Quite right!: Labour’s migration crackdown & why the Rwanda plan was ‘ahead of its time’

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🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Listeners on the Best of Spectator playlist can enjoy a section of the latest episode of Quite right! but for the full thing please seek out the Quite right! channel. Just search ‘Quite right!’ wherever you are listening now.

This week: a Commons showdown over asylum – and a cold shower for Net Zero orthodoxy.

After Shabana Mahmood’s debuts Labour’s new asylum proposals, Michael and Maddie ask whether her barnstorming performance signals a new star in Starmer’s government – or whether the Home Secretary is dangerously over-promising on a problem no minister has yet cracked. Is her Denmark-inspired model workable? Can she get it past the Labour left? And are the right-wing plaudits a blessing – or a trap?

Then: at COP30, the great climate jamboree struggles to command attention. As Ed Miliband charges ahead with his Net Zero agenda, the pair question whether Britain has finally passed 'peak Net Zero mania'. Is the UK hobbling itself economically while China cashes in? Has climate policy become more like a faith than a science? And what would a more balanced, less fanatical environmentalism look like?

And finally, Channel 4 claims a medical quirk shaped Adolf Hitler: does this kind of genetic reductionism teach us anything – or simply turn history’s greatest monsters into comic-book villains?

Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

To submit your urgent questions to Michael and Maddie, go to: spectator.co.uk/quiteright

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Subscribe to The Spectator in our Black Friday Flash Sale and you'll get 12 weeks of the magazine, along with full access to all of our online content, for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey worth £30 on the shops, absolutely free.
0:18.3	Hurry though, this ridiculously good offer, ends on the 1st of December. Go to www.
0:25.3	Spectator.com.uk.org. Forward slash Friday.
0:36.2	My name is Michael Gover, and I'm editor of The Spectator.
0:39.8	And I'm Madeleine Grant, assistant editor and parliamentary sketchwriter at The Spectator.
0:43.7	And this week on Quite Right, we'll be examining Shabang and Mahmood's
0:46.9	barnstorming performance in the House of Commons as she introduces her asylum proposals.
0:50.8	We'll also be discussing the COP 30 summit and specifically the lack of interest
0:55.8	in this year's festivities. And we'll be considering the curious case of Adolf Hitler's DNA.
1:10.0	This week, the government newsmaker has actually been responsible for a story the government wants us to be talking about.
1:17.3	The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud has unveiled a set of new proposals to try to restrict the demand for asylum in the United Kingdom.
1:25.4	And she lit up the House of Commons by taking down her opponents
1:30.1	from the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, attracting certainly some rave reviews from those on
1:36.8	the right who you'd normally expect to be critical of a Labour government. Maddie, do you believe
1:42.2	that Shabana Mahmoud has effectively established the case for
1:46.7	what it is that she's trying to do and the case for her as a star of this government?
1:51.7	Well, I think she really has. It was really interesting experience to watch in the chamber
1:56.8	a minister giving such a self-assured performance, unlike many of her colleagues, what she said,
2:02.9	she said with real conviction, you sense that maybe she was doing a good performance, but it came
2:07.5	across as authentic and genuine in a way that I think people have really lacked with this administration
2:13.1	and with many others. So there was that element of it. It was rather glorious, I think, to see her taking on many of the kind of usual suspects in the chamber,
2:22.4	not just from her own party, people like Nadia Wittome.
	...

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