The New Statesman.

What should we make of Shabana Mahmood?

The Home Secretary is known for her blue labour roots, her tough stance on immigration,

and has just proposed what she calls the biggest ever shake-up of policing reforms in centuries.

Is she a potential Labour leader?

To talk about all of this, I'm joined by our editor-in-chief, Tom McTake.

Before we start on Shabana and before we get into the nitty-gritty of the high politics of the Labour Party,

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the substance of these policing reforms.

And I should say as well,

we are going to do a future episode that looks really in a high degree of granularity about the

specifics of what Shabana is proposing, because like I just said, it is far-reaching. It's an

organizational restructuring, a reduction in the total number of police forces, some sort of large national bodies, kind of equivalent to a British version of the FBI.

There's tons of detail. There's tons of specificity to discuss. So we're going to do a future episode where we really get into those details.

This episode is going to focus a little bit more on the Home Secretary herself

and the politics of the Labour leadership. But before we talk about that, I just really want

to single out a couple of things as relates to these reforms. Not least the reintroduction or

increased usage of facial recognition technology, this is going to

change the way that facial recognition cameras are used in Britain. At present, we have about

10 vans that facilitate that technology. These reforms are talking about getting 40 of them

and using them all across the country. In a way, this is a positive move because for the last

decade, this technology that's been used in London has been done so without the permission of any

specific law. No legislation has been passed that permits the Metropolitan Police to use this

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