Inside Labour’s immigration feud
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As ministers and backbenchers criticise Shabana Mahmood’s immigration plans, is Labour about to water them down? And what is behind the splits over the policy?
Anoosh Chakelian and Ailbhe Rea go behind the scenes of Labour’s battle over immigration reform.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:05.0 | As ministers and backbenchers criticise Shabana Mahmood's immigration plans, |
| 0:10.0 | is Labour about to water them down? |
| 0:12.0 | And what's behind the splits over the policy? |
| 0:15.0 | This is Daily Politics from The New Statesman. |
| 0:17.0 | And in today's episode, we go behind the scenes of Labour's battle over |
| 0:21.0 | immigration reform. I'm Anous Shekelian and I'm joined by our political editor Alva Ray. Hi, Alva. Hello. How are you doing? Yeah, all right. Thank you. How are you? Yeah, good, thanks. So we spoke about this briefly in terms of Angela Rainer's comments. She called these plans un-British in an indirect way. |
| 0:37.6 | Let's just go through what the actual policy is. |
| 0:40.1 | So the idea is that the model... comments, she called these plans un-British in an indirect way. |
| 0:40.0 | Let's just go through what the actual policy is. |
| 0:45.8 | So the idea is that the model is moving to an earned settlement scheme, which will mean that the period of time to obtain permanent settlement here will double. |
| 0:50.0 | But it will be faster for some people, high earners. |
| 0:53.2 | And it could take up to 20 years for others, people on benefits, etc. |
| 0:58.2 | And the reason why Mahmoud wants to bring these in is because of widespread anger over levels of migration over recent years |
| 1:06.1 | and also the feeling that there's an unfairness, particularly about the asylum system. |
| 1:12.2 | And so the argument from that perspective would be Labor has to do something to change this because in voters' minds, |
| 1:18.3 | it is a high priority and there is a general feeling that the system is unfair. And I think that there's |
| 1:24.2 | actually quite a lot of, I mean, we're going to come on to the lack of consensus. |
| 1:28.6 | But I think that in broad terms, there's quite a lot of agreement within Labor that they need to do something to show that they have a fair immigration system to tackle just numbers of arrivals and, yeah, to project fairness because the level of public anger |
| 1:46.4 | about immigration is very very high and so jabana mamud has made this case that you either really |
| 1:52.1 | tighten up the immigration system or you end up losing support for it completely and so that's her |
| 1:59.6 | yeah we should say that it's not just a political calculation is it for |
... |
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