I don’t see how he could have stayed on for five minutes and then have to implement a policy which he’d repeatedly said he doesn’t believe in and had repeatedly described as disastrous for the country.
Because he was responsible for the fact that the policy had to be implemented in the first place? If you set fire to an orphanage and then stand aside so that others can try and deal with the resulting problems, that’s not to your credit.
It gets worse.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced a new set of policies on asylum and refugees, to become law in this Parliament. They are draconian to the point of abusive and in her terms premised on the idea that immigration and immigrants are naturally divisive and thus the only way to stop far right thugs rioting is to give them what they want.
The proposals include: changing the timeframe for refugees receiving indefinite right to remain from five years to 20; re-assessing refugees claims every 30 months, with a view to forcibly returning people if we decide the country they fled from is now safe; “streamlining” the appeals process so there is only one chance to appeal, regardless of new evidence or change in circumstance; rewriting the law to narrow the application of the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically article 3 on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, and article 8 on right to a family life; confiscation of wealth in the form of any assets refugees might earn while in the UK; enforced removal of any children of those whose claims fail at any point in the envisaged 20 years.
Alongside this, there is one good bit, which is the lifting on the ban on asylum seekers working or studying (although as mentioned, if they do earn anything the government reserves the right to appropriate it from them as it sees fit) through which refugees could earn earlier right to remain. That said, this also allows the government to lift the requirement on it to support asylum seekers, which will now only apply to those who are destitute - but not “those who become destitute by choice”. This is great news for exploitative employers obviously, because if you hire an asylum seeker you can treat them like dirt and rip them off, knowing that they know that if they quit they’ll be penniless. So maybe not all that good.
What is genuinely disturbing is the rhetoric, which absolutely buys into far-right ideology about the threat to British culture and society posed by immigration. That’s not me saying it, that’s noted criminal thug and fascist Tommy Robinson, who gleefully posted that “the Overton Window has been smashed” - i.e. the framing of the conversation is now entirely what the far-right want it to be. He’s not wrong. At any time in the last 70 years proposal like this would have been seen as the province of meatheaded fringe thugs and they’re now government policy.
The actual good news is that Labour MPs - even those generally considered moderate or on the right of the party, are up in arms and coming out to vocally condemn it. The bad news is Labour appears to be run by a bunch of clowns who have convinced themselves that pissing off their own voters and MPs means they are doing something right, and who are sure that this time, this time, telling everybody that their opponents are basically right will stop people voting for them.
Part of the pitch from Shabana Mahmood is that securing the borders is a moral necessity to fight racism. To emphasise this point, she quoted in Parliament some very unpleasant language she’s been subject to. Rhetorically, this is clearly an attempt to discombobulate those opposed to her proposals who don’t look like her and don’t get that kind of abuse. (Again, if you regard the anti-racists as opponents while being cheered on by the racists then: is it likely that what you are doing is going to lead to less racism.)
As Stephen Bush points out in the FT, this is selling the pass:
I would hope that the home secretary, and indeed every minister in any government, should take the view that racism is always wrong, and that no amount of public policy failures makes it acceptable for people to tell me to go home.
…
But zoom out and it is repeating the biggest and most catastrophic failure of the Starmer government, which is that its year in office has been an utter disaster for race relations in this country. No other government since 1970 would have suggested that such a direct linkage between “immigration policy” and “the safety of ethnic minorities in the UK” was something we should accept. The two are entirely orthogonal: the Labour government should pursue the border policies it thinks best, not suggest that somehow the failure of those policies creates conditions in which racism is acceptable or in any way explicable. … But to suggest that this is the case now reflects this government’s biggest failing, which is that it is essentially incapable of saying that racism is wrong, full stop. That is a far bigger contributor to emboldened racism in the UK than anything the previous Conservative government might have done, or failed to do, on immigration policy.