concern that modern slavery laws are being exploited by migrants and their legal representatives to avoid removal, and Mahmood’s planned review is an attempt to prevent further disruption. For a government led by a man whose one discernible trait is that he is a lawyer, it is a shocking move — but a necessary one.

Since coming to power, Labour has largely failed to wrest control of the immigration system, with Keir Starmer’s France deal designed to sound as close to Nigel Farage’s proposed “Net Zero” migration proposals as possible without dealing with the pull factors bringing migrants to Britain, or the structures that prevented them from leaving via a “third-country” scheme such as the Rwanda plan.

Starmer now finds himself in very much the same situation as Rishi Sunak did over Rwanda: either address the second-order consequences of well-intentioned but badly-written laws, or face the withering of his flagship immigration policy. Sunak was able to opt for an early election; Starmer cannot.

Labour deserves some praise for how quickly it has grasped that the asylum system is being abused. Mahmood’s move was a signal that a fresh approach is now being taken; her review of modern slavery laws is a signal it might be the right one, although it remains an open question as to how far the party’s ideology will allow her to take the necessary steps.

It is unlikely that Labour will undo the trifecta of legal activism, bureaucratic complicity and political cowardice that has essentially put control of Britain’s immigration system out of democratic accountability. But dealing with political cowardice, at least, is a step in the right direction.

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Tom Jones writes at The Potemkin Village Idiot.

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