The Home Secretary has lastly grasped one thing about immigration few in Labour perceive. But I nonetheless have two grave doubts about her plan to curtail it: STEPHEN GLOVER

Illegal immigration is ‘tearing Britain apart’, Shabana Mahmood told yesterday’s Sunday Times. The Home Secretary used the same words later on the BBC.

For a Labour Cabinet minister to talk in such terms is incredible – the more so if one considers that Ms Mahmood is the daughter of immigrants, albeit ones that came here legally.

Imagine if a senior Tory in the last government had declared that illegal immigration was tearing the country apart. Labour would have denounced such a person as a racist, and journalists at the BBC and Guardian would have climbed into their pulpits.

Yet Ms Mahmood has said it. The phrase is probably even more evocative than Sir Keir Starmer‘s assertion last May that immigration was turning Britain into an ‘island of strangers’.

The PM soon nervously disowned that statement, which had probably been written for him by his pugnacious adviser, Morgan McSweeney, who was cheerfully causing trouble for his boss on another front last week.

The Home Secretary won’t retract what she said. She is a feisty and determined woman who talks of her ‘moral mission’. If she were a boat, she’d be a pocket battleship, all guns blazing, whereas Starmer reminds me of that hopeless Russian aircraft carrier that wandered around the English Channel belching black smoke.

Of course, she is a politician, probably a very astute one, and I’m sure she is partly galvanised by the prospect of Reform UK sweeping Labour away at the next election, with its opposition to uncontrolled immigration being its most popular policy.

But I believe Ms Mahmood has also genuinely grasped something that few, if any, of her Cabinet colleagues have understood. Many people are so fed up with illegal immigration that the issue is beginning to poison race relations.

They can’t bear the sight of young men turning up uninvited on our shores, and in the vast majority of cases being granted leave to stay – after being put up in hotels at taxpayers’ expense – even though many of them are not real refugees.

Compared with most other European countries, Britain has enjoyed a high degree of racial harmony despite astronomic levels of immigration in recent years. But the tolerance is beginning to crack.

There are many – I’m not talking of the relatively few far-Right thugs – who watch cities such as London, Birmingham and Leicester becoming places in which white people will be a diminishing minority in what they had once thought was their home.

Worried citizens listen to reputable forecasts that white Britons will be a minority within 40 years. They can imagine a time in the not very distant future when there will be more adhering Muslims than Christians in Britain.

It’s hardly surprising that, after years of such rapid change, previously remarkably harmonious relations should be starting to fray. Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently posted on social media that there is ‘a rising tide of racism, where 70s and 80s-style racism has apparently become permissible again in this country’.

Yes, that is both true and highly regrettable. The fault is that of successive governments, Labour and Tory, for opening the floodgates to mass immigration in the cause of cheap labour, and irrespective of the feelings of people already living here.

That is why I welcome Ms Mahmood’s frank admission that society is being ‘torn apart’ by illegal immigration.

I also applaud her new measures designed to curb illegal immigration, largely borrowed from the centre-Left government in Denmark, which she will formally unveil today.

But there are two caveats. One is that she is concentrating on illegal immigration, which makes up a small proportion of all immigration. In the year ending June 2023, for example, there were 52,530 illegal immigrants (85 per cent of them in small boats) while total net immigration was an enormous 906,000.

It is true that since then legal migration has declined significantly, though it remains higher than immediately before the Brexit referendum. Meanwhile, illegal migration hasn’t fallen, with numbers coming across the Channel having risen over the past 12 months.

But the point stands. Even if illegal migration were reduced to zero, there would remain the problem of legal immigration, which is still at historically high levels.

Ms Mahmood evades this issue, presumably because she believes she can only grasp one nettle at a time. She may also think that her party would be even more opposed to curbs on legal immigration than it is likely to be to curbs on illegal immigration.

My second doubt concerns the efficacy of her proposed measures.

People granted asylum who arrive illegally will have to wait 20 years before they can apply for permanent settlement. At the moment that happens after five years.

Furthermore, such people will have their cases reviewed every 30 months (assuming the Home Office can get its act together). If the countries from which they came are deemed by officials to have become safe, those granted asylum will be sent home if 20 years haven’t elapsed, with a few unspecified exceptions.

Ms Mahmood’s purpose is to create doubt in the minds of asylum seekers. Will they come in such large numbers if their future in Britain is so uncertain? She thinks not.

The trouble is that interventionist judges and activist lawyers are likely to defend the rights of the asylum seekers that Ms Mahmood plans to take away. She may try to derogate from key elements of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act incorporated the Convention into British law. Article 3 (covering torture and inhuman and degrading treatment) and Article 8 (guaranteeing the right to a family life) are often speciously invoked to block deportations.

Without their removal, Ms Mahmood’s proposals face endless legal obstruction.

Both the Tories and Reform have pledged to withdraw from the ECHR and abolish the Human Rights Act, so that future British governments could deport asylum seekers, failed or otherwise. The only challenges they might face would be under our own common law.

But the Home Secretary is well aware that Labour MPs would never consent to withdrawal and abolition. Possibly she would privately like to, but she would never be permitted. In fact, it’s doubtful whether Labour MPs will accept her measures. At least one has described them as ‘racist’. Either her far from ideal plans will be watered down by her party, or will be rejected altogether.

And yet, despite the flaws in Ms Mahmood’s proposals, it was surely right for Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch to say over the weekend that, because Labour is ‘incapable of getting any real change past their Left-wing backbenchers’, the Tory opposition is prepared

to work with the Government to deliver significant reform of the asylum system.

If the election were next year, there would be no need for such an undertaking. But Labour has nearly four more long years in power. If illegal and legal immigration are not restricted, race relations in this country are likely to deteriorate further.

I’d go so far to say that uncontrolled immigration is the most important issue of our age. Because she has glimpsed this truth, Shabana Mahmood deserves two cheers, however inadequate her measures may be, as well as our guarded support.